View the February 2019 seminar recording
Jennifer Symoun
Good afternoon or good morning to those of you to the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Jennifer Symoun and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is Enhancing Urban Freight Planning Through Improving Last Mile Delivery.
Before I go any further, I do want to let those of you who are calling into the teleconference for the audio know that you need to mute your computer speakers or else you will be hearing your audio over the computer as well.
Today's seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. If during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the chat area. Please make sure you send your question to "Everyone" and indicate which presenter your question is for. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but I will start off the question and answer session with the questions typed into the chat box. We will also take questions over the phone if time allows and I will provide instructions on how to do so once we get to that point.
The PowerPoint presentations used during the seminar are available for download from the file download box in the lower right corner of your screen. The presentations will also be available online within the next few weeks, along with a recording and a transcript. I will notify all attendees once these materials are posted online.
Talking Freight seminars are eligible for 1.5 certification maintenance credits for AICP members. In order to obtain credit for today's seminar, you must have logged in with your first and last name or if you are attending with a group of people you must type your first and last name into the chat box.
PDH certificates are also available for Talking Freight seminars. To receive 1.5 PDH credits, you will need to fill out a form. Please see the link in the chat box. Certificates will be emailed one week after the seminar. A seminar agenda has been included in the file download box for those who need to submit an agenda to their licensing agency.
Finally, I encourage everyone to please also download the evaluation form from the file share box and submit this form to me after you have filled it out.
Today we'll have three presentations given by:
Our first presentation will be given jointly by Mary Lamie and Mike McCarthy.
Mary Lamie is the Executive Director of the St. Louis Regional Freightway, a business enterprise of Bi-State Development. Established as the region's go-to source for coordinating freight activity, the Freightway provides site selection and other assistance to manufacturing, logistics, and multimodal transportation companies and their service providers. Mary has over 25 years of experience in the transportation industry, including 23 years at the Illinois Department of Transportation where she served as Deputy Director of Highways Region 5 Engineer.
Mike McCarthy is the President of the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis. Mike began his career in 1979 with the Missouri Pacific Railroad in its Engineering Department and transitioned into Transportation Management in 1990. He has held various positions including Trainmaster, Director of Terminal Operations, Sr. Director of Dispatching, Superintendent and General Superintendent of Transportation. In 2003 he accepted the position of General Manager at The Alton and Southern Railroad until taking his current post.
Mary Lamie
Good afternoon to everyone. We want to thank Jennifer and Chip for the opportunity to be part of today's webinar. Mike I are going to start with some brief introductions and then and Mike is going to talk about the process our region goes through to set multimodal priorities. And then I am going to wrap it up with recent wins we have had over the last 12 months. St. Louis regional Freightway; we're one of five business enterprises of bistate development so we are a public agency and, as our name implies, we represent the St. Louis greater bistate region. On the site you see you can see we represent three counties on the Illinois side, five counties on the Missouri side. Our bistate region includes 260 municipalities, 14 counties in our greater MSA. Our role is to work with public-private sectors from an entire put to set multimodal transportation priorities. The other part of our role is to help build partnerships with industry leaders, not just regionally but also nationally. When the tools we used to do that focuses on the interactive map that we posted on our website. I'm going to turn this over to Mike and he will introduce his organization.
Mike McCarthy
My organization is the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis. We were founded in 1889 and our owners at the time were 16 at the of the 24 railroads that serve St. Louis. Through the decades, many mergers and acquisitions has found this today with five owners, five of the six class I railroads that serve St. Louis are our owners. We are an independent company that operates on an at-cost basis, plus and we keep our rates as low as possible to make sure the gateway is economical and efficient in our nation's freight network. We are an open access Railroad. All six class I railroads serving St. Louis, Amtrak and small shortline railroads have access to us. We control all the major routes through St. Louis. We own the two railroad bridges in the region across the Mississippi. We connect through the river transfer facilities that are prominent in the St. Louis Harbor and St. Louis is the #2 gateway by interchange of rail traffic in the nation behind Chicago and #3 by total volume.
The committee that turned into my full-time job with Mary here, is I am heading one of the committees for the St. Louis Freightway. And really it is an advocacy group that is unique in its makeup. We are tasked with developing freight development projects and a needs analysis that goes into it from a regional perspective. The make-up of this committee is what I find is usually unique. We have transportation providers from all modes, that includes air, truck, water, rail and all modes, so it's multimodal. We have local, state, and regional elected officials. We have both Missouri and Illinois Departments of Transportation that are on the committee. We have economic development entities throughout the region, and shippers of the users of freight services. A group like this had no problem in bringing a large basketful of projects, so we needed a way to organize and prioritize the projects. And as you can see on the screen, each project was viewed through the lens of these four criteria and rated accordingly: Economic impact, the multimodal impact, the efficiency that it brings, and of course safety and security.
After a huge amount of projects, we prioritized and grouped them as to the current phase that project was in. If they ranged from the project that might just be in the concept and development stage to one that is already programmed for construction.
Conditions and the focus of the regions shift and change over time due to many factors, and will update our list of multimodal projects throughout the year as they go from stage to stage or phase to phase. And as projects enter into construction phase, they drop off the list as new projects are brought on the list after the criteria rating and prioritizing process takes place. This list is evergreen and continues to evolve over time.
Having project lists for state regions and local governments is nothing new. What makes ours unique is the makeup and the input of the committee constituents. When a representative from Boeing or General Motors or Anheuser-Busch endorses and advocates for a project, it carries credibility and weight with public sector leaders. There is a lot of time spent educating and sharing information so that our public sector leaders understand how a project impacts the flow of freight in our region and effects the resiliency and cost of shipping goods through and into the St. Louis Gateway area.
Another bit role of the committee is identifying funding opportunities from various government agencies. Projects championed by private industry may not always be aware of the public-private partnership opportunities. And they also may need sponsors, help with grant writing, and grant strategies. The committee is very active in promoting projects through direct advocacy and education with local, state, federal, and elected officials. We coordinate and elicit letters for projects and write letters and articles to the press. We participate in editorial review boards and really anything to advance a project onto implementation.
Due to the freightway being a part of the bistate development agency, they have the ability to be a grant sponsor. This has come in very handy on more than just a few occasions for privately owned projects. In the past year or so, we have also been advocating for high-impact low-cost projects, as well as first mile and last mile projects, along with a list of large projects. These high-impact low-cost, 1st mile last mile projects seem to have fewer challenges of getting to implementation and they have outsized impact on the regional infrastructure capacity and function.
Mary Lamie
Thanks, Mike. Mary Lamie again. Based on that process Mike walk-through, our region's highest priority project is the Merchants Rail Bridge. Earlier in 2018 we received great news when the Terminal Railroad announced their construction financing for the bridge. Mike's company actually consists of a board that includes five class I railroads. This project also received prior grant money, so we consider this a model for public-private partnerships. And based on this process and this momentum our region built, we feel it made it easier for the class I railroads to help make that announcement for funding that allowed this project to move forward. When we were working with the barge industry and we asked them what their number one infrastructure project, the barge industry indicated that the Merchants Rail Bridge is their number one infrastructure project. The reason for that is inn order to have competitive barge rates we needed to have competitive rail rates. So, I think the point on that is if you would have come to the St. Louis region five or six years ago and asked what our region's highest priority projects, the answers with a focused on the roadway system, our interstates and expressways. Fast forward to today, our region is recognizing the significance of multimodal transportation, and at this point our highest priority project is the rail structure. In spring of 2018, Illinois Department of Transportation announced a competitive freight program. They announced it and within six weeks the applications needed to be submitted. Thanks to all the work that Mike just outlined, our region was ready to go. We had projects that were in the queue, a well-developed scope and cost estimates were ready to go. And more importantly these projects were already coordinated with the D.O.T.s, our MPO, our elected leaders. And when applications were submitted they competed very well. In the site that you see in front of you, we secured $18.7 million of infrastructure projects, all included with the list Mike mentioned. And of the five, four of them involved some type of rail improvement or it is related to the rail improvement. And then three of those projects focused on 1st mile-last mile improvement.
Another example of funding success we had last year thanks to this process was Union Pacific Railroad. Last year they received $4 million to partially make improvements at an interchange that involved three class I railroads, IDOT, and Amtrak. Again, another example of a public-private partnership. This is the facility built in 1924 and it had 66 trains that pass through it and an immense amount of congestion. Thanks to these efforts of working collectively together, we received an announcement for $4 million last year and actually two weeks ago, it was announced the Illinois Department of Transportation Union Pacific received another $6 million. This is another example of the work Mike said as far as sending those letters to the editor, working with elected leaders and industry leaders, and allowing our region to understand the importance of the intermodal connectivity really paid off. Another funding announcement we've received, we received over $400 million for one of our interstate projects that connect Missouri and Illinois; it's our Interstate 270. If you look at the aerial map in front of you that is the Mississippi River. The yellow project, Project B, is the river bridge. We received a funding announcement on that last year, and MODOT announced additional funding. Here is where our role came into place with this. We were working with these private industries at a national global level and we identified companies like Boeing, Anheuser-Busch, Worldwide Technologies, Amazon, Procter & Gamble. They're operating on both sides of the river, in both states. They don't recognize the river or state lines as a boundary. Procter & Gamble has a manufacturing facility on the north side and distribution center on the Illinois side. Having those companies tell their story on why it's important they have one continuous interstate system in front of them to use really helped both D.O.T.s step up and fund those projects. When you have two D.O.T.'s their funding cycles, when they have available funding, never is at the same time. And that is where Illinois was at a point where they were able to secure their 50% for the river bridge. And that was where, through all these bistate efforts, the Missouri Department of Transportation were able to come to the table and be part of that announcement and fund that project as well.
Focusing on more of a 1st mile-last mail project, this is a project in north St. Louis. There's probably about $50-$60 million of work schedule throughout this area over the next 2-20 years. What we did is working with those industry leaders and trying to find high-impact low-cost projects that we could break out that would have immediate benefit. So those are examples of what we are doing from a 1st mile-last mile perspective. The action item on this is the trucking companies and the barge industry working in this highly industrial area on the riverfront, a lot of rail congestion, it was recommended by MODOT to install signs on the interstates that are going to divert trucks from one interchange to another to avoid the bottlenecks that occurred from rail crossings. The next step is focusing on a message board system that gives advanced notification for trucks when there is a rail crossing causing bottlenecks and congestion. The last example we have is working with General Motors. Through these discussions General Motors has indicated that their mid-day shift, they are having problems with employees getting to that shift on time because of congestion on Interstate 70. The morning shift is having to be extended. Because of those problems with staff getting to work on time and impacting those production lines, that is resulting in inefficiency of manufacturing in General Motors. You can see on the slide from an economic impact perspective, they serve an important role in our region with employing 4,000 employees. The action item on this was having them convey what those inconveniences are in terms of cost efficiency. We were able to share that with MODOT which makes it easier for MoDOT to compete for funding and allows elected leaders to better compete for funding. There is also high-impact low-cost projects, short-term projects that General Motors was able to articulate. These projects have been on the books but because of these relationships we've formed and having these private entities understand the types of information the D.O.T.'s need to better compete, that is what our role is as far as facilitating conversations and finding this information that makes our region more effective as far as competing for dollars. Moving forward we will continue to work with our MPO in identifying high-impact low-cost projects and we're going to be focusing on some of the available data and find freight corridors outside our interstates and expressways. That was a quick overview of what our region is doing working with public and private sector leaders to set transportation priorities. I think the take away is we have been very successful with some of the recent announcements in 2018 and 2019.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you, Mary and Mike. Our next presentation will be given by Caroline Mays. Caroline joined the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) in late 2012 and has held several positions including, Statewide Freight Coordinator, Freight Planning Branch Manager, Director of Freight and International Trade/Border Section and currently serves as the Director of Freight, Trade, and Connectivity. She is charged with developing and managing TxDOT's multimodal Freight Planning Program, International Trade and Border Planning Program, and Statewide Corridor Planning Program. She is responsible for overseeing the Texas Freight Advisory Committee and the Border Trade Advisory Committee and she has been instrumental in the development of the state's multimodal Texas Freight Mobility Plan and in currently leading the development of the Texas-Mexico Border Transportation Master Plan and overseeing multiple corridor studies throughout the state.
Caroline Mays
Thank you Jennifer. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I will go through the sides and as Jennifer mentioned and will take questions at the end. My presentation is in two parts. First I will talk about the freight mobility plan and essentially the framework for addressing freight needs in Texas. Then I will talk specifically about a project that we have been undertaking the last several years to specifically look at urban freight mobility issues. And then talk about the analysis and the Texas Clear Lanes program which is how we are addressing freight issues in Texas.
The first one is the freight mobility plan. In our case it is the overarching comprehensive plan and blueprint for addressing freight issues in Texas. And an analysis to address rural and urban freight issues, but also looking at it from a multimodal perspective and identifying not just short and medium but long-term strategies to address the freight needs in Texas.
Some of the things we have done to really understand urban freight issues in Texas is several analyses I am going to show you in the slides how we frame the issues in order to better understand freight issues. On here we have central Texas and five urban areas and generally known as the Texas Triangle. As you can see from the map that have circles, San Antonio, Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Houston. When you talk about the major urban areas in Texas, those are the five major urban areas. This is looking at population versus employment and as you can see our role was to see how they correlate. For us it is interesting because we have 28 million people in Texas and 65% of that population lives in these five major urban areas. And a significant employment region as well, so we have to understand that from that perspective why urban issues really matters when it comes to freight. Then the next analysis was looking at the population vs. freight tonnage. We did a similar thing, when you look at population and freight tonnage, it kind of mirrors in these five major urban areas. As you can see from the colors on this map, again, the bottom one is freight tonnage and the top one is population.
The next thing we did in Texas, every year we work with the Texas Transportation Institute and they analyze the 100 top congested corridors in Texas. They do one specifically for all traffic and then they do one specifically for freight. Those numbers don't necessarily align. Sometimes the truck is higher than the general traffic or sometimes the general traffic is higher. So sometimes they don't match, but it has been great to show the difference between where the chokepoints are for freight which sometimes differs from general traffic. The key I want to show here is the percent of growth in freight tonnage. As you can see for Dallas-Fort Worth, you are looking at doubling that 113% between 2018 and 2050. And other regions like Houston are looking at almost 100% and San Antonio 100% growth so that is doubling the freight volumes that we have right now, yet these are some of the regions that have the most freight bottlenecks.
The other data we used for our analysis looking at urban freight issues is every year there is the top freight bottlenecks in the country. And they just came out with a report like a week ago, and we had 13 bottlenecks in the top 100 in Texas. Normally what we do is we map them and show Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin, we show the numbers. This is powerful in terms of communicating to our decision-makers and leaders within TEXDOT about the urban issues is not just for passengers. Actually from the freight side it is much more significant and we also include the cost as you can see in this slide. And this is a little dated, so I have to update with 2018 numbers, but this was essentially the latest numbers we have. It's $6.3 billion of cost of congestion to the trucking industry in Texas. And that is something significant that elected officials really gravitate towards understanding the cost to the business community. Another thing was looking at how we understand freight tonnage on the roadways. We mapped 2016 versus 2045 and the lines get redder as we move into 2045 and that helps us articulate the issues that the challenge will continue because the network is going to see more freight tonnage as we continue to grow compared to other parts of the state.
So, then the next analysis working with DTI is helping us look specifically at truck congestion in the urban areas. What we have done from this map as you can see is looking at daily delay per mile. As you can see in these urban areas and then looking at truck ADT in each of these urban areas. I will talk about how we overlay this information so we can better understand what the key challenges are in these urban areas when it came to congestion impact. I will walk through a couple of the regions. This is Dallas-Fort Worth, and it shows you from a regional perspective where the chokepoints are when it comes to delays per mile and trucking. Also, what is interesting is we do overlay the active truck bottlenecks with this pin to show the correlation of congestion and identifying the top chokepoints in Texas in some of these regions. So, it kind of gives you an interesting idea. Now we overlay that and look at freight delay which is on the right-hand side and on the left-hand side and all traffic delay. When you look at the circles, you look at the freight, look at the intensity in red, and when you look at all traffic, it is not as intense. The goal is to identify the significant difference between what freight movement in these urban areas compared to general traffic. We did that for the other areas, Houston is similar. What is interesting about Houston is Houston for us has the most bottlenecks and you can see there is a lot of things and that begins to tell the story for our leaders and districts, so they can understand where the chokepoints are. Similar for Houston, we did look at freight delay versus traffic. I will walk through a couple of these, there was a similar analysis we did for each of these urban areas. I 85 and Austin is generally on the top congested corridors in the country. So, again, we look at that and the difference when it comes to the congestion. San Antonio, a similar thing looking at the network. And then, one of the key outcomes from this analysis was better strategies to address urban freight challenges, and as you can see there is a slew of strategies and we actually had a TTI who ranked the strategies. As you can see from this slide, we have strategies that rank out of 10, it really ranked 10. And it really shows that it is high impact. And some freight travel information systems rank as high impact to traffic congestion short term and it can be implemented really quickly, so it scored a 10. And some of the other things like ramp configuration which requires a lot more is a medium. You see on the scoring it is challenging to do that fairly quickly so that is why you see it didn't score very high. Others score very low because again in terms of short-term improvement and the cost as well as the time, they didn't score very well. That gave us an idea when we are talking to our districts and other agencies including MPOs and providing them with this information that these are a few strategies that can potentially help in addressing urban freight delivery issues.
The next item we have been working on with TTI again is looking at freight fluidity. Over the last several years, Federal highways have focused a lot on this. We have been working with TTI. Again, this gives us the ability to look at each of the corridors and look at the intensity and be able to show the data itself, but also in the next slide the graphic shows you the intensity of what we're talking about with these heat maps. And a lot of times it provides a graphical representation of what it means to the truck delays compared to passenger delays and the costs associated with those. For instance, this slide shows travel time on I 35. The blue line is showing weekday and the peaks are fairly high at certain times of the day of the night. And then when you look at weekend travel, not as much because again freight a lot of times moves during the weekday, because that is when they have to deliver, and then also during the day. So, that gives us a better idea of what that looks like.
Finally, with all of these issues we applied some of the strategies, what are we doing about addressing urban freight delivery issues in Texas? So, a couple years ago our governor, when he got elected, came to TEXDOT and said I would like TEXDOT to come up with a strategy for addressing congestion. It wasn't about addressing freight congestion but addressing congestion in the five urban areas I mentioned earlier. So, we do have a program. It is called the Texas Clear Lanes. There is a specific amount of money that is put in there and then we work with the districts, and the districts work to come up with projects to address. As you can see here, these were some of the chokepoints identified in these five regions I mentioned earlier, and that is the premise of why we need to have a program to address some of the freight issues. The next slide talks about the amount of money that is allocated into these regions from the Texas Clear Lanes which is different from the other funding we have to address congestion issues throughout this region. The last side shows the amount of money that has been committed. If you look in 2019, we have the Unified Transportation Program that outlines the funding, and as you can see where up to almost $6.6 billion in investments to address congestion issues in those urban areas. Most of the time I get asked by leaders, what does this mean for freight? I tell them freight uses the same highway corridors as passenger vehicles use. Any investment made that improves the movement of people is going to improve the movement of goods as well, especially on the trucking side.
We had to do some analytics and what we found out is 63% of all highway projects in Texas are in the urban areas. And then, 85% of the highway funds go primarily to the five urban areas. So, it's telling the story that when we look at it and we're doing an analyses, that a big chunk of our investments are going to address freight issues in the urban areas. And that kind of begins to solidify investments such as the Clear Lanes that might not be directly tied to freight needs and freight deliveries in urban areas, but a bonus effect of that is being able to invest urban freight issues. That is it in a nutshell. I know I through a lot of information and a lot of slides, and I will be happy to address questions later.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you Caroline. Our final presentation will be given by Diniece Mendes, the Director of the Office of Freight Mobility at New York City Department of Transportation with over 8 years of experience in transportation planning and public policy. At the Office of Freight Mobility, Diniece oversees a multi-million dollar portfolio of freight initiatives which advance policies and programs that reduce the impacts of trucks on communities and infrastructure, while also improving truck delivery efficiency with an overall mission of supporting the City's economic competitiveness.
Diniece Mendes
Thank you, Jennifer and thank you to FHWA Freight Management Operations office for providing the opportunity to speak. Good morning and good afternoon. We appreciate your time and interest in learning about how New York City is tackling last mile goods delivery.
I'll start off by providing information about New York City D.O.T. and the scope of its operations before getting into the specifics of New York City freight initiatives. The presentation underscores the importance of strong public-private sector partnerships as has been the theme throughout discussions today. 2019 is shaping up to be a very busy year for us as we are on the heels of finalizing our strategic freight plan called the Smart Truck Management Plan, as well as launching key priority initiatives such as our Deliveries Program. At a glance the D.O.T.'s mission is to provide for safe, efficient, and environmentally responsible movement of people and goods in the city of New York. We have over 5000 employees and an annual operating budget of $900 million. A five-year $10.1 billion capital program. We manage a huge and expansive network. We have about 794 bridges and tunnels including the iconic East River bridges. A little under a third of those, about 313 bridges, are actually low clearance bridges which presents an impediment for freight mobility within New York City. We have over 1 million street signs, 12,000 signalized intersections, so the scope of the work we do and the staff we work with here at D.O.T. is pretty expansive.
We would be remiss if we don't provide context as to what we are planning for and what is happening on the ground in New York City. Between 2010 and 2016, New York City has seen enormous growth and an historic increase in the number of residents, tourists, and for hire vehicles and jobs since 2010. Our population is now at a record high of 8.6 million folks. We see 62 million annual tourists coming to New York City. Employment has certainly increased. We are also seeing a surgence of TNCs and a lot of FHV registrations, and a lot more competition for that precious real estate. The growth and economic vitality is good for New York City as a region and a good indicator for prosperity and growth for NYC, but it has a lot of impact on travel speed, particularly in midtown Manhattan in the core business district were speeds have reduced from 6.4mph in 2010 to 4.5mph in 2017. Bus speeds and public transit is being impacted by that as well.
There are a lot of other emerging trends and disruptors we are planning for. The consumer's desire faster and more reliable deliveries and we are seeing an increasing number of deliveries going to buildings and establishments and residential areas where we hadn't anticipated planning for this maybe 10 or 15 years ago. A recent survey done by New York City D.O.T., our city mobility survey, revealed 41% of New Yorkers receive a delivery at their home at least a few times a week. We continue to hope to track this trend over the upcoming years to see how this has changed over time, but it presents additional challenges. Freight volume within New York City and the Metropolitan region is projected to increase by 68% between 2012 and 2045, the share of which will be predominantly made by a truck. When we look at time of day distribution about 80% of truck traffic occurs at congested times, so that behooves us to think about how we can improve the efficiency of our system using the infrastructure we have.
Freight movement and our key initiatives are prioritized and anchored by policy documents within the city and within our agency. In 2016 D.O.T. released a strategic plan which outlined for the first time freight movement as a key priority for the agency. Our key freight goals are in partnership with the freight industry to improve safety and environmental performance and economic efficiency of truck deliveries across all five boroughs, foster culture regulatory compliance within the trucking industry, and expand partnerships with the freight and trucking industry to encourage data sharing for more informed planning to better manage truck movement throughout the city. Our strategic plan lays the framework for us. Some of the key initiatives we had to work out at that was to develop a strategic freight plan that would be forward-looking to anticipate any emerging disruptors and how we plan for that accordingly. Additionally, our city One NYC plan provided the vision for a more sustainable and more livable New York City. And also our New York City's Greenhouse Gas Reduction plan for 80% reduction by 2050 has provided us an opportunity to think about how we can make freight a lot more sustainable for the long haul in NYC.
For the development of our strategic freight plan, there were three key guiding questions we started with. 1) How can we improve freight mobility using the infrastructure we already have? 2)How can we help the industry succeed while reducing the negative externalities associated with freight activity? Particularly as it relates to congestion and safety impact and any restrictions and lost product levity and air quality which is critical while some parts of our city are areas of environmental justice and also lower income and also minority populations where we see a lot of different heavy truck activities. The last question is important and that is 3) how we can work in partnership with the industry and the community for more contact sensitive solutions as we move forward. Through this process we have developed a Stakeholder Freight Advisory Committee, understanding there are a range of issues and challenges. Not all the stakeholders may agree but getting everyone into the same room helps increase the awareness of freight issues and challenges. And also facilitating coordination amongst the public sector for regional, state, and local plan providing priorities that should be anchored into the typical planning process. All these provide a more comprehensive freight strategy that is implemental and has practical solutions.
To that end, our Smart Truck Management Plan has outlined a vision for freight movement within the city anchored by four key goals. The vision is to enhance economic vitality and quality of life for all New Yorkers by providing for the safe, equitable, efficient, and environmentally responsible movement of goods. Key goals are safety, sustainable and responsible freight movement, partnership and knowledge.
As we transition to talking about some of our initiatives, we will talk about ongoing initiatives and projects on the cusp of being enacted.
At the onset, in New York City we have 794 bridges of which 313 are low bridges certainly presents a challenge for us for navigating the New York City system without having any of those major impediments. Our team and office has developed an inner agency and interagency task force on reducing bridge strikes, facilitating open discussions and coordination and issues surrounding these activities that have more damage on our infrastructure and also can create additional congestion and delay due to the incident. Our focus is to look at short term infrastructure impact while also thinking about longer-term investments and technology enhancements that can be levied.
We also worked very closely with the community adding a little bit more of a sensitive touch to education and outreach. Our trucks IBU program is similar to London's exchange. The city of Birmingham has an Exchange Places Program where we provide a different point of view for general vulnerable road users. Identifying where blind spots are common around large trucks particularly in the city. As we're moving to a complete street and vision zero types of treatments, we certainly want to make sure we bring more awareness to blindside awareness of larger vehicles and trucks. We increased our public engagement between 2017 and 2018 and we're looking to do more. Our pictures here are showing the great team we have that goes out every summer and throughout the year to hand out and provide more education and outreach. We work very closely with the public and private sector to have display trucks through trucking Association of New York as well as our city fleet like DSNY or sanitation folks.
As we think about our freight demand management strategies, we talked about the surging increase freight activities. Within the vertical market within New York City and the Midtown core area south of 59th Street in Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn, Flushing and Jamaica, there is an opportunity to think about how we can work with transporters and receivers to shift delivery to the off hours. Our program is to foster that between 7 PM and 6 AM. Our goal is to expand to 900 new food and nonfood locations in New York City by the end of 2019. The picture on the right is an illustration of one of our participants doing and off-hour delivery and our key focus areas are in the highly congested areas.
Talking about how we get there, there is been a lot of work over the past couple of years to get us where we are today where we are at the stage to launch in the upcoming months. We have done a lot of work for dividing our goals, objectives, business research and branding, developed a dedicated logo, website and program guide for receivers, transporters, as well as implementation tools for reducing noise mitigation. That fostered into our process for developing an internal workflow of how we would handle coordination with businesses as well as complaints related to noise. We are at the process now where we are assembling our participants to do our press event and public launch. As we transition to getting folks on board during the on boarding process and business engagement, there is a needs assessment to think about what the businesses or transporters need, whether it be technical support, curb access at night, or resolving community issues. We work through that internal process that is very iterative and provide opportunities for them to implement off hour delivery. It would be important for us to do our tracking for progress to make sure we are meeting our milestones. The key support we provide, one of the nuances that is a bit of a challenge but presents an opportunity for innovation, is we are prohibited by our New York City charter to provide direct financial incentives without the receipt of a good or service. We have taken the opportunity to provide technical assistance, curb access where we can, and choosing to recognize folks who are participating and adopting best practices for off-hours delivery to press events and conferences and news releases and social media postings. These are all the opportunities we can leverage to promote and incentivize businesses to shift to the off-hours.
Another initiative that we're looking at is downsizing and looking at opportunities that are greener and zero emissions. Our motivation is to think about how we can reduce negative externalities of freight, particularly as it relates to air-quality. Cargo bikes, we have seen a lot of it on our streets already. A major impediment for using cargo bites in the city has been legalizing pedal assist. Last year our agency clarified pedal assist versus throttle assist bicycles within the city. That was promulgated in the summer of 2018. We are now looking at opportunities to provide additional clarification for cargo bicycles and working with industry partners for 2019 implementation. We are really excited to launch this effort, particularly using untapped capacity in our bicycle infrastructure that we have implemented across the city. This can be a great opportunity for us to meet many of our sustainability and efficiency goals for NYC.
Another initiative that we're looking at how we can reallocate off-street space for freight delivery. Oftentimes, depending on the vertical market, it can take six hours or so to make a delivery to a particular building. That presents a lot of challenges as we are trying to encourage turnover at the curb. The goal for the off-street consolidation pilot is really to improve freight delivery efficiency, reduce curbside dwell time, and streamline the freight network. There are opportunities for consolidating deliveries coming to a particular zone or area and then using more sustainable and friendly options like cargo bikes and hand trucking can certainly help improve operations. For us our overall pilot interests are to look at how we can scale this up by testing it in small cases, in small controlled areas, and then a larger rollout of these hubs across congested areas in the city.
The last issue I will touch on is the issue of overnight truck parking, particularly as we promote initiatives like the off-hour delivery program. A lot of the key issues that come up are the challenges with finding and being able to stage to make deliveries at night. The challenge within NYC is that we really only have one public truck parking facility and that is located in Southeast Queens near JFK. It is oversubscribed and it is not really getting that transient demand for folks coming in from different parts of the U.S. to make a delivery in New York City. This map on the right we worked with ATRI (American Transportation Research Institute) to identify the distribution of where we see long-term parking by traffic analysis zone. And predominantly trucks are parked in industrial business zones near major facilities and highways and shoulders. But this is really highlighting the fact there is a significant demand for truck parking without the supply. We end up with unintended consequences of truck parking in residential areas and having to deal with community complaints, but there is a larger issue at hand. We have seen an uptick in a lot of these trucks parking throughout the city particularly because of the EOD mandate changes. But there is also a lack of information of private lots that are also open to provide truck parking and then also other information in terms of limited options for vacant land to build infrastructure. This presents a unique opportunity for the public and private sectors to work together to mitigate overnight truck parking in residential areas. And then generally establishing better information about where trucks can park. There is a lot of movement on this in the Midwest and other cities, so we will be looking best practices to address this issue within NYC.
Additional strategies we are also working to explore and implement are improving commercial vehicle access to the curb by providing more loading opportunities, strengthening regulations where they exist to reduce illegal usage within those zones, working with private sectors to facilitate off-street consolidation as well of off-hours delivery/storage facilities, to help increase the shift to off-hours deliveries, evaluating opportunities to work with buildings and property owners to develop delivery and service plans. This has been pioneered in Europe and we are looking to see how we can bring that over to New York and provide documentation and guidelines to large freight generators in the city. There has been a lot of work within the urban freight lab at the University of Washington to look at shared use locker systems. We think there are opportunities for that here, but there is certainly a lot more research needed about the right placement and location for these. So those are things we will be keeping our eyes on as we move forward. And lastly, we are looking for opportunities to promote voluntary vendor procurement consolidation programs and items and strategies we think are fit for business improvement districts and areas to take a handle on how they want deliveries made to their specific areas.
This concludes my presentation. I certainly want to thank everyone for your time and any feedback you have at the end I will pass it on to Jennifer for any questions. I want to acknowledge some folks on our consulting teams working on our strategic freight plan, and the data we used to inform our strategy from ATRI. Our website and email for the off-hours delivery programs is here, my contact information is here as well. Thank you.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. We have a number of questions and some discussion as well. I'm going to start the Q&A session with the questions typed online and if we get to all of those we can open the phone lines for questions. Diniece, there was some questions about the involvement of the MPO, NYMTC, as they weren't mentioned as a partner, were they a partner?
Diniece Mendes
Yes, they were a partner. That may have been listed on the slide we talked about for the freight advisory committee. It is not implicit here, but we worked with New York State D.O.T. and worked with our MPO as well as other regional folks. Our business economic development folks (EDC) who also released their freight plan. Our freight advisory committee was pretty diverse from the public sector perspective.
Jennifer Symoun
There is a question that mentioned NYC performed a regional truck parking inventory and assessment some years ago some years ago, was it used as a resource for the current truck parking.
Diniece Mendes
Yes, I think we are looking to revisit that. There are a lot of issues we see when we try to dissect the truck parking issue. There is a need for folks who have registered vehicles within New York and are parking for the purpose of storage in their vehicles. We also have the transit demand for folks stopping because of their mandated rest break or hours of service restrictions. We need to unpack these issues to think about the best policy to move forward to address truck parking.
Jennifer Symoun
What about weigh-in motion locations included?
Diniece Mendes
I chose to highlight a couple of initiatives related to addressing efficiency and last mile deliveries but our larger strategic freight plan will outline a vision for truck routes and overweight truck rule compliance. This was not part of this presentation specifically.
Jennifer Symoun
Are there incentives for OHD participants?
Diniece Mendes
As I alluded to at the beginning, we are prohibited by New York City charter to provide direct incentives to businesses or any entity without the receipt of goods and services. During the pilot program that was funded by US DOT we did provide one-time incentives to transporters as well as receivers. This was actually done through a third-party. We are certainly looking at opportunities for how we can incentivize businesses on the transporter side and can certainly see reductions in their parking ticket violations and improvements in fuel efficiency and productivity at night as they are able to service more customers. The harder sell is from the receiver standpoint where they are tasked with thinking about "Do I need to have an additional person to staff at night to accept those deliveries?" What we found through our pilot program is unattended deliveries really work best for implementing off hour deliveries and these types of scenarios, just having a secure location that they can put these deliveries and the product can be inspected the next day. So we've identified opportunities to work around those challenges and the additional cost the receivers may bear.
Jennifer Symoun
Do you have any thoughts on managing tensions between freight and smart growth priorities? (i.e., complete streets where roads are narrowed, pedestrian improvements like curb bulbouts, etc.)
Diniece Mendes
I think so. We are certainly grappling with thinking about how we manage all of those because we need freight to maintain mobility and sustainability. The way we are approaching this is thinking about opportunities and context sensitive design solutions and policies and priorities, whether it be an industrial or business owned that is predominantly covered by trucks versus more pedestrianized areas that has a different priority, we adjust our street design principle to accommodate where we can. There are certainly opportunities to improve the visibility of urban trucks. VOPEE?? did a study on high visibility cabs for larger trucks, so you can also tighten the radius for trucks that are turning. So, there are a lot of opportunities we will be looking at in the future to address these conflicts. There's also a lot of work at NACTO and a funded research project that looked at how we accommodate freight but it is certainly a great question. I think it will be addressed in the upcoming years as we learn more and adapt.
Jennifer Symoun
Here is another question, does the New York City subway system perform any sort of off-peak delivery operation? If not, has that ever been explored?
Diniece Mendes
To my knowledge, I am only familiar with refuse along the subways. We have not been engaged along on that strategy or concept.
Jennifer Symoun
Does your goal to "Foster the sustainable and environmentally responsible movement of goods" include encouraging "alt fuel" and idle reduction technologies like electric trucks and shore power for plugging in cargo refrigeration units while loading & unloading?
Diniece Mendes
That's a great question. I didn't touch on that today, but we are. Our agency was pretty successful in converting about 500 dirtier trucks to cleaner fuel through the Clean Truck Program. Our agency is looking at opportunities for expanding that initiative to other heavily traveled and industrial business zones. There is certainly some investments and announcements that will be coming this year around those projects. To the extent that we are looking to incentivizing electric vehicles and electric trucks into the market, we are looking at opportunities to do that. What we have heard from the industry is that the return on the investments within New York City is more so on looking at opportunities for curve space is certainly more of an investment for them. But they do not get the return on mileage within the New York City area because you are not getting a lot of that movement within the city because of the congestion. We are looking at opportunities for how we can promote that, either looking at manufacturers that we compare with transporters looking to trial and test these types of equipment. But right now the focus on electric vehicle work has been mostly on the passenger side of things but I believe freight will likely be coming after that.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. One more question for you. I'm curious how enforcement of loading zones is going? Not so well in Boston according to Abby who asked the question.
Diniece Mendes
That's a good question. There are a lot of challenges as it relates to the enforcement angle for loading zones. We do have some exceptions at the moment with our current regulations that allow for different uses like placards, special uses to park in some of our loading zones. We are doing an analysis right now of the level of occupancy of our commercial loading zones and how frequent they are being occupied by other uses that aren't really designed to use that space to inform larger policy. Enforcement in general, we aren't able to put boots on the ground everywhere, so there becomes a point of diminishing returns in terms of being able to have a targeted blanket enforcement across the city. But certainly we work very closely with our enforcement officials to target the hotspots where we feel are creating additional safety conflicts and issues and impacting street efficiency. It is still a work in progress. There are a lot of developments as it relates to technology and how we can use that to better enforce our loading zones, but we are not at that stage yet.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. We will move onto questions for Caroline. In Texas, have you considered a program for off-peak delivery of freight to downtown customers in urban areas?
Caroline Mays
Excellent question. We are actually in the process of launching a study to help us identify a couple of, I want to call them pilot areas, across the states especially in the five urban areas I talked about. In about 12 months I can talk a little bit about this pilot and what we are finding out. But there is a significant interest from the freight community for us, and actually some of the local affected officials, to figure out if it is feasible. Our challenge there is the industry and the public sector has to work together. Yes, they want to move it off-peak, but if the local ordinance doesn't allow them to deliver at 12 AM, then whateer program done would not be feasible or successful.
Jennifer Symoun
Can you say a bit more about how to make the regional and last mile problems relevant for different types of companies and for city authority people? In my experience, most urban freight discussions are still about deliveries in urban centers.
Caroline Mays
We have actually made a lot of progress with the public sector. And I am assuming this question is specifically looking at city/county officials in the urban areas. So, in our case, when we developed the freight plan, we had a freight advisory committee that included not just private sector, but also elected officials in some of these major urban areas. Two is, when we were developing the freight plan, and we worked with the MPOs to develop critical urban freight corridors, we saw that elected officials at the local level that are part of the MPO process kind of let up in their minds and thought that they really hadn't talked about that. Once the MPOs identified what they considered critical urban freight corridors that are now within the region that are not necessarily state facilities. A lot of these are local roadways. In our case, at least two of the urban areas we talked about, in Houston we had the port of use in the urban area. A lot of the corridors and roadways leading to and from the port are not state facilities. Those are local city and county roads. But we identified the needs in those corridors and now are having dialogue with the local elected officials to understand that. In Dallas-Fort Worth we have the alliance facility, the multimodal facility which has air, rail, and roadway freight. There is generally a lot of traffic. So, the city has embraced addressing those issues, working with us on addressing how the state highways and interstates, but also the local roads that lead to the warehousing, leads to the freight intermodal facilities, and then the air cargo piece. We are seeing in a lot of areas we are starting to get traction from the local elected officials in the border region. In the town of Laredo, the city is very engaged issues of truck parking, issues of designer roadways, issues of delivery to the warehousing. In Texas we are making traction, it is still difficult in the smaller communities because they want to ban trucks, or they don't want trucks in their community. But I think it is really a matter of educating the local elected officials. But also, the biggest challenge we have seen is the local level planners. City planners, zoning planners, and public works. A lot of them do not understand the freight side of things. A lot of zoning planners do not think about transportation when they make the zoning decisions.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. Another question Caroline that was typed in and the other presenters may have responses as well, how cooperative have private sector freight companies been in addressing congestion challenges - whether delivery (UPS, FedEX), long-distance trucking (Schneider, YRC, Hunt), or rail? What were the biggest barriers? How have they been overcome? What still remains obstacles?
Caroline Mays
In our case, yes. I think we are little bit unique because there is so much freight and industry in Texas that we are not having a problem getting private sector on the table. We have the freight advisory committee that has been going on for over six years now, and we have private sector and public sector and the railroads on that committee. Some of them have been around from the beginning and they still continue to come. All the 3 class I railroads are at the table, and they bring up their issues and challenges and we work with them to try to find medium, and issues and areas of common strategies to work together with the railroads. On the trucking industry side, we have the trucking association present and a lot of the trucking companies are part of that. We work with a lot of the companies in Texas. You name it, they are here. Toyota to Walmart to HEB and to all these other major companies. Generally, they are at the table discussing the issues and the challenges are. I think the biggest barrier for us has really been data. It is challenging for them to share data with us because of privacy issues. Getting them at the table to talk, we've not really had any issues in terms of getting them and to understand their perspective but also to be part of the strategies and solutions. There are barriers are certainly to be overcome. As I mentioned data, and also keeping them at the table and making sure we continue to engage them. We see the more specific the issues are, the more you can bring them in. Right now we are doing two studies, one on truck parking and they are telling us exactly what the issues are. In other areas the truck parking issues what we are hearing is very different, I think Diniece spoke about those; staging areas, waiting for pick up and delivery. These are the types of things we are hearing in urban areas which are very specific. UPS and FedEx want a place to park to make their deliveries, so we are hearing a lot of that from the industry, they are coming to the table. The other thing we are doing is assessing the design standards on our roadways and we are hearing a lot from them. And interestingly, the railroads are interested in design issues because at railroad crossings, etc, so they are also at the table helping us identify the issues, but also helping us identify what the strategies are. In a nutshell, they are at the table and we have never had a problem getting them engaged in Texas.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. Any other presenters want to comment on that? All right. We will move on. If you have any other thoughts, fees feel free to type them in the chat box. Mary and Mike, I know you have been typing some responses into the chat box, but I'm going to ask the questions in case you want to elaborate more. What was the role of the MPO?
Mary Lamie
For the MPO, they were instrumental in developing our office. They actually conducted a freight study in 2013 to help our region decide how we were going to take advantage of the anticipated growth in freight volumes over the next three decades. We knew there were regions in the Midwest that are going to take advantage of it. So the freight study had indicated that number one, our region needed to do a better job setting transportation priorities, looking at all modes of transportation and doing a better job of engaging with the private sector there. They were the catalyst for our office. As we move forward with this program they are at the table at all of our freight development committee meetings. The importance of that is that as we are studying transportation priorities with the private sector, we have our MPO and our D.O.T. and we are sharing information. What we don't want to do is start focusing on an infrastructure project that is not eligible for funding and we really can't find a funding strategy. So, that is the beauty of having those parties at the table. And having our MPO there, they have been there and have been instrumental in that process and in helping us secure funding.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. For previous projects, do you evaluate the benefits and compare them with the expectations?
Mary Lamie
We have been at it for about three and half years. As I mentioned in my presentation, last year was the year we had lots of fantastic successes as far as funding. So, those lessons we have learned, we are applying it to it. I mentioned with the Lenox Tower we received the final funding on that, and part of that success is that even though we received partial funding on that, we recognize that this really is a valuable tool. Having the private sector explain how these projects allow them to continue to operate in St. Louis or how these companies can remain in the St. Louis area and support help them with growth. So, we recognize that as these projects are being funded, we are now able to go back and say here is an example where project was funded. It is allowing General Motors to be more efficient with their shifts and their efficiency. This is an example of how it is helping our economy and for that reason we would also like to focus on the next round of project.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. There is another question for you. Is the trucking association involved?
Mary Lamie
Yes, they are. We have got the Midwest trucking Association and trucking representation from the states of Missouri and Illinois. They attend our freight development committee meetings where we're setting those transportation priorities. We're also investing our time in a truck driving program where we're actually a sponsor for a US Department of Labor apprenticeship program because of the work force initiative. Because of these efforts of setting transportation priorities, that's led to the other programs we are involved with from a work force perspective.
Jennifer Symoun
Do the railroads operating in the St. Louis area use locomotive technologies like AESS, APUs, shore power and/or ground air to minimize engine-on time on sidings and in yards in urban locations?
Mike McCarthey
Yes, so a couple of those technologies we are talking about. A technology called SmartStart, when an engine is idling it will shut itself down and then start itself again before it gets too cold. There are also auxiliary power units that are being used where a small power unit will be running allowing the main diesel locomotive engine to be shut down. It reduces fuel consumption as well as reducing emissions. So that technology is in wide use amongst the class I's and terminal companies. There are probably some short lines and smaller operations that might not engage with that. But it is becoming pretty prevalent and we do use it here locally. We are also using the mother and slug technologies where we are trying to use that and that has a pretty good reduction in both fuel and emissions. We are leveraging some grants in order to convert our fleet, and that has happened pretty extensively through major metropolitan areas.
Jennifer Symomun
Thank you. We have a question for all presenters. There has been increased demand for e-commerce related distribution facilities near or even within cities to enable quicker deliveries to customers/end users. Have you worked at all with companies that are developing these new, urban-based distribution facilities to maximize their efficiency and minimize their impact on the metro area transportation system?
Mary Lamie
My response really focus is for our region, we have had several other industrial parks that have been fantastic as far as attracting the fulfillment centers and distribution centers. We have done a good job with supplying the workforce. We just got a couple more hits within the last couple months as far as announcements of more growth. What we are trying to do is we want to continue with those successes. So, one of the things we are trying to be very proactive is we are working with the tenants at these parks and trying to see if they would be interested in better maximizing the existing bus routes that are already funded, they're free. I think the frustration we have had is a lot of those bus routes are underutilized and it is because the start and stop times for all of these tenants in these industrial parks are at different times and that is why we are trying to see if they would consider working together and consolidating these times. And by doing that, employees would be able to better take advantage of transit services. We are also being very proactive with some of the recent announcements as far as going back to the drawing board and seeing if there are other things we can do from a creative perspective as far as offering express bus routes to some of these facilities based on the sudden surge of employees at these locations with some of the recent announcements we've had. The other part is ridesharing. These things we are doing are not necessarily cutting-edge or innovative, but what I think is important is the fact we are bringing together these tenants at these parks and our county leaders in charge of these programs. And then with the connections with the tenants and manufacturing companies and distribution companies, getting them in the room and letting everybody understand we have got a lot of good resources being underutilized and trying to see if there is something we can do to better maximize them.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. Caroline, I'll turn to you next and see what your thoughts are on that.
Caroline Mays
On this specifically we have not had the opportunity to work directly with the actual industries. For instance, Amazon. In a matter of a year they've opened a fulfillment center here, another one there, but we have not been directly communicating with them. But we do work with our local economic development agencies, Chamber of Commerce, and industrial developers. On our freight advisory committee, we have representation not just from our governor's office of economic development, but also some of the other regional economic development agencies. So, we get some of that information from them, but it is an area we want to explore. Especially in the five urban areas I talked about earlier, we're going to be doing hopefully in the near future kind of an e-commerce analysis and understand how that is impacting the congestion issues in these urban areas, because that's where the sheer volume and population is in Texas. And being able to understand the dichotomy between that and e-commerce, but also really understanding the location of these facilities and the rationale behind that. In our case, with Amazon in some of these major urban areas and because of congestion issues, they are locating closer and closer to the consumers because if they want to do the one hour delivery, you cannot deliver from an area that is far away from where the consumers are. So, we definitely need to continue to explore that area.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. Diniece, any thoughts?
Diniece Mendes
Similar to what Caroline mentioned. We work very closely with our counterpart with the New York City economic development Corporation, as well as industrial service providers who represent businesses in industrial areas through our small business services agencies. That is one of the other nuances that is different with New York City, because there are a lot of different agencies for those workforce development related initiatives. From our perspective, from the planning side of things, we think about the growth and sustaining the growth in those industrial areas in line with what are the needs in terms of transportation infrastructure improvements to sustain the businesses and enhance the growth of industrial and manufacturing sectors within New York City. It is really I think a mix of approaches for us, but we certainly take the lead on the transportation related investments that are needed within our right-of-way.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you Diniece. We are about out of time today. Thank you to all the presenters and thank you to all for attending today's seminar. The recorded version of this event will be available within the next few weeks on the Talking Freight website. Registration is not yet available for the March webinar but once it is information will be sent through the Freight Planning LISTSERV. The Freight Planning LISTSERV is the primary means of sharing information about upcoming seminars. I encourage you to join the LISTSERV if you have not already done so.
