View the July 19 seminar recording.
Nicole Coene
Good afternoon or good morning to those of you in the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Nicole Coene and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is: Sustainable Freight Transportation Services.
Before I go any further, I want mention that we have been experiencing connectivity issues with Adobe Connect. DOT is working to resolve this issue; however, a permanent fix is not yet in place. If you begin to experience poor audio quality while listening to this webinar via your computer please private message me in the chat pod. Currently the most consistent sound is via the teleconference line.
If you are calling the teleconference line for audio, you will need to mute your computer speakers.
Today we'll have three presentations, given by:
Denise Kearns is an environmental professional who advocates for common sense policies based on collaboration, sound science and good information. Denise is focused currently on finding solutions to improve supply chain efficiency through better transportation management. She supports the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) SmartWay transportation program and is an experienced writer and speaker on environmental, community and public health issues. Denise lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Tina Hodges is an Environmental Protection Specialist at the Federal Highway Administration. She conducts research, technical assistance and outreach to improve sustainability of transportation networks and enhance the resilience of transportation to climate change impacts. She has ten years of experience on these issues at FHWA and the Federal Transit Administration. Prior to that, she carried out policy advocacy for a non-profit. She holds a Master's in Public Policy from the University of Maryland.
Samantha Bingham is an Environmental Policy Analyst for the City of Chicago's Department of Transportation and is the U.S. Department of Energy's Clean Cities Coordinator for the Chicago Area Clean Cities Coalition. Sam manages several of the City's air quality improvement programs, coordinates responses to grant solicitations, and through analytical support and subject matter knowledge assists in developing City policies and ordinances. In her role as Clean Cities coordinator, Sam encourages local fleets to use alternative fuels, alternative fuel vehicles as well as clean vehicle technologies to reduce petroleum dependence and improve air quality. During her 9 year tenure at the City, Sam has obtained over $50 million in grant funding for green fleet incentive programs in the Chicago region.
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. If time allows, we will open up the phone lines for questions as well. If we run out of time and are unable to address all questions we will attempt to get written responses from the presenters to the unanswered questions.
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. I have included more detailed instructions in the file share box on how to obtain your credits after the seminar.
For those of you, who are not AICP members but would like to receive PDH credits for this webinar, please note that FHWA does not formally offer PDHs, however, it may be possible to receive PDHs for your participation in Talking Freight if you are able to self-certify. To possibly receive PDHs, please download the agenda from the file download box and submit this agenda to your respective 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.
I'm now going to turn it over to Tina Hodges of the FHWA Office of Natural Environment to get us started.
Tina Hodges
Thank you very much. The presentation is still loading on my screen. What I will talk about today is the sustainability self-assessment tool called INVEST. It was developed by FHWA to help transportation agencies, primarily state DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations, but also local agencies and others as well figure out how to translate the broad principles of sustainability into their day-to-day actions. The tool allows agencies to assess how they are doing sustainability and develop recommendations on how to improve their level of sustainability. When we are talking about sustainability we're talking about maximizing the sustainability triple bottom line, or improving social, economic, and environmental outcomes.
INVEST stands for Infrastructure Voluntary Evaluation Sustainability Tool. It's a web-based self-assessment tool and it's specific to transportation. It helps stakeholders go above and beyond. You don't get any points for doing anything that is already required. It is practical. It connects those broad sustainability principles of improving social and environmental and economic outcomes with specific actions such as specific pavement materials or operations and maintenance practices that transportation agencies can take. It's nationally vetted – it was pilot tested across the country and we received over 3000 comments that helped us improve the first version of the tool. We're now on version 1.2 so we are continuously taking feedback on the tool, improving it, and making sure it keeps up with the sustainability practice. The Federal Highway Administration encourages all their stakeholders to use the tool, but it is voluntary and not a requirement to do so. It is very easy to use and has a simple web-based interface. It is free so people overseas have used it as well. It is very flexible. It has different types of scorecards for different types of projects and also helps you score plans and operations and maintenance programs.
The tool is built around three modules. The first is the system planning module. And that is primarily designed to help agencies score their long-range transportation plan but it can also be used for other types of plans such as corridor plans. The project development module is for scoring and improving particular transportation projects so it covers the project planning, project design, and project construction. And then the operations and maintenance module has criteria focused specifically on improving the operations and maintenance programs of transportation agencies.
To give you a quick sense of the breadth of the tool, you can see the list of criteria by module so you'll see it covers everything under the system planning module from integrated planning to access and affordability, safety, travel demand management, and I've highlighted in red some of the criteria that I will go into in more detail today. Since this is a Talking Freight webinar I will focus on some of the freight related criteria. In the project development module there are three freight criteria ranging from economic analyses to construction quality control plan, habitat restoration, permeable pavement, light pollution, etc. Not all of these criteria will apply to every project so the project development module actually has multiple scorecards. It has separate scorecards for urban and rural projects, for more limited projects and basic projects work-study projects, and then it also has a separate module for scenic and natural roads and that's what our federal land partner's use for roads in national parks or national forests. It's also useful in state parks as well. And then in the operations and maintenance module you can see the criteria covers things such as internal sustainability plan, energy efficiency, vehicle fuel efficiency, traffic control maintenance, transportation maintenance, and transportation management and system operations.
The online interface of the tool is simple. Go to sustainablehighways.org and there's a wealth of information on the site. Many case studies of how other agencies have used the tool and detailed descriptions of the criteria. All of that you can access for free and without having to login. If you do want to go ahead and score you need to set up a user ID but that only takes a moment and it is free as well. When you go about scoring, you click on the different criteria and each criterion has the goal, sustainability linkage back on information, and detailed scoring requirements. The write-ups are about 2 to 3 pages for the criteria and it also provides information on what type of documentation you can use to back up your claims. On the right-hand side there are a series of yes or no questions to help you score each criterion. As you go through and score it adds it up for you and lets you know what your ranking is. It goes from bronze, silver, gold, and platinum for the different achievement levels. You can also make note as you are scoring by putting notes into the system to review later, such as "we would have scored additional points if we had had this particular sustainability practice" and then at the end you could go through and compile your recommendations to make improvements.
The score is very nice, but that is not what it's all about. It's about using the process to figure out how you can improve. The score is just a first step. The more important part is to develop recommendations on how to improve and then implement those recommendations. As I mentioned the tool was piloted across the country. Here you can see some of the state DOTs and MPOs that piloted the tool. It's in use now by agencies across the country. You can see there are 15 state DOTs and 20 MPOs that have used the tool and 23 federal land units which are parks and forests for instance. And then other six of the transportation agencies such as local agencies or transit agencies. We've also had international interest.
There are many different ways to use the tool. For instance, if you are a state Department of Transportation you might want to use the operations and maintenance module to maximize sustainability of your O&M program. Another way some state DOTs have used it, Ohio and Texas in particular, is they have incorporated the tool into contracting language to provide incentives for contractors to implement sustainability. They put it in their bid documents to require contractors to commit to a certain level of sustainability and achieve that level as part of the contract requirements and those were design-build contracts. It's actually an interesting practice because they had to propose how they would meet that level of sustainability and they were also in a competitive design-build process so they had to propose to gain ability measures that would be competitive in terms of pricing. And in both of those cases the winning bidder committed to a platinum level of sustainability at a cost that was below the DOT's original estimate. So that's a nice story there.
If you are a Metropolitan Planning Organization, you might take your current long-range transportation plans and then use that information to improve the development of your next plan. Another way to use the tool is to update guidelines for all of your roads projects incorporating sustainability considerations. That's a good way to use the tool because instead of just improving sustainability of a single project you are doing it for all of your projects going forward. For federal land management agencies they can use the scenic and recreational roads scorecard to identify sustainability improvements. If you are a contractor you can suggest INVEST to your clients and use it in your proposals. For universities or professors you can use INVEST as a teaching tool. It covers the broad range of sustainability topics in transportation and can be valuable to students.
What I will do now is I will go through and provide examples from three different agencies; one agency for each module of the tool. For the system planning module the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) used this module in order to score their 2012 long-range transportation plan and used those results to guide the development of their 2016 plan. They scored very well at the platinum level. INVEST helped them to identify and highlight their strengths which is always good for public communications to be able to say to your stakeholders that we achieved this high level of sustainability on a nationally vetted tool. It also helped them identify a gap area on the criterion related to infrastructure resiliency. They found that they did not score any points on that one and decided as a first step to improve sustainability they would conduct a vulnerability assessment of climate change impacts on their assets. They scored very well on the freight criterion, so this gives me an example to highlight a freight issue. SP-8 is Freight and Goods Movement. They scored all 15 points there. If you look in the box on the right it gives you a breakdown of what the different points are for. For instance, develop goals and objectives. The plan needs to include provisions for multimodal freight mobility, reliability, and connectivity in ways that enhance sustainability. They also need to engage stakeholders and develop performance measures, track progress, and demonstrate sustainable outcomes. The SCAG plan includes rail safety and grade separations, mainline rail improvements and expansion, bottleneck relief strategy, and environmental strategy and other projects that improve Sustainable Freight operations. You can see that is how they scored so highly on this criterion. This is particularly important as the Southern California area covers major ports; the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
The second example comes from the Arizona DOT. They used the product development module – they've used all three but I will highlight this one. They evaluated a series of under construction roundabout projects. They also held trainings with local governments using INVEST and that helped them partner with the local governments on improving sustainability of particular projects. They found it to be a good communication and decision-making tool. You will see on the right sketch of a roundabout project that they developed on state Route 89 on Perkinsville Road this project scored very well on criteria of PD-13 Freight Mobility. It scored all available points. They had safety improvements specific to freight. They designed and constructed adjustments specific to freight and had dedicated truck delivery ingress and egress. You can see in the aerial photo there is a freight operation where trucks need to enter and exit and they developed the design in order to facilitate that.
A third example comes from the Utah DOT using the operations and maintenance module. They scored their operations and maintenance program with INVEST and then developed a prioritized set of recommendations for how to improve. They did a good job of tracking their progress on the recommendations and also documented any cost savings from the recommendations. For instance for criterion OM-13 Transportation Management and Operations, they implemented signal timing improvements such as an adaptive signal system and dynamic dilemma zone detection so if there is a car speeding through an intersection it will hold the light on the other direction so it does not turn green before that intersection clears. They also implemented systems that could adapt to changing congestion patterns that they could tweak for large events such as sporting events to reduce congestion. While these new systems cost $3 million, they achieved $5 million in savings so it was very cost effective.
This is an example from an agency that used all three modules. Illinois Toll way used the project development module to set a baseline and scored 35 projects that were already completed to get a sense of their general level of sustainability and then used INVEST on some in-progress projects to improve that level of sustainability. They did a good job of mainstreaming INVEST into their standard procedures of developing agency specific practices around INVEST. They score, improve, and track progress of the 30% design, 60% design, 95% design, pre-construction, and substantially complete phases. They also used the system planning and operations maintenance modules to score their different plans and funding programs and they found an upward trend in sustainability, but also additional areas for improvement.
Some tips for usage. Do not expect a high score since you only get points for going above and beyond existing requirements. Second, emphasize sustainability improvements and not the score. In terms of process for using the tool, we recommend that you select a lead staff member, give that person time to play with the tool and browse the criteria, create a test project and read case studies. Then that person can assemble a cross-discipline scoring team and lead a workshop where a cross set of your staff and subject matter experts in different areas go through and score each criterion and develop recommendations for improvements. Then you would analyze, prioritize, and implement the recommendations from the workshop and then it's always good practice to track your progress. We love to hear about any stories about how you have used the tool. We have a number of case studies on our website and we are always adding to that when people are willing to share with us how they have used the tool.
I get many questions about how much time is required. The largest time commitment is in the scoring workshop itself since you normally have 15 staff or so in this full-day workshop. That is your largest chunk of hours, but there's also the hours for that lead person to do the background research and set up and then the tracking and recommendations. I usually say about 200 staff hours.
We have a number of resources available to help transportation agencies use the tool. We have case studies from across the country on our website. We also have a toolkit that has a fact sheet and presentation slides that you can download and modify if you like or use them as they are. We have a user guide. We also offer consultations; you can give me or anyone else on the team a call and we're happy to answer questions or work with you in using the tool. We also offer trainings and can also link you up with peers that have used the tool for something similar to how you might be using it. And also, not mentioned here, is we will have a funding opportunity soon to offset any cost of staff time for using the tool and to fund agencies to document their lessons learned and success stories so that we can post more case studies on the website.
Again I would encourage you to go to sustainablehighways.org and check out the tool and feel free to contact me or anyone else that I work with. All of our contact information is here and we are happy to work with you. Thank you.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Tina. I'm now going to turn it over to Denise Kearns of the EPA Office of Transportation and Air Quality.
Denise Kearns
Thank you, Nicole and thanks to everyone on the line for tuning in. My discussion is going to highlight some trends in the freight industry that are driving both the private and the public sector, the federal government, to take a closer look at freight and to assess freight's environmental impacts and to find ways to fit freight into sustainability planning by participating in EPA's SmartWay Transport Partnership program. In my discussion today I will first look at the importance of freight to the US economy and its role and contribution to climate change. I will address how changes in the marketplace and public expectations are leading businesses and the federal government to address the supply chain emissions, which of course includes freight. The second part of my discussion I will address an Executive Order issued by the president last year called Planning for Federal Sustainability in the Next Decade, commonly referred to as Executive Order 13693. I will discuss the scope of the order and specifically how it pertains to freight and how it might affect federal suppliers and vendors. I will close my slide with a bit of detail on how EPA SmartWay Partnership works to help organization and improve their understanding of actions they can take to improve the performance of their freight operations both economically and environmentally. Let's start with something I think that most of you on the webinar are familiar with. That is freight's contribution to the US economy. Stop for a moment and think about it. Freight makes an enormous contribution. Every year the US freight system is moving nearly 18,000,000,000 tons of freight valued at close to $18 trillion annually. That value translates into around 8% of the total US GDP. That's probably only known by hand full of economists, but it's an important one. This figure might seem high but it actually represents a relatively efficient and highly functional infrastructure network. It's estimated that in China freight costs are nearly double that. So we're doing pretty well here.
We can see this tremendous amount of economic and physical activity has corresponding environmental impacts. In the US, the transportation industry is the second leading source of greenhouse gas emissions accounting for 25% of those emissions. And it's also responsible for consuming nearly 2/3 of all petroleum consumption used in the US. Within transportation we whittle it down and look at transportation and the emission sources within transportation. Freight accounts for over 25% of the energy used and corresponding greenhouse gases emitted. Importantly, freight for many years has been and continues to be the fastest growing source in of transportation related emissions. Leading that growth is emissions from heavy-duty trucks. They are the second largest and fastest-growing contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. Looking ahead to 2040, it's estimated that emissions from heavy-duty trucks will increase at a faster rate than all other sources of greenhouse gases in the transportation industry.
That is not surprising when you look at worldwide that you see, by weight, trucks are moving more products and supplies than all other modes combined even including rail. This trend is expected to continue. Freight activity will grow and there some other DOT statistics that I don't show here but they project over the next 25 years freight shipments by truck are going to grow by more than 40%. I want to do a plug here for a new website that DOT put out. I apologize if my slides are not up-to-date with their figures. I need to go and look at this freight and the economy website that DOT has put out recently. It's a great resource for statistics.
This continual increase in greenhouse gas emissions poses risks to destabilizing our climate, which of course is bad for human health and the environment. It's bad for the economy since drought and severe weather and damage to crops and infrastructure costs money. As President Barack Obama has stated there is such a thing as being too late when it comes to climate change. Next I want to look at challenges and opportunities for improving freight sustainability. Notably we see a growing interest in sustainability and climate change within the millennial generation. Studies show younger people are concerned about the environment and that they are willing to put their mouth where the money is, at least some of them are. Investors as well are demanding greater corporate accountability and asking corporations for disclosure information on their environmental impacts and the actions they are taking. Even the federal government, a recent study shows that expectations are that 63% of Americans want the US government to buy greener and more environmentally friendly products and services. Last but not least is that energy consumption remains a key cost in the freight sector and despite falling oil prices, fluctuating oil prices, fuel continues to remain the second-highest cost in trucking operations, just barely behind driver wages and benefits.
These costs and concerns add up and that is just as true for the federal government as it is in the private sector. In fact the federal government is the largest consumer of energy in the US economy. Making it a major source of greenhouse gas emissions as well. These emissions come from primary sources under the government's direct control such as federal buildings and vehicles that the government owns. These direct source emissions are categorized as scope one emissions in the carbon accounting world. The secondary source is from the direct production or purchase of energy, categorized as scope 2 emissions. The focus for many years has been on these scope 1 and scope 2 emissions, but more recently the federal government, as in the private sector, has begun to try to account for and reduce carbon emissions from the scope 3 sources. These emissions are perhaps outside an organization's immediate control but the organization can still have influence on their suppliers. That is emissions generated upstream and downstream in their supply chain.
Supply chain emissions contain a broad range of sources. In the focus today is freight transportation emissions. Notably under this new Executive Order 13693, the president directed the agencies to plan for sustainability and drive down emissions across the federal supply chain. A key provision in the order requires agencies to promote sustainable acquisitions and procurement for transportation services by giving preference to transportation carriers that are registered with EPA's SmartWay program. The order goes further as well and supports federal agencies to contract and also give preference to good suppliers and vendors who register with SmartWay program as shippers or vendors and suppliers who might be contracting for freight service they are asking their carriers to also participate in SmartWay. So they are trying to do this executive order reach down into the transportation supply chain. On the next slide I tried to highlight a little bit the federal suppliers that might be subject to this new Executive Order. This includes the most obvious, the transportation service providers, such as for hire trucking companies, rail carriers. I gave some examples of companies that do this kind of work that are well-known. Shippers and logistics companies that provide goods to the government or services also could be given preference for registering with SmartWay or hiring these registered carriers.
The reason for contracting and giving preference to these freight carriers and suppliers is that through their participation in SmartWay these suppliers can help agencies report and track, and the end goal, of course, is to reduce their carbon footprint from freight. The way they will do this, and I thought it was interesting that Tina brought up earlier, the use of contract vehicles that will be the mechanism that we're working with the federal agencies to develop language for various transportation contracts to include preferences for SmartWay carriers where possible. Since EPA launched SmartWay in 2004, we have developed and refined a comprehensive suite of these carbon assessment tools that help the freight industry and stakeholders to get a handle on the benefits of using carbon as a metric for efficiency to improve the industry's environmental and economic performance. I will describe these tools in greater detail later but to summarize here, they include -- carrier tools, shipper and logistics tools, and then a process that supports the tool, a database, and a dynamic website that partners can use to assess, benchmark, disclose, and reduce their emissions.
I'm going to give a quick snapshot of SmartWay. Currently the program has 3000 companies including many of the leading trucking companies. We have all class 1 rails and several Fortune 500 shippers from across many key economic sectors and of course the federal government General Services Administration and US Postal Service have been participating in SmartWay for at least several years for GSA and Postal Service is a little more recent. They have significant responsibility for moving goods along the federal supply chain and they are participating. Under the new Executive Order we hope and anticipate that more agencies will join the partnership.
There have been significant savings since the launch of the project. Over the past 10 years we have reduced 70 million metric tons of carbon and saved several billions of dollars in fuel and maintenance costs. How does SmartWay do this? We achieve these benefits by sticking to a core set of principles. Our overarching goal is to support partners in reducing carbon and other emissions. We do this through a balanced approach that includes a relatively simple and standard set of benchmarking tools and methods that enable accurate reports and transparency. The program also provides some credibility with EPA's name behind it and neutral methods and data quality assurances that we want partners to use to set realistic goals for reducing emissions and improving environmental performance over time.
Let's look at the guts of the program and that is how the carbon calculator tools work. In this example of the carrier tool you can see what kinds of data SmartWay partners used to complete the truck tool. This includes many critical data points such as how freight is shipped including different fuel types and gallons of fuel consumed, model year, truck class, capacity utilization, and more. After all of the carriers have input this data and entered this data, the program processes it and we establish, as you can see on this right-hand side of the screen, we have established a set of 5 performance levels and in this example the performance levels are given for truckload carriers based on carbon emissions as expressed in a grams per mile basis. It's shown over here on the left that SmartWay organizes the ranking system using 15 different truck categories including package, truckload, refrigerated, and tanker delivery among others. Within each of these rankings a carrier's environmental performance is established based on the truck category it belongs to and using three pollutants, carbon, NOx, and particulate matter and two metrics. These metrics are expressed in grams per mile and grams per ton mile.
Again as seen on the right using carbon as the environmental indicator, in this example, a truckload carrier would fall into one of five performance levels – top, middle, or bottom. Based on the carbon it emits and expresses in this example on a gram per mile basis. These performance levels along with partner carrier names are annually posted to EPA's SmartWay website for disclosure and benchmarking purposes. And partners themselves are provided with more detailed reports that are unique to their operations annually. These are averages. This is an example of the shipper tool. SmartWay shippers include 300 companies from broad range of industries including retailers, grocers, automakers, consumer good suppliers, and others as defined by the North American industry classification system. Data points needed by the shipper to run the SmartWay calculator include an accounting of all of the SmartWay and non-SmartWay carriers you are using, activity data for the amount of freight and distance shipped, mileage and ton mileage data and there is also a place for optional data on operational and mode shift strategies that shippers can provide. Once these data inputs have been made the SmartWay processes the data and generates an environmental report on the shipper's freight operations, including carbon and NOx and particulate matter, emission reports, modal choices, and more. These reports are provided also on the annual basis and shippers can use the results to benchmark their freight operations and can include some of the data points and company-wide sustainability reports. And for the purposes of carbon disclosure to organizations such as the mobile reporting initiative, CDP, and of course, in the case of the federal agencies, these numbers can be used to account for their carbon emissions as reported to the Office of Management and Budget.
In closing, I want to summarize how SmartWay has supported the freight industry and the goals for improving sustainability. We provide a standardized approach for assessing transportation efficiency in the supply chain for any business that ships, carries, or receives goods. We worked with the freight sector very closely in developing these tools. It's voluntary and at no cost. There is proven benefits – by providing data these marketing incentives are put into place. Assisting shippers in identifying greener carriers – carriers have told us they have gained a competitive advantage by participating in SmartWay by itself but also over time as they improve their performance they also can demonstrate that commitment to their shipper customers. EPA provides oversight on data quality assurances and controls. In the end if the program helps organizations see how they are performing in their freight operations they can use that information in developing their brand equity to these investors or customers who care about the environment. In transportation it may not seem like it is right there in the forefront but transportation is changing. There are many dynamics going on right now in the industry. The public is getting more interested in transportation particularly in freight as time goes by. That is my presentation.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Denise. We're now going to finish with Samantha Bingham of the Chicago Department of Transportation.
Sam Bingham
Thank you, Nicole for the introduction and for inviting me to participate and provide a local government perspective on sustainable transportation. As Nicole mentioned in my bio she read up front, my scope of work is focused on reducing direct emissions from the transportation sector and that is what my presentation will be on today. The city of Chicago is accountable for our sustainable transportation goals as outlined in our climate action plan. This was launched in 2008. The Chicago Climate Action Plan details steps for organizations and actions that individuals can take to lower their greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for climate change in the city of Chicago. The climate action plan task force agreed that Chicago needs to achieve an 80% reduction below its 1990 greenhouse gas emission bubble by the year 2050 in order to do our part to avoid the worst global impacts of climate change. To achieve this 80% reduction the task force also proposed an initial goal of a 25% reduction below 1990 levels by 2020, just four years away; a mid-term goal that was far enough in the future to allow time for major infrastructure vehicle changes to take effect but soon enough so we can ensure we're on the right course. I think every five years we've been doing an emissions inventory to see how we are tracking and going forward. I think we're going to tighten that up to within every year or every three years.
Launched in 2012, the Sustainable Chicago Action Agenda represents Mayor Emanuel's vision to make our city more livable, competitive, and sustainable. The action agenda identifies 100 concrete actions that comprise a clear commitment to leadership partnership and positive impact so these are very near-term actions that the city is undertaking with our partners to reduce emissions. And while these strategies are called something different, Chicago's goal remains the same and that is to reduce our emissions and prepare for climate change. It's important that the city's sustainability goals identify and outline our sustainable transportation initiative. However, our sustainable transportation work was started over 20 years ago when we first participated with the Department of Energy's Clean Cities Program. We are a bit unique due to the relationship between Clean Cities and the city of Chicago. A city of Chicago employee has always served as the coordinator for our local coalition ever since we were designated an official clean cities coalition. I guess it's because of that unique perspective that we have that the city has always focused our sustainable transportation efforts as they relate to direct emissions reduction projects and focused on a regional level. Not just stopping our efforts at the city's borders and not just with the city's fleet but trying to improve the efficiency and access to alternative fuels for public and private fleets throughout the six counties of the Chicago area. We have done this in part with partnering with the coalition and also developing and managing Regional Alternative Fuel Deployment Projects, which I will talk about later.
I think the majority of you probably know what Clean Cities is so I will keep this short. For those that might not be as familiar, Clean Cities is a Department of Energy program whose goal is to reduce petroleum use in the transportation sector. The nationwide goal is to reduce petroleum use by 2.5 billion gallons per year by 2020. This program is a voluntary program and stemmed out of the Energy Policy Act of 1992 which had some actual meat to it that mandated some places to reduce petroleum use. Clean Cities is the kinder, gentler side of the act in that the Clean Cities Program and the coalition are working for community-based voluntary programs to help us reach our goal. The Clean Cities coalitions that have been designated cover about 75% of the population of the US. There's probably a clean cities coalition in your back door and in your neighborhood. They are a great resource and represent or comprise of businesses and fuel providers, local fleets, state fleets, national fleets, you name it and they are probably a partner in a local coalition trying to reduce emissions and reduce petroleum use in the transportation sector in your state.
Over the years, Clean Cities has gained a reputation as being a program focused on just alternative fuel however that is not the case. Alternative fuel is in the toolkit that we have for petroleum reduction, but it is part of the trifecta of strategies that we focus on to meet our long-term petroleum reduction goals. That trifecta is to replace petroleum with alternative fuels and renewable fuels including biodiesel, electricity, ethanol, and all the green boxes on the right. We also focus on reducing petroleum consumption through smarter driving practices and fuel economy improvements. And the last leg is eliminating petroleum through idling reduction and other fuel saving technologies and practices.
Clean Cities helps strengthen markets for alternative fuels and advanced vehicle technologies in a variety of ways. We provide the working opportunities for fleet and industry partners to share experiences and the use of alternative fuel vehicles and advanced vehicle technology. Coalitions provide training and technical assistance and educational opportunities and we do so with the goal of providing unbiased information to help our stakeholders make informed decisions.
Something that I did not realize this was important but it is something that is important and something that Cleans Cities does a good job with is actually helping fleets gain recognition for their progress in reducing petroleum and having sustainable operations. This surprised me when we held our clean slate task force meetings that recognition was high on the radar. We did that locally by having an Illinois Green Fleets Program that designates a number of fleets per year and gives them that recognition and ability to market themselves as an Illinois Green Fleet. We also provide an annual clean fuel champion award directly from the coalition. We also provide assistance with media and social media outreach both through the coalition and through the city of Chicago. We also provide funding opportunities. Coalitions track information about funding opportunities that are available both at the federal, state, and local levels in addition to foundations. We also will help provide assistance with fleets and states and local governments who want to apply for funding. And then in some cases coalitions have participated and developed their own incentive program for fleets in their region.
We know there are numerous businesses and government leaders that understand and realize the importance of improving local air quality mitigating climate change and reducing our petroleum use. However, because of our work with our stakeholders, we know what hinders them the most is their ability to transform their fleets to new, clean, advanced vehicle technologies. It is due to their ability to efficiently manage their organization resources. Highly incremental vehicle costs, costly fuel infrastructure or lack of public infrastructure, public stations, and the uncertainty of new vehicle performance, the resale values, the maintenance costs are all critical barriers and probably the biggest barriers to widespread hybrid and alternative fuel adoption. To respond to the industry's and community's needs, the city of Chicago and State of Illinois have made a decision to offer separate but not disassociated incentive programs to help fleet owners cover the incremental costs of clean and efficient vehicles as well as to improve access to alternative fuel infrastructure here in the state of Illinois. As you can see we have not picked any winners. We cover all alternative fuels in the state of Illinois as well as assistance with idling reduction technology.
An example of a project that we manage at the Chicago Department of Transportation that has wrapped up is our Clean Fuels Across Chicago program. This was an incentive program we offered in the six counties of Chicago leveraging $15 million in US Department of Energy American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. While we brought $15 million of federal funding to the table, local fleets and feeling providers brought an additional $24 million in private funding to make this program a success. In the end we were able to deploy over 400 alternative fuel vehicles and hybrid vehicles, over to 225 stations. We displaced 2.5 million gallons of gasoline and, by our estimates, saved the fleets about $8 million in fuel savings over the course of the project. While the project wrapped up in 2014, the results that are compiled on this slide reflect the project as it wrapped up in 2014. But the impact of the project remains and we've actually gained a lot of momentum. This program has been a game changer for our region. When we kicked off the program there was only one public compressed natural gas station in all of northern Illinois. Now there are over 15 public and shared CNG stations across northern Illinois which has allowed for the deployment of hundreds of more CNG trucks which has further helped us displaced diesel. This program was important to get the ball rolling to help mature our alternative fuel markets. It also led to additional long-term incentive programs being managed and prioritized by the city of Chicago and State of Illinois.
We understood that we would never see funding on a scale like that again from the Department of Energy and weren't sure when we would see other opportunity or deployment of that size from DOE. Assuming that both the state of Illinois and city of Chicago turns to our congestion mitigation and air quality funding for the Chicago region to continue the momentum we gained through clean fuels across Chicago. The State of Illinois currently operates a program called the Chicago Area Green Fleet Grant Program. They have secured $10 million for this incentive program that's estimated to last 5-7 years. It currently supplies grant funding towards the incremental cost of propane and compressed natural gas vehicles and if the vehicle is class IV and above you can receive up to $20,000 per vehicle. The Drive Clean Chicago is a program we manage here at the city of Chicago and I'm going to go into deeper detail in the next couple of slides. Drive Clean Chicago is broken into three targeted incentive programs. Underneath drive Clean Chicago is Drive Clean Truck which was launched last year with $11 million focused on the freight industry and buses. There is also Drive Clean Taxi due to the amount of miles the Chicago taxi and public vehicles market puts on their vehicles; this was another targeted market we wanted to prioritize that provides incentive funding for electric and compressed natural gas vehicles. And then lastly, Drive Clean Station is our third and last to launch program that provides incentive funding toward the capital cost of installing additional compressed natural gas and fast chargers through the Chicago region.
I'm going to dive deeper into Drive Clean Truck because I think it is a program that you all want to hear about and it is replicable given the funding source of it and there are additional programs like it that have launched across the country. Let's start off with telling the story of why clean trucks and why we focused on larger vehicles. Since its founding Chicago has been a major transportation hub. Today nine interstate highways run through the city and suburbs and the city is the third-largest mobile port in the world. Almost a quarter of US freight trains pass through Chicago and Chicago has one of the largest passenger rail service hubs in the nation. One by-product of this transportation activity is the air pollution. Diesel engines power a range of vehicles and equipment that perform important work and opportunities for our economy. As Denise mentioned, we are transporting goods and services and people using diesel powered vehicles. However, diesel exhaust contains a variety of air pollutants and more than 40 toxic chemicals. The EPA ranks diesel exhaust among the pollutants that pose the greatest risk to human health. This program is targeting larger freight vehicles because this is where we can realize the most benefit for our sensitive community and for our region by helping them get into more efficient and zero emissions vehicles. Even a small increase in efficiency can lead to economic advantages and fuel savings and maintenance costs; these are the long-term goals. We want fleets to realize the long-term operational savings from the technologies. Our six county region does not meet federal ambient air quality standards. And lastly, efficient, less polluting vehicles are a crucial piece for us to meet our sustainable to goals as outlined in Mayor Emanuel's plan as well as the Chicago Climate Action Plan.
Drive Clean Truck is a point-of-sale incentive. In speaking with our fleet stakeholders they emphasize to us it was critical to offer a point-of-sale incentive. Tax credits and rebates and grants all leave some folks out of the running for this funding, including local governments sometimes. Having a point-of-sale incentive was paramount for us to make this program a success. This is what we are calling our voucher program. Due to the higher incremental cost and the relatively recent commercialization of these vehicles, OEM products, and upsets we, the city, realized we need to play a role in helping adoption of these vehicles through this type of incentive program. We cannot just sit by the sidelines and wait for the market to get there itself. We need to help invest in these technologies to help us get down the road to generation three and four and five of these technologies where they can stand on their own.
We have secured $30 million in funding for Drive Clean Truck. To date, $8 million has been requested and that represents 220 vehicles. We have limited the program to cover 80% of the incremental cost and we do have caps based on the technology, which I'm happy to share with anyone if you want those details. An important part of the program is its ease of participation and transparency. On our program website we list all of the eligible vehicles that we have pre-vetted and all of the eligible vendors and identified what the voucher amount is for each of those vehicles. A fleet can take a look at our website and know exactly what they're in for. We've also have a ticker on our website that identifies the amount of funding we have remaining for the program. This is the first time we've included leased vehicles in incentive programs. More fleets are leveraging leases to help them meet their needs, so it was important for us to find a way and a solution to include leased vehicles. And while the paperwork in terms might vary, we tried to keep the principles of our program similar to others voucher incentive programs in the US. That was done by design to help provide similarities nationally.
Because we're using funding, one drawback for freight is that the majority of the time the vehicles have to operate within the six County region. That has not been an issue so far, but I can imagine it could be as we go forward with the program. Our funding agreements are with the vehicle vendors but the purchasers also have to sign onto terms and conditions where we have to pass along certain requirements of the program and as a minimum we require the vehicles to be in the region for at least three years.
This is our dream team. I am happy to follow-up with anyone directly after the call and answer your questions of how we designed the program. I can tell you because of previous experience with regional alternative fuel deployment projects we knew we needed a partner to help us administer the programs, so we set aside 10% of our total funding to identify and work with a partner contractor to administer all of the work involved. The issued an RFP to identify this role and received a good number of quality responses. That is excellent to see at this time. When we first started doing these types of programs there was not a lot of people out that had the expertise to assist us with this. This is the team we have administering the program. CALSTART is our prime consultant on the program and they have contracted with Tetra Tech, an international environmental consulting firm to operate the day-to-day reviews and approvals of the voucher requests as they come in. Legacy Environmental is providing the marketing for the program doing grassroots marketing in the region and prioritizing areas where we can do better from an air quality perspective.
One of the key things that's great about our program is we want to share as much information as we can. We're developing case studies as the program goes along and vehicles are deployed. One of interest to you all might be the all-electric yard truck offered by our MDB. We are finalizing this case study and just approved the 20th voucher request for this vehicle, so it's actually been well received in our region. This is the level of information we are trying to pull out of these case studies. Many case studies about alternative fuel vehicles are happy success stories. We're trying to get at the meat of how the vehicle has performed in specific applications. This is the type of information we are trying to pull out. How has it increased miles per gallon? What is the total return on investment? All of this information or data will help us make decisions going forward on how we improve the program down the road.
Lastly, while I have you on the phone, I wanted to make sure everyone was aware of the current alternative fuel Corridor Opportunity. The FAST Act, section 1413, calls on US DOT to designate alternative fuel corridors in strategic locations along major highways to improve the mobility of alternative fuel vehicles. This must be done by December 2016. US Department of transportation will be soliciting nominations. It is my understanding that US DOT requires an open nomination process and that the request for nominations will be taking place this month still in July. I'm not sure what other work is underway but in the upper Midwest we have six states and seven coalitions that are working together to champion for I-94. This work started last September so there is a little bit of legwork done already. If you want to learn more about the Corridor Opportunity in general or participating in our specific opportunity on I-94 please let me know. And with that here is my contact information. Thank you for allowing me to participate in the call. I learned a lot from our co-presenters. I hope you did as well. I will turn it back to Nicole.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Sam. We have a few questions in the chat pod so we will start with those. We also will open up the phone lines. If you would like to ask question over the phone press *1 on your telephone keypad to be placed in the queue.
The first question is for Tina. Why shouldn't INVEST tool users not expect high scores when using the tool?
Tina Hodges
When you used to come home from school with your test, if you got a 60% you would feel you had done poorly. But on INVEST if you get 60% of the points that's really good because it's not actually 60%, it's 160%. INVEST only gives you points for going above and beyond existing laws and regulations. It's already assumed you have complied with American's With Disabilities Act, with Natural Environmental Policy Act, all other things you'd have to comply with anyway. Any points that you earn are for doing things above and beyond existing requirements. So you should not expect to earn a high percentage of the overall points.
Nicole Coene
Tina, can you describe the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission pilot?
Tina Hodges
I don't have information on Pioneer Valley Planning Commission pilot. But I looked it up and that appears to be the MPO for Springfield, Massachusetts and the Springfield, Illinois MPO has an invest project. I wonder if you are thinking about that one. And for that I put the link in the chat pod to the spot on the sustainable highways page that lists out the different agencies we know of that have used the tool and has links to case studies for those agencies. You can click on the link for the Springfield MPO. This is not a complete list because we only have people on this list that have let us know they were using the tool and would love for us to list that on our website. But we don't have anything on here about folks that may be using the tool we're not aware of or do not want to be listed on the site.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Tina. Abby followed up and said she was looking at your map on slide nine. If you want to look back at that I will move on to a question for Denise. What kind of successes, or for that matter challenges, has EPA had in engaging smaller truck carriers, such as drayage truck carriers at ports, in the SmartWay program? Ports in particular handle large volumes of freight, and issues related to larger ships unloading larger volumes of cargo at ports may make port emission reduction needs a particular challenge and a particular need.
Denise Kearns
Yes, thank you for that question. That is certainly true. Ports are a hub of transportation activity and a hub of emissions that really have impacts on communities nearby. That is true of virtually any transportation hub. Early on SmartWay worked especially with a group of shipper partners who were particularly interested in addressing port emissions and communities impacted by those emissions. I'm trying to remember the name of the organization. It was interesting because the shipper partners actually had a rebate type of program and they were providing assistance to the drayage operators. Drayage trucks are operating on the margins and are typically very old trucks and I think that was a successful venture but SmartWay had various financing programs early on in the development of the program. They continue to do a little of that. There was funding made available to port operators and drayage trucks in particular and at one point we even had a drayage tool. The drayage participation has grown and we have about 100 operators participating in the program and a good proportion of our carrier partners are smaller carriers because there's hundreds of thousands of small carriers versus the top carriers that are carrying the majority of the freight. When the program was first launched we had a tool that was simpler for these smaller carriers and we're looking again at developing something that would be app oriented for the small truck drivers and recently the EPA has launched a ports initiative addressing port emissions and you can check our website on that. SmartWay has been engaged in that to some degree. Thank you for that I hope we can get this small carrier app out to those truckers that could use it.
Nicole Coene
Samantha. Does the City of Chicago have any plans in the future to address emissions from both freight and commuter trains?
Sam Bingham
Yes we do. Drive Clean Truck is a long-term program. In the past we've had an opportunistic approach for funding programs and we leveraged federal or state dollars to do short-term initiatives. However with Drive Clean Truck we're leveraging funding and expect to have it going in operational for 5+ years, so it can be relied on by the local transportation industry. I did not have time to mention the work that others in our office are working on regarding congestion relief. Many of you might be familiar with the Create Program. This program is working on increasing the efficiency of the region's passenger and freight rail infrastructure and investing heavily in improvements needed there. Regarding regional commuter trains, those are outside the city of Chicago's regulatory reach, but our local train system is 100% electric and we are working with our transit agency in the city on helping them get some more electric buses to pilot. We are happy to see they will be purchasing 30 and hopefully in a few years have the opportunity to purchase many more.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Sam. I wanted to give an opportunity to take a response to Abby. Was there anything else you wanted to say over the phone, Tina?
Tina Hodges
Sure, thank you. Pioneer Valley Planning Commission had pilot tested the tool and the pilot version of the tool was before my time. I looked up in our records the description I had a big usage of the tool and pasted it in there. That is the information I have but I can go back and ask others who might have been involved in the project for more information.
Nicole Coene
Thank you. At this time those of the questions we have in the chat. We can give it one more minute and see if anyone would like to add anything else. In the meantime the next seminar will be held on August 17, 2016. The topic is tentatively scheduled as "Accommodating Trucks through Appropriate Intersection and Interchange Design". Registration is not yet available but I will send a notice out through the Freight Planning LISTSERV announcing when registration is open. I encourage you to join the Freight Planning LISTSERV if you have not already done so. I don't see any more questions coming in over the phone. We will go ahead and close out. The recorded version of this event will be available within the next few weeks on the Talking Freight website. Thank you to our presenters and to everyone attending. Please enjoy the rest of your day.
