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Talking Freight: Freight Shipments and the Changing Last Mile
March 2016
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: Freight Shipments and the Changing Last Mile.
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, the best solution is to call the teleconference line. If the computer audio or visual components completely disconnect, please bear with us a moment while we work to re-establish the connection as quickly as possible.
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Today we’ll have three presentations, given by:
Anne Strauss-Wieder is the Director of Freight Planning for the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority. She has over 35 years of experience in supply chains and freight movement, economic analyses, and policy and project development. She works closely and collaboratively with private sector stakeholders and public sector interests to ensure that supply chain projects reflect market realities, emerging trends and customer needs. She has authored numerous reports and industry assessments and is one of the co-authors of the 2014 NCFRP report, Enhancing US Port Resiliency as Part of Extended Inter-modal Supply Chains.
Ms. Strauss-Wieder has been or is in leadership roles in several professional organizations including the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals and the Transportation Research Board. She is also a member of the US Department of Commerce’s Advisory Committee on Supply Chain Competitiveness and was a Leadership New Jersey 2010 Fellow. She has a BA and MA in Regional Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Stacey Hodge is the Director of the Office of Freight Mobility for the New York City Department (NYCDOT) of Transportation where she manages a multi-million dollar freight program with responsibility for managing the City truck routes, truck delivery programs and traffic rules and regulations that governing truck movement.
Ms. Hodge coordinates with City, State and Federal agencies on transportation projects and policy. Ms. Hodge serves as the point of contact at NYCDOT for the Volvo Center of Excellence (COE) for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems.
In May 2013, Ms. Hodge was appointed by the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) Secretary to serve on the National Freight Advisory Committee (NFAC).
In addition, Ms. Hodge is a member of the TRB’s Urban Freight Transportation Committee. Ms. Hodge has B.S.C.E. from Florida Institute of Technology and an M.S.C.E. from Purdue University.
Alison Conway is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the City College of New York and the Associate Director for Education at the Region 2 University Transportation Research Center. She is also an associated faculty member of METROFREIGHT, a Volvo Research and Education Foundation Center of Excellence in Urban Freight. She currently chairs the TRB Young Members Council and the ASCE Transportation and Development Institute’s Freight and Logistics Committee, and is a member of TRB’s Freight Data, Truck Size and Weight, and Urban Freight Committees. Dr. Conway holds Ph. D. and Master’s degrees in Civil Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, and a Bachelor’s of Civil Engineering from the University of Delaware.
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 Anne Strauss-Wieder of the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority to get us started.
Anne Strauss-Wieder
Good morning on the west coast and good afternoon on the east coast. Today we are talking about the changing last mile. Those of us in supply chain are used to an industry that is constantly evolving. However, the changes in last mile delivery are unprecedented, both in terms of their velocity: the speed at which these changes are occurring and the breath of changes that are happening. So the next 20 minutes or so I will discuss what is occurring and indeed what we are seeing in our daily lives. Because we as consumers are the starting point, freight is a derive demand and retail is utterly changing. On the top right is a picture of the opening of Randall Park Mall in 1976. Right below is picture of the same mall just before its demolition about one year ago. When you think about it, we often don't go to malls these days or to brick-and-mortar stores. More commonly we receive our products at our doorstep. So there is a reshaping of the characteristics of demand. What our expectations as consumers and that in turn is changing the facilities and the way in which we receive products. Let's first talk about what is driving the changes in freight modes the demand and our expectations. We are empowered consumers. There was a time many years ago when apples were red and peppers were green but now we expect a great diversity of products.
Not only that but we expect all those options to be available in stock. If we don't find it in one place we will find it in another. We are informed consumers and we have the Internet to search on. We have apps that can scan UPC symbols and look for the lowest price. We also want flexibility. We want to be able to go to a store to buy something when we need it and we want to order it at 1 AM in the morning. We want items delivered to our home or perhaps to someone else's home or to our offices. We also would like a flexible return policy. We want the items to be given to us in an environmentally standard fashion and most importantly these days consumers look for free shipping. Accordingly retail channels have changed. Brick and mortar stores have been around for hundreds of years and they have also been added to by mail order catalogs and then eventually internet shopping. It's going beyond that now. Omni channel refers to retailers who make use of all of the channels available to them. As I will be discussing, the way that brick and mortar stores, Internet, and mail order are being used collectively is also evolving as we speak.
There is also M-commerce which refers to use of smart phones and tablets to search for items and to order items. I do ask if you are multitasking right now and looking through Amazon that you put your phone down and listen to our presentation this afternoon. There is also social commerce a way of influencing demand and building awareness. Pinterest and Facebook, those apps that we see when we are online. They are all designed to help build interest and that shows our reliance on e-commerce overall. In fact, going back to the Randall Park Mall, since 2010 more than 24 enclosed malls have gone out of business. Over 60 now are on the brink of closing. There is an evolution that also affects development and in that matter also affects communities. As I mentioned, it started changing when we started getting interested in free shipping. Amazon prime then raised the bar by indicating that not only are we going to get free shipping, we can pay an annual amount and get shipping within two days.
Then the bar got raised even higher. We can get things in one day and now, and even higher bar. Same day delivery if you order something online. If you're in Manhattan as the example shows here, Barnes & Noble and they have an alliance with google. You will get your product the same day in the same thing goes with Instacart and another variety of other options. This is not just an urban phenomenon. The implications of this transition are profound across all of the US and every type of setting. Whether it's rural suburban, for example individuals located in more remote locations, whether it's Alaska or rural locations can now shop online and still pay $99 for their prime service and get the lower prices and to delivery. That has ramifications in terms of what they have available and at potentially lower-cost and it also has ramifications for local merchants. Some other pictures shown here, that’s Amazon's 40,000 foot fulfillment center for prime now located in Manhattan and RadioShack, an example of what happens when a retailer cannot keep up with the rapid changes occurring.
Let's talk about the last mile. How goods get to us. A completely different landscape, different in terms of point of origin. Different in terms of the modes and the providers and different even in where we receive our products. Let's walk through all of these. First of all, let's talk about origin points. Let me start with brick and mortar stores. Because their functions are changing, their locations are changing, and their inventory is changing. For example, there have been a lot of local recent press on this, Target for example is completely rethinking its stores and moving into urban areas with a smaller footprint. Same with Walmart, people in the DC area may recognize this picture of their multi-story operation in urban areas. Restoration Hardware, rethinking the store as a showcase for products. Pop-up stores, limited time demand, stores can also be used in an Omni channel setting as a place for products and more recently retailers are using those stores in a similar manner to Amazon setting up small footprint local distribution to get to people faster. They are recognizing that their investment in brick-and-mortar stores enables them to perhaps offer that same day supply as Walmart.
This is something that Target is doing as well as Barnes & Noble. Let's move to the top, fulfillments centers. They are a bit different than a typical distribution center. It's still a large box but because of their function, these are buildings that may have three times the employment a typical distribution center which serves a variety of stores and customers may have about 0.3 employees per 1000 ft.². A fulfillment center typically has one employee per 1000 ft.² and during peak periods can have as many as three employees per 1000 ft.² which starts bringing it up to office building levels, clearly with ramifications in terms of workforce and in terms of traffic. So let's talk about distribution center layout. Down here we have Sports Authority. This is the Hanes industrial Park in southern New Jersey. It is a very typical building and rectangular. Trucks are on one side and on the other side moving goods through from receiving to shipping. Over here, BJ's wholesale or which has more of a cross box and has very quick move into their stores.
In addition to a regular type of distribution framework. More tracks, trailer parking for inbound and outbound. Far more velocity going on here because of the nature of the wholesale operation. Here is an Amazon facility. Again lots of truck parking. Typically 2-3 spaces per loading dock. More importantly what is upfront? What we see here, all of that parking for all of these associates working there. Again, even looking at it from a Google aerial, it's very easy to spot the fulfillment center. It's all about velocity. That is the case in distribution centers. But even more important, when we are talking about fulfillment essentially the individuals, the associate in the building are doing our shopping for us. They are going in picking the items. It may be a multilevel mezzanine where workers are picking individual items. It could be as in the top left picture, see robots that are bringing the racks over to the individuals. This happens in Amazon buildings. There is technology again for velocity and accuracy shown on the bottom left and lots of conveyors and lots of technology.
Do you want to see the future of transportation? Go into a state-of-the-art distribution center. Look at the information background and look at the technologies in place. It's all about velocity and accuracy and getting the products to us and more importantly it has to be done in a cost-effective manner because we have demanded that the shipping be free. So let's talk about who is providing us with items. We have established players, UPS, and FedEx. But the U.S. Postal Service an established player is also rethinking how they use their equipment. U.S. Postal Service handled over 40% of Amazon shipments. As the U.S. Postal Service is replacing their vehicles, they recognize they will be doing more package delivery than letters. They are not the only established players with equipment that are entering the market. For example, Gammet a newspaper companies are looking at raising their delivery trucks for moving products. We also have a whole variety of startups. Amazon Flex is going very Uber style where they have independent contractors doing the deliveries.
This also includes Instacard, Postmates, and a whole variety of startups and new types of businesses. If anyone has seen about curbside delivery by Target and its being run by a startup called Curbside which also handles other major retailers. It's also bringing back modes in urban settings such as the use of freight bikes. For example if you go to Casper Mattresses, a startup that is very successful in the mattress delivery business. They do have couriers for delivering in Manhattan and their video will show that the box is put onto a freight bike and brought to your location. This would not be a complete discussion without considering the drones. There are lots of prototypes going on in terms of how drown delivery can go into effect in rural locations and other facilities for getting packages to customers. Now let's move into how we receive products. Often it's backed by our door. That can be useful if you are at home and it could be a security situation if you are not at home. If you live in a multi-family dwelling where packages are delivered by doormen those packages are stacking up. In some cases lobby space has to be redeveloped to accommodate the increased packages being delivered. In addition, some Manhattan multi-family dwellings have had to put in refrigerators to accommodate temperature controlled shipments for their tenants.
Management software from multi-family buildings now enables some of the doormen to scan and let residents know when their packages are in the lobby. We are looking at a swelling of individual deliveries. If someone is not at home, if it's a missed delivery it may be that that truck is coming multiple times. It's not necessarily cost-effective and not environmentally sound as well. What do we do when we talk about security and convenience and reducing vehicle miles traveled? We look at alternative destination points. Becoming a more familiar sites are automated package lockers, APL. Anyone ordering through Amazon can have the option of having their package delivered to their home or to another location or pull up a screen and find out where you’re most local APL is available to you which can be a Dunkin' Donuts or a convenience store or another location. Perhaps space that used to be occupied by newspaper stands. We have APL's which are operated by shippers such as Amazon, DHL, UPS, FedEx and they all operate them as third parties. Package lockers mean that you use a truck and if you bring multiple packages to a single location and go back you are saving VMT's.
In addition to package lockers there is the option of alternative locations other than lockers where you can have your package delivered. An example is a UPS access point. If you are a choice customer with them you can take a look, you can have it delivered to your home or have it delivered to the UPS store nearby or to a designated axis point location that could be your local drugstore. UPS is also indicated that they if they miss you at your home they may leave you a very kindly note indicating your package can now be found at a certain axis point. Even more high-tech but using currently available technology is an experiment going on in Munich Germany between Audi, DHL, and Amazon. In this case, if you the customer own an Audi and order something from Amazon and are willing to share the GPS information on your car, DHL will use tracking to find your car, a one-time code to take the package and put it in your trunk after which the code is no longer used. So this is an alternative customer location. This is not our grandparents last mile. This is a rapidly evolving situation that is making the news almost daily. Certainly there are going to be additional evolutions as some of the startups go through a maturation process as we figure out our own purchasing patterns in the future.
Certainly this is the case in Bordentown where an Amazon facility during peak periods had so many trucks and so many associates working there that local traffic jams were caused and alternative strategies had to be developed. As with all types of freight, it starts with the demand. In this case, us. What is the best way of tracking what is happening? Look at what is happening with consumers. Look at how you, yourself purchase items. We have to look at their regulatory environment which really sets the playing field for the variety of modes that can be used, the providers and even the types of facilities and locations that could be used for delivery. Think also about the fulfillment centers that have a lot more associates and trucks in terms of thinking through land side and roadway requirements in communities. The supply chain is ever evolving and it's very exciting right now to see what is happening. With that, thank you very much.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Anne. We will now move on to Stacey Hodge, of the New York City Department of Transportation.
Stacey Hodge
Good afternoon for those of you on the East Coast and those of you on the West Coast, good morning. I will share with you today the perspective from a public agency that is experiencing an increase in population while we are also experiencing a streamlining or reduction in roadway capacity as we add other features to our network to improve quality of life, to improve bus speeds, and to accommodate additional modes of travel. This is an overview of the size of New York City. It is about 302 square miles, with a population of 8.4 million also with an anticipation of another 1.7 million to be in the five boroughs by 2040. When we have those additional persons coming into the city that is going to put an increase pressure on the transportation network both for the movement of those people and for the goods and services that they will need to have provided to them. Which are often provided by trucks in this urban environment. How has our city been changing over the past few years? We have been adding additional amenities to improve the quality of life.
We have added pauses, bike lanes, curbside bus lanes, and dedicated bus lanes because we need to improve the travel time and reliability of our transit system to move the number of people here that rely on the transit system. We have also over the last few years incorporated some seasonal temporary seating spaces along quarters with a lot of restaurants. We have found that this is an amenity that serves to support the economy. Locations that have had these temporary plazas installed have seen an increase in sales. It’s a more active street life and it's a better utilization of those spaces in that temporary seasonal time. Overall, as we see the city changing with the accommodation for additional modes for our bike lanes to provide our residents with additional quality of life amenities such as plazas, to accommodate the bus travel and improving the bus speeds. As we look at how we must now design our streets, we must also consider how we accommodate the deliveries that are coming to these buildings and better understand the activity and the constraints of all of the modes. One of the ways that we have done that is to team with research teams as well as the private sector to better understand track deliveries and the business needs in the city. This slide was done by a NYU, New York University capstone team that we brought on board to help us explore the feasibility of consolidation centers.
A part of their task was to go out in interview businesses and truckers about their delivery patterns. This sketch represents the track deliveries going to one hotel in midtown Manhattan on a given week. After we were able to show this to the hotel, they were able to figure out that they should consolidate some of their deliveries and they also are a participant in our off hour delivery project. If you're working in a city and thinking about how to accommodate deliveries, one of the first things that you probably need to do is go out and talk to businesses and the truckers and understand what their current truck trips and origin destination patterns are. So that is what we have been doing with another research partner that has developed a Freight TRIP Trans Generation Model that we have used to determine the number of truck trips going to specific parts of the city. This map is in the midtown, the Manhattan core south of 60th Street. You'll see a park at the top of the slide and that is Central Park.
We are trying to estimate how many truck trips are going to these commercial buildings because we want to approach them about coming up with more sustainable delivery practices for their buildings to reduce the congestion we are experiencing during the daytime. We also had one of our consultants summarize truck trip volumes on bridges that lead into Manhattan and found that approximately 28,000 trucks entering Manhattan on any given day. The other reason we wanted to find a better way to manage these truck trips is to reduce the conflicts with our pedestrians and our cyclists. If you're going to have more deliveries coming in we need to find a better way to manage the conflict that will exist when you have a street like the one I'm showing in the Grand Central area with 16,000 pedestrians per hour, 900 retail stores all of which will need deliveries and the hotels that will need deliveries of food for their restaurants. Our mayor has put out a plan called OneNYC and within that there is a transportation vision to get us to find a more reliable, safe, sustainable, and accessible way to move New Yorkers and meet their needs and support the economy.
Here at New York City DOT we have several programs and strategies that we have been pursuing to accomplish that truck safety initiative. This includes working with the NYPD on enforcement and looking for ways that we could make enforcement more efficient using technology, potentially. Also educating the public about blind spots using a program we call Trucks Eye View. We can also use state legislation to put crossover mirrors on trucks so that they can see the front of their vehicle to reduce fatal crashes with pedestrians. We have reduced our speed limits and we have been exploring CCTV technology to manage trucks movements and Weigh in Motion technology. Many of you may have heard about our off hour delivery program which we have been doing since about 2010. We see that as a way to reduce the conflicts during the day time between our vulnerable users and trucks. This picture shows a CCTV camera affixed to a traffic signal had. We deployed several of these near the JFK Airport so that the freight team could watch what trucks were doing in that area. We used to that to help us get the elected officials and the communities to allow us to have larger trucks go to the airport. Previously we couldn't allow and it was illegal for 53 foot trailer to travel to the JFK Airport in New York City.
About one year or so ago we were able to change that rule and a big part of being able to change that was showing the public that we could put in this CCTV technology to monitor what trucks were doing and we could communicate with the police department if we saw something that shouldn't be happening. Another way to manage the truck trips are to use delivery windows. Delivery windows are basically just curb regulations that dedicate certain times of the day for trucks only for loading. This map shows green areas and an orange area with just identifying specific times when we would have truck loading only. That has been very effective for helping to reduce congestion on commercial corridors. It's heavily dependent on ability to enforce. Signs are great but if people ignore what they say then this corridor would not work. That is what I will show here. Another part of the city we were approached by the residents who had a lot of double parked delivery trucks like UPS for their online purchases. They asked us to put in truck loading so that there would be less double parking trucks. In this area where you see this white van, this is where we put in the truck loading. It is 60 feet with a one hour limit. We found that a lot of trucks were parked or vans were parked there to service this building that were not making deliveries and exceeded the one hour. You will see one call out there that says 4 hours and 51 minutes and another for 1 hour and 29 minutes. You will also see in this picture two NYPD tow trucks. They tried very hard to enforce these corridors and loading zones but we were unable over a period of three months to get enough compliance so we took away this delivery window. That was the compromise we had made with the community board that if we took away private car parking for truck loading, it had to have worked to reduce the double parking if we wanted to keep it.
Here is an image of our team out testing a mobile CCTV unit that also has a variable message sign attached to it. We have been deploying these two residential areas that have a problem with off route trucks. We're using that to support a City Council local law that is asking us to document truck routes compliance in New York City. We will be able to log into the camera that is at the top of this sign and see what trucks are doing and what traffic is doing and display message such as no trucks or local deliveries only. Another use of technology that we have done in cooperation with the New York State DOT is we have put in a weigh in motion site on a bridge that connects New York and New Jersey. The weigh in motion scale is within that concrete slab that is being laid in this image. That project has been in for a while now and we are collecting very good data on the amount of overweight trucks that are coming into the city from this location. We hope to use that information to support potentially future legislation to use technology for enforcement. But we are not there yet. This is the scale, once in place. It is barely noticeable to a vehicle going over it. It's been very good.
The state put in license plate readers so we're actually able to identify the actual trucks that are overweight. This is the off-hour delivery program. This is a hotel in the Times Square area within walking distance to the Port Authority bus terminal which means there is a lot of activity and traffic in this area. You have a lot of pedestrians because it's also close to the theater district. If you were a truck driver needing to deliver food to this hotel, you would find it very difficult to find access to this curb. A hotel in this block was one of our off-hours delivery participants. This is what that street looks like at 4 AM or 5 AM in the morning so now you can make your delivery and not have any conflicts with pedestrians. You can also have a shorter less complicated route into the hotel because during the day they would not let a driver walk into the front of this hotel carrying products like he is in this image. GPS devices used on our off-hours delivery participants were able to compare how long it took to make a delivery during the day and how long it took them during the night. A delivery such as this could take 2.5 hours during the day time. It was reduced to about 20 minutes in the off hour.
Our mayor is supporting off hour deliveries and we have been asked to expand this program and scale it up. There are over 9,000 restaurants and drinking places in Manhattan all of which need truck deliveries. We are continuing to work with our partners, our academic partners, public agency partners, and industry to expand this program. We are currently working with the Department of Education to see if we can switch some of the schools that they deliver food to their vendors go into the off-hour. That is under development. We also have our New York City truck route map which last year our IT team was able to make a more user friendly tool for your smart phones. If you could go to this website, you can download our truck map now to your iPad or smartphone which is much more user friendly because we want to make it easier for the drivers to find their way legally to and from their destinations.
Another area we would strongly encourage you if you're working on urban freight in your cities is to think about truck routes and land uses and how you can plan those to reduce conflicts. In this picture you will see yellow lots. Those are residential. The purple lots are manufacturing. The blue lines that you see in the drawing represent truck routes. Unfortunately, at the time that this was designed many of these truck routes were very close to these residential lots. A lot of trucks traversed the residential area in order to get to the manufacturing centers. The community asked us to remove the truck routes that were predominantly surrounded by residential lots and make the truck routes that were more completely surrounded by industrial lots to be the primary way into this neighborhood so we have since done that and removed the sections of the truck routes and prioritized the truck route for access to the industrial area more on the end of Route 58. Why is that important? If you don't do that, you end up with problems like this. We've got manufacturing industrial sites across the street from residential areas and large trucks trying to make their delivery at those locations creating a lot of chaos for the residents and getting a lot of phone calls to us here at DOT. Lastly, another program that we are doing here at New York City and its run by another unit, not my team but the alternative fuels team is trying to get fleets to be greener and reduce less air-quality impact.
One of the programs that they've done that has recently reached a 500 truck retrofit milestone is the Hunts Point Clean Fuel Program. This image shows the yellow and red triangles that you see are actually the GPS locations of the trucks that were in this program. Any company that was given funding to retrofit their truck to a more clean fuel type truck had to prove that they were actually using the truck in the Hunts Point Bronx area and using it within the tristate area. To do that we needed to have access to their AVL, they're automated vehicle location device. A contractor that was hired to work with the alternative fuels team managed all of that data to document the compliance with that stipulation. The yellow and red just identify a different time of day that the truck was in operation. When I say the tristate area that is the Connecticut, New Jersey, New York area but some of these trucks even went down into the Pennsylvania area and maybe even further up into Massachusetts. This image is an illustration of the GPS data for 343 trucks that operated between 8 AM and 3:59 AM and where they went.
So by putting funding into a clean fuels truck program for the Bronx, we were actually adding clean fuel benefits to a much wider region. Last year, we had a press event to celebrate the 500 truck milestone for that program and we had Peter Osborne from Federal Highway come down and present and give some words of encouragement to the team and the industry that was there. This is just a quick overview. If you were in the program you had to commit for five years. You had to provide your GPS information so we can prove that 70% of your VMT was in the tristate area and that you actually made two trips to the Bronx per week. I think that is the end of my presentation. An overview of the various initiatives that we are doing here at New York City DOT to try to balance the needs of residents, the needs of industry and the need to be able to meet people and goods safely. Thank you Nicole.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Stacey. We will now move on to Alison Conway of City College of New York.
Alison Conway
Thank you, Nicole. The good thing is that I am not going to have to spend a whole lot of time setting up the background for my project. This slide looks almost exactly like Stacey's first slide. Setting the context for New York City, we're dealing with the world city with a very large dense population. In our city trucks operate on designated truck routes. Meaning they are required to stand the designated route network essentially to get as close to possible to a final delivery location at which point they are allowed to divert from that network. Again as Stacey has already laid out in great detail, the historic challenges for goods movement in New York City are well documented. Our loading dock requirements from zoning regulations have not been updated since the 1950s resulting in limited off-street parking and on street parking for commercial vehicles which researchers at RTI and Stacey have found to provide adequate parking for CCTV’s overall. Because of this inadequate parking we have very high parking fines that truckers face as they try to make deliveries in the city.
On top of these historic challenges, we now have new emerging challenges which both Stacey and Anne have outlined in great detail. The city is undergoing, like many cities in the US and urban revitalization in industrial areas, where we had underutilized warehouses and manufacturing space. A lot of that land is being redeveloped for residential land uses particularly as part of one of the mayor’s major initiatives which is to develop affordable housing. We have dense residential developments coming up all over the city which as Anne pointed out are now major generators of freight activity as we are in the midst of this e-commerce boom. At the same time, that freight is becoming and that the demand is increasing and this spatial and temporal dispersion of that demand is changing because of these new residential generators. We're also dealing with the shrinking urban street capacity. Stacey has also detailed this in terms of the bikes network, bus installations, and pedestrian friendly treatments that have been installed. So what do these things actually mean for the city?
As capacity on the urban street network begins to disappear for these other well-intentioned uses, what happens to the freight network? In terms of big picture impact, it reduces length capacity, particularly at intersections where we are trying to shorten pedestrian crossing distances. We end up with limited turning radii that might be difficult to navigate for trucks. As Stacey mentioned when we have a designated local truck route network, when changes happen such as one direction of movement being taken away on that truck network, it can actually either drive trucks onto streets where they're not supposed to be operating or require them to travel far out of their way to stay legally on the truck network. The installation of bicycle and dedicated bus installations at the curbside can reduce parking capacity. Whether that is putting in a curbside bus lane or bike lane or having intersections mixing zones that consume the capacity, parking capacity is lost. Ultimately curb access might even completely disappear.
Why do we care about these things? As these things happen, we see increases in congestion and idling of trucks on the network. We have more double parking and we have an increase mileage of truck routes that are happening on the network. Why do we care about those things? Ultimately with those translate to are greater emissions, more congestion, and increased exposure to accidents. So the longer distance that heavy vehicles are traveling on the network that is more exposure that other vehicles on the network are going to have to those vehicles. Particularly when those trucks leave the designated truck network and are traveling on routes that were not built for them, they can cause significant infrastructure damage. Ultimately for industry it's going to end up coming back to costs such as wasted fuel, increased driver time, and other associated costs. The goal of this project, it's an exploratory analysis recognizing that detailed freight operation data at the desegregate level is not very much. What we wanted to do is take data sets that were not necessarily collected with the intent of studying freight operations and see what we could find out about the way that the network is changing and particularly about the way that trucks and bicycles are interacting on the network.
We did that by mapping and visualization any some very basic statistical analysis to see what we could find. Our analysis looked at three separate issues. The first was the extent to which the truck routes had actually been impacted by growth of the bicycle network. The second is where are accident now happening, both on the truck route network and involving commercial vehicles overall. Finally, where are there parking conflicts where there is actually bicycle infrastructure and trucks trying to axis the curb where that bicycle infrastructure is located resulting conflicts. What we started with were a number of open data sets that are available from New York City. There were shapefiles for the truck routes and for the bicycle networks and street centerlines. There were also two operating data sets the first being the NYPD collision database and the second being the New York City Department of Finance parking violations. I do want to mention that there are some challenges with using these data sets. We know that they're not telling the whole story of what is happening on the streets.
The collision data is only going to include incidents that warranted NYPD involvement. Accidents involving bicyclists that don't resulting in an injury may not show up in this data set. Similarly, parking violations are only issued in locations where the enforcement is actually performed. We know there's a problem in the areas where we could see the violation but what we may not see are violations happening in places where enforcement is not happening. Starting from these data sets, there were a number of questions that we attempted to look at. The first is the extent to which the networks overlapped. How much is the truck route network now on the same right-of-way as the bicycle network? Not disqualify the mileage but looking at what types of bicycle infrastructure are actually being installed on the truck routes. The second area that we looked at was safety. First we just wanted to understand where are collisions actually happening on the infrastructure? Are they occurring on truck routes and what type of bicycle lanes are they happening? Then building from that we wanted to look at how freight demand might actually be impacting the collision locations.
This was a very basic analysis using proxy factors for things that we know are representative of freight demand. I would like to go back and redo this analysis by using the RPI freight demand analysis and see if we get the same results as Stacey. Finally we look at parking locations where there seems to be a problem with trucks parking in the bicycle lanes. We had the Department of Finance data state that includes very detailed information on every parking violation that has been issued in the city. Fortunately, one of the violation codes is violation code 48, vehicle parked in a bicycle lane. From that data set we were able to extract the commercial vehicles and the commercial vehicles specifically parked in the bicycle lanes and zero in on critical locations. That analysis gave us a network level view of where violations are happening but just looking at these open data sets really wasn't sufficient to understand why violations were happening. We then went out and did field observation in a few critical locations to try to put little bit more detail as to why these violations were happening. In terms of network overlap, the graphic on the right of your screen shows the truck routes in blue. The bicycle routes in green and the overlapping network in red.
What we found was currently there are about 89 miles of overlapping segments and these are street and centerline miles and about two thirds of which have been installed since 2000. You can see the overlapping networks are concentrated in Midtown and downtown Manhattan, in downtown Brooklyn and along the waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens. Once we identify the extent to which these lanes were overlapping we wanted to see what types of bicycle lanes are actually being installed on these streets. There are actually six different classifications of bike lanes that are being installed. The first two signed routes and sharrows are designated as bicycle routes by signs and pavement markings. However, there is no dedicated capacity necessarily for bicycle operations. The other four options for bike lanes actually start to consume capacity of the roadway. Bicycle friendly parking includes parking lanes wide enough that a bicycle could actually pass the parked car. Standard lanes are just your standard four foot bicycle lane and curbside lane is that standard four foot lane that located at the curbside. A protected pass are those in which there is actually specifically physical infrastructure separating the cyclists from the street.
What we found was that as we look at the total on street bicycling network, the percentage of the network on which there is truck route overlap and a part of that truck route overlap that was installed since 2000, we see that about three quarters of the bike lanes in all three cases are of those lane types that actually start to consume roadway capacity. If we look at the more recent installations of those truck route overlaps, we're seeing that the type of lane that seems to be increasing most rapidly is the protected path which is the type of bike lane that is going to end up consuming the most roadway capacity. The second thing we did was we mapped the actual locations of collisions occurring on the bicycle route network and involving commercial vehicles. This map that is showing on the screen shows the locations of accidents involving commercial vehicles and bicycles. By commercial vehicles we include six tire and more trucks as well as smaller commercial vehicles like vans that would be a four tire commercial vehicle. On this graphic, a missing link that is not showing other Williamsburg and Brooklyn bridges which actually cross from Brooklyn into Manhattan. Those are not showing on the screen.
The second thing I want to point out from this graphic is that before we zoom in on this red circle, what we can see that overall it appears that these accidents are heavily concentrated on the truck route network. In certain locations along the truck route network we can see that there are definite customers of collisions happening. The area that is circled on the screen now is Grant Street through Williamsburg Brooklyn that open area on the right side of the screen just above the circle is East Williamsburg. Above that is Long Island City and Queens. Those are historically industrial areas. There is still a lot of warehousing and manufacturing type activity happening in those areas. Trucks from those areas need to get into Manhattan. They are going to travel across Grand Street to cross the Williamsburg Bridge to get into Manhattan. Now there is also because of the demographic changes that have happened with residential locations in Brooklyn, there is also a heavy bicycle commuter population that is going to be using the same route.
We see an example of the street that is not very wide. It has a designated bike lane but it's a very narrow street for the amount of volume that it carries. We can see there is a heavy concentration of collisions. The last thing I want to point out on this graphic is that when you look at downtown Brooklyn, where you can see is even those truck collisions that are not happening on the truck route network are happening very close to the truck route network. These accidents are actually happening within a block or two of the truck route network. This suggests that these collisions are not occurring where trucks are going rogue and going off of where they're supposed to be but they are actually most likely happening during the truck operating under its proper legal guidelines moving to those locations close off of the network.
The second thing I wanted to point out with the mapping of the accident is that not just focusing on commercial vehicles but looking at overall bicycle accidents. A highly disproportionate share of the collisions that are occurring anywhere on on-street bike lanes are concentrated on the truck route network. So of the limited network that we use for our analysis, we had about 363 bike lanes and only about 20% were this truck route overlap. However, more than half of all bicycle accidents that occurred in the network occurred on those routes. Close to two thirds of all CV involved accidents occurred on those routes. Again that is where those trucks are operating so that is where we would expect these collisions to happen. I think this raises a question as to yes there are going to be volume impacts and those are heavy volume routes that are caring a lot of vehicles and a lot of bikes that we expect higher accident shares but if there is such a heavy concentration on these shared routes that may be an indicator that we need to look a little bit more carefully of whether those actually should be shared routes.
That brings to the second point on the slide, which is that in addition to being heavily concentrated on truck routes, we also found that disproportionate accidents are happening in these protective bike lanes which are completely counterintuitive. We would expect the protective path would provide more protection and fewer collisions happening. There's probably a volume impact that we haven't been able to control for because we do not have the local truck and bicycle route volumes. However, there may also be some specific challenges for example right turning vehicles crossing a protective lane to have visibility problems may cause other visibility problems. Further research is needed here. The last thing was the accidents to see how closely the accidents were look related to demand. This was a very basic analysis because of the way we needed to code the data. We had two for each accident type we won't to look at we had large CV’s involved accident of small CV’s involved accident and we took the entire data and separated the accidents involving those vehicles and we used those two data sets to compare the characteristics of the locations of where the accidents involving CV’s occurred in these areas not involving where CV’s occurred. What we found was not at all shocking. The expected freight demand factors are higher in these locations where the CV accidents are happening. For large CV’s there was a significant relationship with wholesale, retail, and employment.
For small CV’s we saw areas where the e-commerce deliveries were happening including areas where we have a lot of manufacturing and areas where we have transportation and warehousing. The last segment of our analysis was zeroing in on these parking violations. In terms of the parking violations we mapped them to the nearest block. We found 23 blocks citywide for the three month analysis period that we used where more than 20 violations occurred in a single block for a commercial vehicle parked in a bicycle lane. The lane types that seem to be most problematic where the standard lanes which would be next to parking and in between parking in a travel lane. Something that surprised us a little bit is that these critical locations were not concentrated along commercial corridors where we might have expected them. They were distributed throughout four boroughs and there were none in Staten Island because there is very little bicycle network in Staten Island.
They also occurred in areas with varying land uses including commercial and residential. We found there were problems in residential areas as well. To figure out why we went out and looked at three field observation locations. The first was East Broadway which is a very dense commercial Street in Chinatown. There are a lot of small retailers operating and food retailers. West 77th Street, which is primarily a residential street on the south side and there are about 11 and 12 story residential buildings. On the north side of the block is the Natural History Museum and at the end of the picture you're looking at is Central Park. On the Grand Concourse is a more traditional commercial corridor in the Bronx. Looking at the parking in these locations, these were three very different locations. We sent students out to look at parking availability in these locations and the actual choice that the drivers made when they had to park in these locations. The first thing we noticed was that there was very different availability on the three locations in East Broadway and more than half of the commercial vehicles arriving actually had access to parking directly at their delivery location. That's because East Broadway is regulated as a commercial metered street. There is heavy staff turnover due to the metering and it’s designated for commercial parking.
The Grand Concourse is metered but not designated for commercial vehicles. West 77th Street is residential, meaning that it's residential parking and in New York City residential parking means drivers move their cars twice a week for street cleaning the rest of the week those vehicles turn over at a very slow rate. What we can see from the colored graph on the right is that these almost directly are proportional to the choices that drivers actually make. When they have access to legal parking directly in front of their location, most of the time they're going to use it. However you can also see from the graph that they are not necessarily always going to use that parking. The second thing we wanted to look at was breaking down these vehicles by sector, so how did their choices look different? First, just in terms of availability.
More than two thirds of food and beverage delivery vehicles because of the locations, they were delivering to actually had access to legal parking either directly in front of their delivery location or elsewhere on the block. Parcel trucks, many of which were delivered to residential locations had a much lower access to legal parking. Only about one third of these parcel trucks actually had access to legal parking anywhere on the block to which where they were delivering. Even where the parking was available, the use of it was also different. Moving trucks and service trucks, if there is legal parking available they almost always are using it. However for these parcel vehicles even when a legal parking spot was open right in front of the locations the trucks still chose not to use it more than half of the time. This is the same thing for legal parking on the block.
When we looked at the block level essentially the service vehicles were willing to part down the block. Those service vehicles are things like utility trucks and plumbers and people who have a commercial tag but are not as fairly moving goods. It makes sense that they would be able to use the whole block for parking. The parcel trucks almost never will use that parking elsewhere on the block and food and beverage trucks less than half the time used it as well. Why? Because the types of deliveries that are actually being made will vary and the duration for which they are parking. Those food and beverage and parcel deliveries are very heavily concentrated in these very short trips. Zero to 10 minutes parking is how long the vast majority of those vehicle types are parking. Those drivers are not going to go out of their way to spend extra time parking when they are making a fast delivery.
At the other end we have those service and moving trucks that are required to park for much longer time and again those are the ones that are going to be more willing to look for that more distant parking. Overall, just to review the key observations that we found from this exploratory analysis, we found that 55 miles of centerline miles of bike lanes have been installed on the truck route network since 2000. We found that bicycle collisions are disproportionately concentrated on the truck routes and in protected lanes. We found that commercial vehicles frequently and all three of these locations we observed have a choice to obstruct a single travel lane or to park illegally in the bike lane and in many cases they chose to do so. Finally, the parking availability and choices varied considerably by location and sector. One other point that Stacey mentioned is that enforcement also makes a difference or in fact does not make a difference for some of these driver types. For example, many of the parcel trucks we saw were essentially even if they got a ticket they barely looked up as they got the ticket.
Enforcement is an important part of this. Enforcement is also not one-size-fits-all. Learning from this analysis, there is a lot of research we need to do including looking at what the actual congestion and omissions impact from these reduced capacities are in those downstream operating costs. We need to really zero in on this issue of the accidents being concentrated on the protected path and figure out why it's happening. Ultimately what needs to happen is that we need to look at much more complex curb management strategies that take into account the different behaviors of these different vehicle types. With that I want to acknowledge the many students who worked on this project and our funders for this project and Volvo Research and Education Foundation and I will turn it back over to Nicole.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Alison. I’d now like to start off the Q&A session with the questions posted online.
Our first question comes from Paul Sittig and it goes to Anne. Regarding this "since 2010" mall closings figure, is this nation-wide, or regionally?
Anne Strauss-Wieder
Actually my first response is to Robin in the chat if you could also note in chat if your Amazon order whether you chose to deliver to your home, to an APL where you can buy the packages or if your prime member took the slow option to get the one dollar Kindle discount. Those are all some of the options available to people doing e-commerce these days. That last one in particular is a method by which Amazon among others is trying to rein in the cost of multiple deliveries using APL's and options for getting people to slow down the velocity of their deliveries. With regard to Paul, I will note that New Jersey in one area does hold the Guinness Record for number of malls per capita. But indeed that is a national number.
Nicole Coene
Next question is also for Anne. How much of the shipments from Amazon, etc., are included in FAF, CFS, TRANSEARCH or other freight databases? If they are not included in those databases, how does one obtain estimates from that demand?
Anne Strauss-Wieder
This is one of the more interesting aspects of being in a trend breaker situation. The situation from a data perspective where the information that we have collected in the past doesn't necessarily represent how things are moving currently or how they may move in the immediate future. I don't necessarily have an answer for you in how they are represented or if they are fully represented in the current FAF or other information as to how we will obtain estimates, this is open for discussion and one of the reasons we are having the webinar today. With all the new providers, methods, and techniques being used, it will be hard to figure out but it is something we will have to figure out. Probably the best way of starting is figuring out what is the most critical information we need to know.
Nicole Coene
Next question comes from James Galvin. So the last mile shipments aren't necessarily a semi, vans, or panel trucks?
Anne Strauss-Wieder
There are different series of answers to this question. If we talk about last mile delivery to a store in an urban area that has a small footprint and no back room, that could be a variety of truck sizes. Stacey may want to address it where you might have these slightly larger trucks that are doing multiple stops fulfilling each of the stores needs and chances are they're working very hard to do that off-peak. In terms of delivery to us as consumers, it's the type of vehicle that you see. It could be a straight truck or it could be a van. It could be if you're in an urban area it could be a freight bike as well. They are smaller trucks in general.
Nicole Coene
The next question is from Jimmy Martin. Do APL's charge a user fee to get your packages out?
Anne Strauss-Wieder
That's a very good question. They do not. If you order on Amazon, your choice of using an Amazon locker is free. The idea there is if you are at a location where you don't want to leave your package outside or you don't have a doorman, you have an alternative as a customer that is more secure. From Amazon's perspective maybe they can consolidate the load and it's also going to a commercial location rather than a residence. Commercial destinations are charged a lower fee by UPS and FedEx if delivering to a residential location. It goes back to dealing with offering free shipping and trying to control your costs. In terms of DHL, FedEx, and UPS they also do not charge a fee. They are saving in terms of vehicle miles traveled. The other part of your question is those stores that house the lockers; they do receive a small fee similar to what happened in the past with having a newspaper stand in stores. They actually get a small benefit by having the lockers present and these lockers can be part of an existing operation. For example, in New York City the U.S. Postal Service is also experimenting with packets lockers obviously within the footprint of their existing postal services. UPS and FedEx also within their retail locations.
I think that may also address Tom Phelan’s question next because in general these lockers are within established retail locations. Generally they try for locations where you are as close as possible to 24 seven access.
Nicole Coene
Is consumer demand (fueled by internet-based knowledge & access) the real driver of this last-mile change, or is competition among retailers (to gain customers by offering more)? It may be a matter in figuring out how to address the congestion, loss of fuel efficiency, and solid waste surplus that results: do we simply expand capacity, or try to show consumers the environmental and quality-of-life penalties and thereby try to influence them (perhaps a “slow commerce” equivalent to “slow food”)?
Anne Strauss-Wieder
It has always been the name of the game in retail to get the consumer in from the very beginning of time. It is clear that some of these last mile services whether it's free shipping, prime, same day, same hour are all designed to encourage the user to come into a store. It is the same way that you offer a variety of services. That being said, I’m not sure we can influence customer behavior. They look for the best price. They do decide how quickly they needed. An example that I gave before with Robin asking if she was prime customer and took that incentive that Amazon throughout their and they did not need it within two days and they took the Kindle credit. That is a subtle way for Amazon to slow down the velocity and save money in the process. Here we have private industry looking to reduce VMT and address the cost associated with offering free shipment.
Nicole Coene
Could you please provide your thoughts or if the study has already been conducted on the potential direct economic impacts for example the latest emissions etc. of these small stores for example target express located in urban downtown areas since these stores are adding truck and auto transportation to already congested streets or streets that were not designed to serve high truck volume.
Anne Strauss-Wieder
Let me apologize to Robin and hope it does not affect his choice of retail delivery. For Isabel in terms of Target express, we are not talking about new retail space in urban areas. Generally these stores are taking over existing retail space. Indeed looking at new multifamily housing particularly at the millennial's, retail is seen as an amenity for that housing rather than in income generator. In terms of the impact associated with serving the stores that is something that Stacey addressed. There is a big effort to try to deliver to these stores off-peak where ever possible. There is a balancing going on as I mentioned before particularly in an urban area. If you're going to have a retail brick-and-mortar establishment it has to serve a particular function and be as cost-effective as possible. That means maximizing sale space. There is going to be very little back room. If there is inventory on hand it may be used to help deliver immediately in addition to serving the customers that come in but it doesn't necessarily mean that there's going to be more truck traffic in an urban area.
Nicole Coene
How are companies like Transfix impacting congestion and helping to curb the first last mile issues?
Anne Strauss-Wieder
Transfix is one of the emerging group of companies often referred to as Uber for trucking. They created an electronic platform for mentioning, in the case of transit truckload capacity with what users need. They generally serve some of the larger and midsize retailers. It actually helps quite a bit in terms of producing empty miles traveled because it can match up fairly quickly those drivers with space available with the customers. There is a good series of maps that Elroy from Transfix that shows when he presented it as part of the six minute pitch at TRB that shows the reduction of vehicle miles traveled through that load matching effort. Seeing those types of services emerge as well as efforts by Gammet to make better use of their truck capacity and U.S. Postal Service using their vehicles for additional delivery. We are seeing companies really looking at their assets and seeing how to maximize revenues and reduce VMTs right now.
Nicole Coene
Alison, how are the "protected paths" protected? By paint or with a physical barrier?
Alison Conway
There are two different types of protected paths that can be included. There are cycle tracks in which there is just a raised curb physical barrier that separate the moving lane from the bike lane. The second type of protected path which also is included in this are parking protected bike lanes and in that case there is usually a raised curve but there is also parked vehicles themselves are what provides the barrier between the moving lane and the bike lane in those locations as well.
Nicole Coene
Is there correlation with regard to the availability of protected off street loading zones?
Alison Conway
Yes. That's a great question it's not one that we analyzed in particularly in the locations that we were looking at because in these locations there really is no access to off street parking at these residential buildings. The zoning requirements in Manhattan have parking minimums as opposed parking maximums and essentially don't account for the fact that there is loading going on at these buildings. However, we actually collected data in a fourth location that I didn't talk about because it was not a bicycle lane it was a bus only lane location. That was on 34th Street through midtown Manhattan along a very popular commercial corridor including the Macy's flagship store, and the Empire State building on this very heavily traveled block.
In that location where there are off street loading docks for those major commercial buildings, there was much lower rates of vehicles obstructing the bus lane. I think that was for two reasons. One is because they did have access to off street parking in those loading areas. The second is that the bus lanes are enforced much more stringently than the bike lanes would be. That's a major street in which major volumes of traffic are crossing from East side to the west side of Manhattan. Vehicles that are double parked in that the flight would be very quickly enforced.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Alison. It looks like we are starting to wrap up the questions in the chat. If you would like to ask a question over the phone, please press * 1 on your phone keypad to be placed into the queue. Another question for you Anne, what kind of impacts do you think emerging technologies, such as 3D printing and more broadly the "internet of things", will have on e-commerce shipments, especially in urban areas?
Anne Strauss-Wieder
That is a topic of great concern because of the supply chain industry. What is really going to be the impact of 3-D printing? We are not at the point of ordering Earl Gray for our wall yet. There is anticipation that 3-D printing will move into greater uses in the future. It didn't take very long for color printers to go from $15,000 a unit to a situation where it costs more to get a cartridge that to get the actual printer. It's not clear how quickly that will emerge as an option for the delivery of products. It is something that clearly is being looked at in terms of what it will mean for supply chain. You're still going to need to get stock to the printer and not everyone may have a printer at the beginning. We are seeing some stores that are offering that is a local service.
With the internet of things, we are savvy consumers. We are seeing the development of new platforms for a variety of people and services that we perhaps have never saw before deplaning on where we lived or worked. For example, Etsy bringing artisans into the marketplace and bringing providers products overseas into the marketplace. We have a lot more selection. The market is a lot bigger. The consumer market is a lot bigger. The ability to offer new services is evidence. The Internet of things also involves the Internet of services. Hence, Instacart, Post mates, Amazon Flex, we could go on and on. We are in new territory and it will be very exciting to see how this will shake out in the future.
Nicole Coene
Alison, I see responded in part two a question but I wanted to give you an opportunity to respond on the phone. What were the prevalent crash types or crash scenarios that your analysis found?
Alison Conway
In our study unfortunately the data set that had available at these NYPD crash records really did not include reliable information about the accident club validity. Some of the records did have some general reasons like alcohol involved collision or driver inattention. But the actual detail of the accident was not clear. Not only was the actual detail not clear but the way that the data is coded is that if actually coded by intersection. We know that the accident occurred and we know where the location is but we don't necessarily know if actually -- the accident occurred at the intersection or midblock. This raises the question that needs to be looked at is why are these accidents happening and I think in order to do that we need better accident data whether it's going out in the field and collecting that data using stop motion cameras to collect that type of information. That's a major area of need for the next step of this research.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Alison. We've gotten through all the questions and I don't see anything else coming in. I think 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.
The next seminar will be held on April 20, 2016 and the topic is still to be determined. Registration is not yet available but I will send a notice out through the Freight Planning LISTSERV announcing the topic and the availability of registration.
I encourage you to join the Freight Planning LISTSERV if you have not already done so. Thank you to our presenters and to everyone attending. Please enjoy the rest of your day.
