Incorporating Freight Issues into Baltimore’s Regional Transportation Planning Agenda: Progress to Date and Lessons Learned

Author(s):  
Peter Plumeau ◽  
Jocelyn Jones

Strategically located midway along the East Coast, the Baltimore region has one of the nation’s most sophisticated intermodal freight and goods movement systems, consisting of an extensive highway system, two Class I and several smaller railroads, an international airport, and a major deepwater seaport. Further, thousands of firms in the Baltimore region are engaged in the handling and transporting of freight. A heightened awareness of the region’s freight movement needs and issues, combined with the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act’s emphasis on intermodal transportation planning, resulted in the Baltimore metropolitan planning organization’s (MPO’s) designation of a public-private Freight Movement Task Force to work with MPO staff to provide guidance and advice on freight-related transportation issues and needs. As the Baltimore MPO pursued its aggressive freight movement planning agenda, it was recognized that addressing freight needs and issues would require MPO members and staff to assume roles and pursue transportation planning activities in markedly different ways than they had been pursued traditionally. An examination of the MPO’s efforts to incorporate freight movement issues into the regional transportation planning agenda is provided, with a discussion of the MPO’s progress to date, how various challenges were addressed and overcome, freight planning products developed, and lessons learned from this undertaking that may be instructive to other transportation planning agencies as they venture into the freight planning arena.

Author(s):  
David A. Zavattero ◽  
F. Gerald Rawling ◽  
Daniel F. Rice

The Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS), as a metropolitan planning organization, developed an approach to integrate intermodal freight transportation into regional plans and programs. This process began with the establishment of the Intermodal Advisory Task Force (IATF) in 1994 and led to a series of freight-oriented activities and products, including the identification of regionally significant facilities, analysis of improvement needs, and the intermodal component of the 2020 Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) for northeastern Illinois. Task Force membership includes public- and private-sector representatives working cooperatively to develop and direct a work plan to address goods movement and inter-modal freight issues and needs. The intermodal planning process involved significant preparatory work. The IATF established four working groups that directed specific tasks, including development of a geographic information system–based intermodal facilities inventory, an outreach for industry needs, a review of proposed intermodal improvements, identification and analysis of intermodal connections to the national highway system, and analysis to estimate the economic value of the industry to the region. Ultimately, six policy statements were developed and incorporated as system-level intermodal recommendations in the RTP. The process developed by CATS through the IATF has “mainstreamed” intermodal freight issues, analysis, and policies into the transportation plans and programs of northeastern Illinois. Although the scale of the intermodal and freight industry in Chicago is enormous, the lessons learned and the technical and institutional approaches developed through the IATF offer valuable insight and direction to other regions seeking to support their intermodal freight industry through the transportation planning process.


Author(s):  
Haiyuan Wang ◽  
Mingzhou Jin

In current literature and practices, there are no systematic and user-oriented intermodal transportation performance measures. After identifying customer needs and transportation goals, this paper proposes a set of system-level performance measures for intermodal transportation that are user-oriented, scalable, systematic, and scientific. The measures can be used to compare intermodal design alternatives or to evaluate existing transportation systems with any size and any mode. The highway system in Mississippi is analyzed as a case study. The case study demonstrates the existing data sources, the methods of calculating the measures, and the means of evaluating transportation systems with the measures.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Cai ◽  
Jin Tan ◽  
Xiaojing Liu ◽  
Pengfei Dong ◽  
Timmy Dy ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Eliot Benman ◽  
David Aimen

Federal Environmental Justice directives require transportation agencies responsible for planning and programming federal funds, including state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), to identify and address disproportionately high and adverse human health and environmental impacts on minority and low-income populations. Despite issuance of federal and state guidance and training programs, many MPOs nationwide continue to seek clarity on effective environmental justice (EJ) approaches and procedural considerations. The South Central Pennsylvania Unified EJ Process and Methodology study was a year-long effort undertaken by a consortium of MPOs in Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) District 8 to identify a unified and replicable approach to implementing EJ in transportation planning. PennDOT, Federal Highway Administration PA Division, and Federal Transit Administration Region III provided technical assistance and support to the effort. The consortium engaged a technical assistance consultant to facilitate a collaborative process to identify a process framework, a set of analytical methodologies, and effective strategies for advancing EJ in the regional transportation planning process. The study demonstrated a model for convening regional, state, and federal partners to reach consensus around an effective EJ process and methodology. This paper provides an overview of the study process, findings related to the concerns of the participating MPOs, and a brief description of the recommended analytical approaches. The paper discusses lessons learned during the course of the study and considers additional work required to further enhance the EJ process.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan James McLachlan ◽  
Changlih Ee ◽  
Jeroen Veen ◽  
Fabien Cochet ◽  
Daniele Tomassi ◽  
...  

Objectives/Scope Systems engineering techniques, particularly requirements management, are critical to realizing the value of digital transformation to improve capital project delivery. Drawing on the results of a case study, this paper will demonstrate the value of using digital requirements management to exchange information through a project lifecycle, specifically showing benefits in the integrity of data transfer; more efficient procurement lifecycle; more robust deviation management; and bidirectional traceability of requirements, including full visibility and end to end verification and validation. Methods, Procedures, Process A requirement is a capability to which a project outcome (product or service) should conform, and the purpose of requirements management is to ensure that an organization documents, verifies and validates these capabilities. In this case study the operator provides their technical specifications in the form of requirements. These requirements are then imported into the EPC's PLM platform, where they are supplemented with additional information from the EPC's engineers to create a requirements-based requisition package. This is then transmitted to the equipment supplier, where it is reviewed and, for the purposes of the case study, reviewed for completeness. To test the ability to identify changes and deviations, the EPC engineer modified the requirements and the file was transferred to both the operator and equipment supplier to ensure the changes were transferred and were identifiable. The case study also demonstrates how verification activities (testing, commissioning, etc.) can be linked to requirements; passed through the supply chain and be modified to capture changes to the status of the activity (such as test results). Results, Observations, Conclusions The case studies described show how requirements can be exchanged between operator, EPC and equipment supplier without any loss of data. It will also show how this approach allows a data driven approach, as opposed to a document driven approach, to be deployed in the requisitioning process, which could facilitate substantial reduction in the procurement lifecycle. This is achieved by removing extraneous information exchanged between the companies; the removal of swivel chair solutions, where data is extracted from one system and transferred to another; and expediting the bid evaluation stage. Finally, the case study will demonstrate how this approach could be extended beyond the purchase order to provide a direct link between specific requirements and testing (FATs) or commissioning activities, which facilitates a more efficient process for verification as well as ensuring a digital record of the entire lifecycle of a package. The case study highlighted the importance of aligning data model and developing workflows, these findings are captured in the lessons learned section and have been shared with the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) Requirements Digitalization Task Force (RDTF). Novel/Additive Information The paper will also include a vision of requirements models can be used to establish a holistic requirements model of a project, including the interdependencies of different system components. The case study will also demonstrate how the adoption of a common data standard for requirements allows a software agnostic solution that can be adopted by all.


Author(s):  
Francis P. Banko ◽  
Jackson H. Xue

As we witness the advancement of U.S. high-speed rail initiatives, the country can look towards its European and Asian counterparts for best practices and lessons learned from their decades of high-speed rail design and operations. These experiences gained may be applicable towards projects such as the Texas Central Railway and the California High-Speed Rail Project. This chapter will address the events of 2009 that have brought domestic high-speed rail to the forefront of U.S. rail transportation. This includes the new FRA Tier I and proposed Tier III criteria, challenges associated with each FRA tier of operation, overseas interoperability efforts, snapshots of international experiences (from policy and technological perspectives), the holistic system-based approach to safety, ongoing efforts of the FRA Engineering Task Force, and additional challenges and opportunities moving forward.


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