Appendix D: Freight Professional Development Workshop Results
Within the Freight Professional Development (FPD) workshop, participants were asked to identify priority training topic areas and then determine what needs to be covered for each of these topics in order to develop useful courses. The most commonly discussed topics were:
- Engaging with Freight Stakeholders…and Keeping Them Engaged
- Freight 101: General Education on Freight
- General Freight Planning
- Freight Forecasting
- Freight Data and Performance Measures
- Financing Freight Projects
The following table describes the participant thoughts on each of these training topics.
| Topic |
General Comments |
What Needs to be Covered |
| Engaging with Freight Stakeholders…and Keeping Them Engaged |
- Involve Department of Labor, DOT, DBED, private developers
- Economic Development Office must become a voice for freight
|
- Who are the various freight stakeholders?
- How to identify stakeholders
- How to develop relationships with stakeholders
- Tools for identifying stakeholder needs and impacts on the transportation system
- Impacts of the various stakeholder needs on the transportation system (general)
- Private Sector
- Coalition building with regions/states (public/private)
- Possible solutions to freight bottlenecks
- Planning horizons
- Negotiation skills
- Developing and maintaining advisory councils
- How to develop charter/model agreements for Freight Advisory Committees
- Ideas for how government can help meet private sector needs
- "Hooks" to encourage participation
- Mode selection
- Elected Officials
- How to portray freight as a good neighbor
- Development of continuous education based on election cycles
- Land use, jobs, port issues, etc.
- Linkage of economic development to freight needs
- General Public
- How to portray freight as a good neighbor
- Understanding the freight problem
- Contribution of freight to jobs
- Linkage of economic development to freight needs
|
| Freight 101: General Introduction to Freight |
- Encourage all State DOT and MPO staff involved in freight to take this course to develop common ground; then decide topics you want to specialize in (planning, financing, data, etc.)
- Customizable to include Regional, State and local freight considerations, needs and impacts
- Course participation should be multi-modal—encourage all modes to attend training together
|
|
| Freight Planning, Forecasting, Data and Performance Measures |
|
|
| Freight Financing |
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