Freight and Land Use Travel Demand Evaluation: Final Report

Appendix A: Project Approach

This appendix provides details on the project approach. The approach involved conducting a literature review and several stakeholder outreach activities to obtain input on draft project documents.

Literature Review Research

The initial literature compilation gathered relevant material from reasonable sources, including existing works in progress and information from published and unpublished reports, to prepare a broad synthesis of best practices and guidelines related to freight trip generation. The output of this activity was a literature review.

One critical document framed this literature review—the 2007 QRFM. Like the original QRFM published in 1996, this manual provides background information on the freight transportation system and factors affecting freight demand. In the last decade, significant advances have occurred in tracking freight movement, in the state of the practice for behavior-based supply chain modeling, and in developing processes for taking into account land use and demographic considerations. Within freight planning, the QRFM—despite being out of date—remains a foundational document that helped the study team organize the literature review findings into two categories. The first category is literature that was considered an update of QRFM information and could be incorporated into appropriate sections or chapters. The second category explores opportunities beyond the QRFM to address broader topics such as scenario planning applications, land use/zoning applications, megaregions, and freight resiliency.

Key resources and technical information included in the literature review for this project include the following:

QRFM published as landmark document (2007)

SHRP2 C20 Freight Demand Modeling and Data Improvement

NCFRP Report 24: Smart Growth and Urban Goods Movement

NCFRP Report 25: Freight Data Sharing Guidebook

NCFRP Report 26: Subnational Commodity Flow Data

NCFRP Report 37: Using Commodity Flow Survey Microdata and Other Establishment Data to Estimate the Generation of Freight, Freight Trips, and Service Trips: Guidebook

NCHRP Report 739: Freight Trip Generation and Land Use

NCHRP Report 750: Strategic Issues Facing Transportation Volume 1: Scenario Planning for Freight Transportation Infrastructure Investment

Information gathered also addressed broader topics associated with freight demand, including considerations outlined in the current planning context (discussed in section 1 of this report and highlighted in Table 1):

While current Federal, State, and metropolitan commodity flow analyses are primarily oriented toward institutional boundaries, a megaregional topology may be a more appropriate scale for contemplating broader economic diversification.

The QRFM is primarily oriented toward the same Federal, State, and metropolitan agency audiences, but the concepts of freight-efficient land uses and context-sensitive trip-generation are also valuable to local land use planning and zoning authorities. The update to the QRFM should be scalable for use from a statewide level down to the local site level.

The information explosion and emphasis on interdisciplinary performance measures make scenario planning an increasingly valuable tool for considering alternative investment approaches.

The evolving nature of freight logistics as it relates to development of industry, distribution centers, and delivery of goods and services needs to be understood in terms of its effect on land use and FG.

The literature review was not exhaustive, but rather is meant to document emerging best practices and new approaches and serve as a foundation for stakeholder outreach activities (described below).

Stakeholder Outreach Activities

The goal of outreach activities was to better understand nuances and situational needs of the study participants in a way that would help concurrently inspire and educate them. These activities included:

Outreach during the 2017 Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting - This outreach solicited input and marketed the next event (i.e., Virtual Meeting #1).

Virtual Meeting #1 - Held as part of FHWA’s monthly freight webinar series, this meeting was an informational webinar supplemented with open discussion to validate the literature review findings and understand the challenges practitioners are facing that were not previously captured.

Expert Working Session - Presented a draft set of topic matrices to freight planning experts for refinement and more detailed discussion.

Virtual Meeting #2 - Provided experts from the expert working session mentioned above an opportunity to review and comment on the draft final technical report and its findings.

Together, these activities helped develop and refine the key findings and topic matrices contained in this technical report. Additional details on these activities follow below.

TRB Annual Meeting - January 8-12, 2017

During the TRB Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, project team members attended more than 10 key TRB freight committee meetings to inform and solicit initial thoughts on key freight issues, and encourage participation in Virtual Meeting #1.

Virtual Meeting #1 - April 19, 2017

The goal of the first virtual meeting, held as part of the April “Talking Freight” webinar series hosted by FHWA, was to engage a broad group of interested stakeholders and practitioners to explore new trends in freight travel demand evaluation as they occur in different communities and contexts. This meeting included select presentations with complementary discussion time. These presentations included:

Where are we now? - State of the Practice in Incorporating Land Use and Demographic Trends into Freight Trip Demand

Where are we going? - Advances in Freight Travel Demand Evaluation

How do we get there? - FHWA Freight Resources: Existing and Forthcoming

The webinar summarized high-level issues identified early in the literature scan and garnered feedback to confirm areas of greatest practitioner interest. Throughout the course of the webinar, the study team facilitated conversation and conducted polls to gather feedback from the audience on the topics discussed. The goal was to learn whether the findings matched practitioners’ experiences.

The webinar helped practitioners explore the gaps and challenges they face in many different communities and contexts. These gaps and challenges span a variety of disciplines (such as transportation, land use planning, and economics) and goods movement stakeholders (such as owners, manufacturers, shippers, and service providers).

A total of 221 participants attended Virtual Meeting #1. Webinar attendees came from a variety of backgrounds in both public and private organizations across the Nation and represented both urban and rural areas.

Expert Working Session - August 8, 2017

FHWA also hosted an expert working session at USDOT headquarters in Washington, DC. Attendees at the expert working session included freight demand modeling practitioners from state DOTs, MPOs, consultants, and academia. While the Annual Meeting outreach and Virtual Meeting #1 were meant to engage a broad group of potential stakeholders, the expert working session focused on mining the collective expertise of more than 10 freight researchers and planning practitioners. The goal of this session was to introduce the draft topic matrices and refine and add detail as provided through participant leadership, expertise, and engagement. The session attendees were asked to:

Consider how to close industry gaps reflected in the initial project literature review

Assess practice-readiness

Suggest case studies

Identify missing topics

Build momentum for next steps

This conversation was supported through a pre-session briefing package that included summaries of the draft topic matrices, as well as a compendium of high-level resources that provided important framing context.

Virtual Meeting #2 - December 6, 2017

The second virtual meeting provided experts from the August working session with an opportunity to review and comment on the draft final technical report and its findings. The key recommendations from this meeting were threefold:

1. Emphasizing the dual nature of the report—identifying both practice-ready QRFM content and actions to close knowledge gaps.
2. Suggesting formatting and readability enhancements to the topic matrices.
3. Proposing a new conclusion that connects this report to the QRFM update.

Attendees of this meeting believed this report provided a very good summary of the practices and key issues that freight and transportation practitioners were struggling with. The attendees also identified key needs for next steps for advancement by FHWA and other transportation planning and research agencies.