Freight and Land Use Travel Demand Evaluation: Final Report

Section 3
Topic O: Other Topics

Several elements that are appropriate for inclusion into QRFM did not fall neatly into topics A through D. These elements were included below.

Summary of the State of the Practice

The final report for the SHRP2 C20 strategic plan provided a useful 15-page summary of the state of the practice.⁶ Different components of this plan can now be updated for the SHRP2 C20 projects and products, including:

Economic flow models

Land use and economic input-output models

Commodity-based models

Trip-based models

Localized estimation routines

Aggregate/trendline measures

Quick response procedures

Scenario Planning Guidance

Scenario planning is an increasingly important topic given that any transportation forecasting process has a range of uncertain and uncontrollable input variables. Additionally, investment decisions should encompass the widest possible range of likely futures as reflected in a risk-management approach to forecasting. For this particular "thinking beyond the QRFM" topic, one of the foundational documents, NCHRP Report 750, Strategic Issues Facing Transportation Volume 1: Scenario Planning for Freight Transportation Infrastructure Investment, is dedicated to the topic of scenario planning for freight transportation investment.

NCHRP Report 750 Volume 1 outlines the Schwartz Eight-Step Method for Scenario Planning, which describes the following approach:

1. Identify focal issue
2. Identify key local factors
3. Identify driving forces
4. Rank driving forces by importance and uncertainty
5. Select scenario logic
6. Flesh out scenarios
7. Apply the scenarios and uncover implications
8. Identify leading indicators and signposts

This report provides specific examples on freight scenarios that have been used to examine alternative outcomes and their implications in company decisions. The 2010 Future Freight Flow symposium process is described in detail as an example of procedural approaches to scenario planning workshop development.

Megaregional Planning Considerations

Megaregions increasingly reflect economic interdependencies across regional and State boundaries throughout the United States. Transportation remains an integral part of these systems, ensuring efficient flow of people, goods, and services. Effectively managing these systems across jurisdictional boundaries remains a challenge. Specifically, many megaregions struggle with identifying key issues of concern and taking action to implement specific project priorities to enhance or improve transportation conditions. These areas continue to have a strong need to create new models for implementing megaregional transportation solutions that reflect agreed upon project priorities and system performance goals.

The first round of 2016-2017 megaregion workshops helped FHWA and local partners explore technical and institutional opportunities and constraints associated with more holistic engagement in large-scale movement of people and goods.

At the broadest scale, the I-10 Corridor workshop provided an opportunity for State DOT leadership to share a vision to connect several megaregions and establish a concept of operations. Workshop participants also identified the need to develop an action plan for continued planning and operations over a 1,000-mile span. Suggested action strategies ranged from turning data into corridor-wide traveler information to policies and technologies that would further streamline goods movement (e.g., through permitting, weigh-in-motion, truck parking, and enforcement tactics).

A key concern expressed in the Piedmont megaregion workshop was how best to link Atlanta to the Ports of Savannah and Charleston, yet many megaregion definitions don't include those two port cities in the Piedmont megaregion. The concept of "problem sheds" discussed at the Mid-South megaregion workshop may help focus attention on the importance of a more nimble approach to connecting stakeholders depending on the scale and scope of the issue being addressed. Maintaining precise or fixed boundaries are not required to form useful and opportunistic partnerships to address the identified regional issues. The area of these "problem sheds" will vary based upon the issue and the relevant regional partners. Overall, each of the megaregion workshops helped develop or strengthen interagency and interdisciplinary relationships. They also helped set the stage for implementing specific megaregional transportation solutions.

The concept of scenario planning for megaregions was examined by Weidner et al. in a 2013 TRB paper 13-2236, Exercising a Mega-Region Analysis Framework in the Chesapeake Bay Area, which examined a high energy-price scenario for a multi-State, multi-MPO area in the mid-Atlantic region. The scenario demonstrates the value of having a planning application at a geographic scale below the national commodity flow model that can link economic, land use, transport, and fiscal models. This can help MPOs and others within a megaregion better examine the unanticipated effects of their decisionmaking for that megaregion. The applicability of this type of model to the QRFM will depend on how potential users of the manual interact with megaregions. This type of model may be of greatest value to transportation agency coalitions such as the I-95 Corridor Coalition.

An outcome of this research was an identified need for practitioners to better understand strategic, institutional, and other linkages between their own agencies, partner agencies, and private sector entities within the goods movement community. The concept of megaregional coordination is similar (although not limited to goods movement or economic development). This involves finding common ground and synergies among new partners for whom collaboration is mutually beneficial.

Value of Reliability

Reliability is a topic area of recognized importance and value to the freight industry for both operations and planning. In the past, the lack of consistent data limited the ability of many practitioners to assemble meaningful metrics associated with transportation system reliability. Subsequent work by Xia Jin et al. at Florida International University identified the value of reliability at roughly 50 percent greater than travel time.⁷ This effort builds upon prior meta-analyses by the same team in a 2016 TRB paper 16-2051, Comprehensive Review and Meta-analysis of Stated-Preference Studies for Valuation of Travel Time Reliability in Freight Transport. Reliability has also been a major focus of the MAP-21 National Freight Performance Measure through the Truck Travel Time Reliability Index.

Visualization Techniques

Understanding and communicating the significance of freight data is critical to planning for future transportation capacity, operation, preservation, safety and security, energy, and economic investment needs. The advent of new data sources and more robust analytic tools does not change the importance of turning data into information, and transforming that information into wisdom to inform decisions. In fact, the explosion of data increases the importance of separating "the signal from the noise," both in terms of performing data analysis and summarizing actionable intelligence. Using visualization techniques to tell a compelling story is often a hallmark of new data and analytic applications, but should be recognized as being independent from those applications.

Transportation agencies can enhance their freight transportation planning and decisionmaking by using visualization tools, which provide a powerful means of communicating complex concepts and data. Visualization tools can also be used to provide a powerful means of communicating freight performance measures. Visualization of data can help freight stakeholders understand geographic information such as truck touring routes; temporal information such as time of day delivery patterns or seasonal variability; and physical information such as the effect of alternative curb space management approaches on goods delivery.

In addition, visualization techniques can be used to develop more robust forecasting models while communicating concepts and analyses to decisionmakers. Visualization can help explain a variety of freight-related variables that may be inputs to or outcomes from an analytic technique, providing a "common language" to promote a greater understanding and more productive dialogue among modelers, planners, researchers, the private sector, decisionmakers, and other stakeholders.

In addition to the SHRP2 C20 resources described elsewhere throughout this report, the TRB Committee on Visualization (ABJ95) provides a useful clearinghouse for visualization technique considerations.