United States - European Commission Urban Freight Twinning Initiative: Compendium of Project Summaries, Volume II
Overview of 2018-2019 International Urban Freight Roundtables
| Research | United States |
New Approaches to Creating Compatibility Between Freight Movements and Land Use
To plan for an environmentally sustainable and livable future, the dynamics between freight and land use must be examined more closely. This project aims to develop guidebooks and decision-making tools for local and regional leaders to help them better understand the interaction between freight and land use on urban areas as a whole. Though freight traffic has grown at a greater rate than passenger vehicle traffic in recent years, traditional research on land use strategies continues to largely ignore freight in lieu of passenger vehicles. However, freight's relationship to land use also has a great impact on our cities; factors such as urban population growth, gentrification, and new supply chain management strategies are also important considerations; and pollution from diesel engines has emerged as a top health concern. Meanwhile, new approaches have been developed in order to create compatibility among freight and other type of land uses, including freight villages, freight hubs, and inland ports. This project will highlight these and other strategies as well as develop methods that will allow cities to quantify and evaluate the impact of land use practice and policies to support efficient movements of all modes of freight. This research project is funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program of the Transportation Research Board. The research team is led by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; research partners include SRF Consulting Group, University at Albany-State University of New York, American Transportation Research Institute, and Emprata, LLC.
Project Type
Research.
Period of Performance
April 2018 - April 2019.
Project Sites
The project's end products are intended to be used by decision-makers at the city, regional, and state levels.
Contact
José Holguín-Veras
William H. Hart Professor
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, New York, USA
JHV@rpi.edu
(518) 276-2098
Topics Addressed
- Air quality/environment.
- Energy consumption.
- Land use interaction.
- Livability/quality of life.
- Logistics/distribution.
- Mobility/congestion.
- Modeling.
Expected Outcomes
The project will result in:
- A guide to quantify and evaluate the impact of land use practices and policies to support efficient movement of all modes of freight.
- Decision-support tools to assist local, regional, and state land use and transportation decision-makers to support efficient movement of freight.
Stakeholder Involvement
Practitioners including land-use planners, local and state officials, and researchers—among others—will be engaged during the research process. The project will take into account the perspectives of a broad variety of affected stakeholders, including land use planners, local and state elected officials, locally appointed officials (planning commissions and board of zoning appeals), remonstrators, constituents, courts, developers, and economic development officials.
