nymtc regional freight plan - New York Metropolitan Transportation ...

A Freight Plan for the NYMTC Region
6.0 Regional Transportation
System Impacts
The macro-level regional impacts of the three alternative packages were analyzed by calculating:
1) the change in truck regional vehicle miles (VMT) and hours (VHT) of travel;
and 2) the benefits to the regional highway system and its users. Each analysis is based on
the output of the NYMTC Best Practices model. Specific projects that did not have readily
modeled benefits are not included in this part of the analysis. Changes at this high level of
analysis cannot be directly attributable to specific projects within a given package, but
only to the package as a whole.
• 6.1 Changes in Regional VMT and VHT
VMT and VHT are important measurements of systemwide performance because they are
surrogates for changes in regional congestion and macro-scale air quality. Tables 6.1 and
6.2 show the change in commodity (freight) truck VMT and VHT produced by each of the
three alternative packages as compared to the 2025 baseline. Note that in the tables,
reductions in VMT and VHT are expressed as positive values (since that is the goal of the
study) and increases in VMT and VHT are expressed as negative values. The change is
presented both in terms of absolute change and percentage change. Results are presented
for the broader 28-county region. This analysis includes the 10-county NYMTC region,
two counties in Connecticut, 14 counties in northern New Jersey (roughly equivalent to
the NJTPA region), and two Hudson Valley counties (Orange and Dutchess) which are not
in the NYMTC region. Results are presented for each county individually and for six
subregional groupings of counties: New York City, Long Island, Hudson Valley,
Connecticut, New Jersey, and the NYMTC region.
The Operational, Policy, and Low-Cost package produces very small VMT reductions of
0.1 percent and VHT reductions of 0.4 percent. The reductions in VMT are spread relatively
evenly across the 28-county region. The reductions in VHT are concentrated most
heavily in New York City, (0.9 percent) which is where most of the projects are physically
located and where existing congestion is the worst.
The Rail System package produces reductions in VMT and VHT of 4.6 percent each. This
is consistent with the findings of the Cross Harbor DEIS, upon which this alternative is
based. These changes are distributed relatively equally among the subregions with a few
exceptions. Richmond County (Staten Island) experiences the largest reductions
(14.7 percent of VMT and 16.4 percent of VHT) due to the diversion to rail of freight truck
Cambridge Systematics, Inc. 6-1