Conference Proceedings 26 - Transportation Research Board

PANEL DISCUSSION: PUBLIC-SECTOR FREIGHT PERFORMANCE MEASURES 145gether, use an analytical approach and use the staffknowledge. If you work with shippers and carriers,some of it will be the same, but some of it will bedifferent. That is the advantage, and you will seesome different perspectives.We asked them several questions:• What are your critical issues?• What changes would you like to see in ourfreight transportation system?• By what measure would you know that we hadmade some progress?• How would you know that we achieved changesthat met some of your needs?Just to summarize, some of the areas of emphasisare obvious: time predictability was a key area, particularlythe competitiveness of our metropolitanarea of Minneapolis–St. Paul. Is our congestion asbad as Los Angeles, Atlanta, and other cities? Howcompetitive are we? We may have to live with congestion,but how does it compare with other areas?The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) index ishelpful there.The group has an economics perspective on safetyin all areas and is very concerned about investmentplanning. Where are freight terminals being located?Why are transportation planning and land use planningnot integrated? There is a concern that ourterminals and access points are being pushed fartherand farther away from centers of economicactivity.Two general categories of measures came out ofthese sessions. The first had to do with overall policymeasures. Again, it came back to competitive traveltime: How competitive is our metropolitan area intransportation? What is our time of travel to globalmarkets? That is something that we do not have dataon right now, and I do not know if it is on the horizonfor the Federal Highway Administration(FHWA), but that was a big concern.By the way, FHWA has put together a nice report,Measuring Improvements in the Movement on Highwaysand Intermodal Freight. Through a staff effort,FHWA came up with some recommended performancemeasures that it is going to be developing.That is a nice resource that you can use. However,some are useful at the local level, perhaps, but manyfocus at the national level.I cannot go through all the recommendations indetail; I will mention a couple of items here. Transportationinvestment as a percentage of our grossstate product was discussed. The shippers and carrierslooked at that percentage as to whether we areinvesting enough to meet the needs of our system. Itprovided some interesting data showing that our investmentin transportation by public and privatesectors combined is actually going down because oftremendous improvements in productivity and efficiency.It is a curious measure in the sense that weare not sure whether it should go up or down. It ismore of an indicator that is interesting and importantfor people to follow.Several measures that came out of our sessionswere in line with what FHWA is recommending. Weare working with the University of Minnesota’s LogisticsTask Force now to develop a shipper panel. Itis going to start with focus groups and eventuallyinvolve a survey, which we hope will become annual,of 1,600 shippers around Minnesota to evaluate andtrack the quality of service in the private sector andpotentially from the public infrastructure. That panelis just under development.Measures that we can use for investment in projectdesign decisions include• Interregional travel time,• Predictable metro travel time,• Bottlenecks and impediments,• Cost-benefit ratio, and• Safety economics.Nancy Melvin from our Metro Division developedwhat she calls a ‘‘freight scorecard’’ that our MetroDivision is using to evaluate a particular corridorproject, which has several factors.What came out of the Freight Advisory Committeeincluded measures for interregional travel time. Withour Interregional Corridors Program, we have to settargets for a project, and this was not simply becauseof freight considerations, but it coincides with theirinterests. We have set targets for high priority, mediumpriority, and regional corridors around ourstate and average speed targets for those corridors.Another area that repeatedly came up was bottlenecksand impediments. Again, FHWA is looking atthis area. We established some categories, and we aredeveloping a system for tracking impediments tofreight movements such as lane drops, lane weaves,substandard bridges, and low overpasses. It is a practicalkind of measure that you could use in doingproject analysis to identify the number and types ofimpediments to freight.We do cost-benefit analyses on our major constructionprojects. The committee wanted to know whatthe cost-benefit ratio for freight is. We have a crudemeasure that is one of the components of our costbenefitanalysis, already as a freight component, butit could use a lot more development.