American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials

Special Committee on Research and Innovation

FY2023 NCHRP PROBLEM STATEMENT TEMPLATE

Problem Number: 2023-B-37

Problem Title

Methodologies and Measurements of Urban Freight Resiliency Under Emerging Next Normal

Background Information and Need For Research

Resiliency refers to the rate of action in implementing countermeasures in response to disruptive events, which could be due to natural events or man-made, and of which we could have some forecast of or none. To this effect, in urban freight transportation, it often relates to developing strategies to mitigate its short-term and long-term impacts on the economy and population of a region. This requires transportation planners and policymakers to identify and understand the leading indicators of freight movement to develop strategies to mitigate its impact. Resilience, however, means nothing without being able to identify problems in real time and acting on them quickly. Quick and responsive assessments of supply chain are becoming necessary. While short-term fixes are a necessity, the “New Normal” will be established in the long term and is the biggest challenge. Therefore, a comprehensive research approach is needed to address urban freight resiliency over the long term in presence of high degree of uncertainty. This study will contribute to past research on freight disruptions by focusing on new methodologies and measurements of urban freight resiliency.

Literature Search Summary

Recent studies on improving freight resiliency during disasters have revealed how thinking beyond resilience creates opportunities for smarter supply chain and logistics decisions in the new normal. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 43% of freight-related businesses experiencing disasters never reopen. Further, approximately 29% of businesses that are able to reopen after a disaster go out of business within two years. As a result, business resumption is a major issue in resilience management. Historically, the focus has been on examining the immediate concerns rather than the complete picture of all the factors that keep a business in operation. The above statistics further reinforces the need to look beyond the immediate impacts, importantly it calls for understanding the differential impacts across businesses, commodities, transportation mode. These aspects could be valuable inputs to the development of resilience strategies, which might not necessarily be confined to planners and policy makers but could as well include other stakeholders.

In this context, urban and regional economists, planners and engineers work with state and federal transportation agencies on periodic disruptions to the urban freight systems from a range of inevitable natural and human-caused events (Renne, et al. 2020). However, the vulnerabilities of economic and technological systems are not yet completely understood. This is because, freight disruptions have far reaching consequences and affects a diverse array of stakeholders. It is often difficult to define and quantify the impact from such adverse events across them both in the short term (e.g.: lack of access to commodities) as well as long term (e.g.: business closures). Ninety-two percent of the states (Flannery, Pena, and Manns, 2018) reported having no specific resilience metrics in place for freight transportation. This being said, select urban transportation entities have working definitions of resilience, and few have resilience metrics as well. A variety of possible metrics have been suggested and tested (Parkany & Ogunye, 2016, NAP 2016; NCHRP 20-125; NASTRB, 2021) aligned along the four components of resilience outlined by robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity.

Research Objective

There are several areas that require additional research. First is to undertake a survey across agencies to understand the extent of resilience measures and preparedness for unforeseen disruptions. This is of utmost importance given the growing rate of disruptions resulting from natural and man-made disasters. The second objective is to evaluate the state of the practice, in terms of the strategies, tools and intelligent transportation system (ITS) technologies to assess and respond to immediate needs versus optimization plans to mitigate its impact over the long term. Across various other studies and contexts, there is a growing recognition that lack of resilience can have grave socioeconomic consequences, especially in the context of disruption of interconnected infrastructure. The current state of practice in transportation planning lends itself to the conclusion that advances in resilience research need to be integrated into planning norms to help account for uncertain events and emerging risks. To this effect, this statement outlines the following research tasks to be undertaken for advancing the development of methodologies and measurements of urban freight resilience.

Research Tasks:

1. Define Urban Freight Resiliency

 Similarities and differences – large, medium, small metropolitan areas

 Resilience assessment framework and evaluation methodologies

2. Identify & Examine Challenges to Resiliency

 Interdependencies among Stakeholders

• Best practices of freight resiliency measures at state highway and transport facilities.

• Best ITS technologies for automation, connectivity, and freight resiliency.

 Economic Implications of Lack of Resiliency (Do Nothing Scenarios)

3. Develop an integrated framework linking freight network disruptions and resiliency measures to quantify economic impacts.

 Short term resiliency: Responding to incidents (such as disruptions to State DOT infrastructure and(or) function)

 Long term resiliency: Secondary effects of disruptions resulting in adverse economic effects (such as loss of business, employment etc.) for an urban area.

4. Model Implementation and Evaluation

 Performance Assessment Metrics (by mode, commodity, geography)

 Data Collection – Existing data, surveys, focus group interviews

 Case Studies of immediate impact and long-term impacts from disruptions and effectiveness of resilience measures.

5. Policy Recommendations

Urgency and Potential Benefits

This study will integrate resilience models for freight transportation networks with economic models. Past studies have shown that travel delay resulting from disruptions in transportation networks result in non-trivial economic impacts. The economic outcome of disruptions cannot be predicted by a simple incremental change of velocity-related parameters (VMT, VHT). The research will demonstrate that economic models must also be paired with structural network models and analysis in order to best reflect the impact of disruptions on economically important freight movements and processes.

Implementation Considerations

The outcome of this research will be a guidebook on “Methodologies and Measurements of Urban Freight Resiliency” to better address future challenges under the new normal. The state DOTs and the Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) would benefit from the research results of best practices for implementation and evaluation of resiliency measures. The economic impacts of “do nothing” scenarios could be used to justify investment in infrastructure and functions within state transportation facilities. This research could bridge the knowledge gap through innovative data analytics and spatial visualization of urban freight disruptions and resiliency measures for improved communication with policymakers.

This research needs statement is supported by:

• AT025 - Standing Committee on Urban Freight Transportation, Bill Eisele (Chair), b-eisele@tti.tamu.edu

• AASHTO Special Committee on Freight, Caroline Kieltyka (AASHTO Liaison), ckieltyka@aashto.org, 202-624-8489

• Carole Delion, Divison Chief & CAV Program Manager, Maryland Department of Transportation. Email: cdelion@mdot.maryland.gov; Phone: (702) 530-7719.

Recommended Research Funding and Research Period

$400,000 for 24-month period.

Problem Statement Author(S): For Each Author, Provide Their Name, Affiliation, Email Address And Phone.

Amlan Mitra, Professor of Business Economics, Purdue University Northwest

Email: mitraa@purdue.edu; Phone: (219) 989-2313.

Vijayaraghavan Sivaraman, Research Data Scientist, Texas A&M Transportation Institute

Email: v-sivaraman@tti.tamu.edu; Phone: (813) 389-8224.

Robert DeDominco, President, CargoFish

Email: robert@packrabbit.net; Phone: (609) 501-2542.

Kelly McGourty, Director of Transportation Planning, Puget Sound Regional Council

Email: kmcgourty@psrc.org; Phone: (206) 971-3601

Sushant Sharma, Research Scientist, Texas A&M Transportation Institute

Email: s-sharma@tamu.edu: Phone: (817) 462-0508.

Potential Panel Members: For each panel member, provide their name, affiliation, email address and phone.

Please contact Caroline Kieltyka at ckieltyka@aashto.org for potential panel member contact information.

Person Submitting The Problem Statement: Name, affiliation, email address and phone.

Casey Wells

Statewide Planning Branch Manager

Texas Department of Transportation

Casey.Wells@txdot.gov

(512) 423-8986

References

• Capgemini Research Institute, (No Date), “The last-mile delivery challenge”, Capgemini Research Institute, https://www.capgemini.com/wp-content/ uploads/2019/01/Report-Digital-%E2%80%93-LastMile-Delivery-Challenge1.pdf, p.20

• Flannery, Aimee, Maria A. Pena, and Jessica Manns, Resilience in Transportation Planning, Engineering, Management, Policy, and Administration: A Synthesis of Highway Practice, Washington, D.C.: Transportation Research Board, NCHRP Synthesis 527, 2018.

• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2020. Building Transportation Supply Chain Resilience After a Pandemic. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

• ———, 2019. Improving Freight System Performance in Metropolitan Areas: A Planning Guide. Freight Transportation Resilience in Response to Supply Chain Disruptions. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

• ———, 2015. Improving Freight System Performance in Metropolitan Areas: A Planning Guide. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

• ______, 2013. Integrating Freight Considerations into the Highway Capacity Planning Process: Practitioner's Guide. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

• ———, 2012. Methodologies to Estimate the Economic Impacts of Disruptions to the Goods Movement System. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

• ______, 2012. Guidebook for Understanding Urban Goods Movement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

• Parkany, Emily, and Olufunmilayo Ogunye, Transportation Corridor Resilience Assessment, Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia, Mid-Atlantic Transportation Sustainability University Transportation Center, August 1, 2016.

• Renne, John, Brian Wolshon, Pamela Murray-Tuite, Anurag Pande (2020). Emergence of resilience as a framework for state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the United States, Transportation Research Part D 82 (2020) 102178

• US Department of Transportation, National Freight Strategic Plan 2020.

• U.S. Department of Homeland Security, National Infrastructure Protection Plan 2013: Partnering for Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience, undated. As of February 28, 2019:

• U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, “FHWA Order 5520: Transportation System Preparedness and Resilience to Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events,” webpage, December 15, 2014. As of August 5, 2019: