Trucks, Traffic, and Timely Transport: A Regional Freight Logistics Profile

This report justifies and designs a comprehensive tool for describing intraurban trucking, which is the bulk of truck movement in an urban area but typically is unexamined in regional transportation planning.

We begin by reviewing literature describing the characteristics and policy issues bearing on freight. We extract from that literature a structure for describing those policy issues, and then go on to design a series of map displays and quantitative measures that provide a linkage between the characteristics of local delivery trucking and the public policy issues that stem from and influence these characteristics. The Regional Freight Logistics Profile (RFLP) emerges as an easy-to-understand yet comprehensive description of urban trucking that stimulates a more constructive dialog among government transportation leaders, shippers, truckers, and the general public. The design balances coverage of the variety of public and business concerns relative to freight against the costs and other practicalities of collecting data. To overcome reluctance on the part of private companies to reveal performance information, we have designed an institutional approach to gathering truck fleet performance data that does not compromise confidential performance data from competing carriers and shippers.

We recommend that metropolitan planning organizations, as well as state and federal freight mobility offices with responsibility for technical assistance to MPOs, review the RFLP design for potential adaptation and adoption.