Rail Freight Solutions to Roadway Congestion: Issues Research

For a national transit research program, we were responsible for discovering and documenting issues involved in various different ideas that would leverage public sector investment in rail freight programs with a view towards solving highway congestion issues.  As part of these projects, we essentially served as rail freight economics subject matter experts, and provided research and technical support in the following areas:

1. case studies of current or proposed projects that have a public-sector rail freight investment component, which issues they have run into, and how those issues were solved;
2. state-of-practice review for data sources in freight forecasting, and economic forecasting methodologies;
3. innovative methods used by freight traffic forecasting practitioners to estimate the impacts of these schemes;
4. methods for evaluating the benefits of railfreight investment, particularly in terms of community and environmental impacts;
5. issues in shortline railroads, bulk transfer operations, transportation technology, and land-use trends.

Related Publications/Presentations:

• NCHRP 8-42 Rail Freight Solutions to Roadway Congestion
• NCHRP 8-43 Forecasting Statewide Freight Toolkit
• NCHRP 8-36 Task 43 Return on Investment on Freight Rail Capacity Improvement

Note: Alex Lu performed this work as an employee of another firm.