Texas Freight Fluidity Tool

Date and Time: Thursday: 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: NAS 120

 

Nicole Katsikides, Texas A&M Transportation Institute

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

This work involves visualization of freight fluidity in Texas including understanding the freight user experience for trip performance, how commodity trips are impacted by freight bottlenecks, the impact on business supply chains by transportation performance, resiliency impacts on freight fluidity, and multimodal trip performance (performance of two modes for a freight trip). This work is important because it can help TxDOT understand the freight user experience in a more holistic way. This can then help TxDOT target investments or operational strategies that can make the transportation most efficient, safe, and resilient.

Freight Fluidity is measuring trip performance to determine how efficiently goods are moving in a region. It involves answering questions like: What are the goods? How do they get from Point A to Point B? What's the route? There are several ways to assess freight fluidity such as through travel time analysis, bottlenecks, and understanding travel times by different types of day. The TTI team has lead freight fluidity analytics from the initial freight fluidity concept development for Transport Canada to current applications in the United States, especially for FHWA, Texas, and Maryland.

This research takes freight fluidity forward by not only understanding performance for routes from the freight user perspective but also going beyond highway data to look at multimodal links at ports and airports to show the full trip goods make. It also creates a relationship between transportation and economic development and paints the picture of the business side impacts of transportation performance through a set of supply chain measures. Resiliency is a key part of this work by looking at how well freight trips recover from man made or weather impacts. Finally, the TTI team conflated Transearch data to Texas' highway network, putting congestion data, anything on the Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS), and Transearch commodity detail together for a robust understanding of how commodities are impacted by transportation performance.

This work further develops the analytics for visualization in a web-based format. A beta version of this tool is located at: https://purple-desert-0597f9810.1.azurestaticapps.net/ A full build out will be available in summer 2022.

This tool is a first-of-its-kind approach to connecting the business user view of the Texas transportation network to overall understanding of system performance. It helps engage stakeholders and support freight planning, project development, and operational plans and programs. It is also the first foray into showing multimodal trips using multimodal data in a visual, interactive way.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Nicole Katsikides is a Research Scientist and project manager for TTI. She has 20 years of transportation, policy and economic development and planning experience with significant accomplishments in freight policy, planning, and operations. Her areas of research include freight mobility and supply chain analytics, data for decision-making, public policy analysis, railroad and aviation planning, policy and operations, land use and economic development. Prior to TTI, she served as Deputy Director for the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) State Highway Office of Planning and Preliminary Engineering responsible for data collection, analysis and strategic planning divisions. She was the Freight Performance Program Manager for FHWA’s Office of Freight Management and Operations, and prior to that, she served as MDOT’s Director of Freight and Multimodalism responsible for freight planning, policy and oversight of the state’s short line railroad. She also has many years in community planning, economic development, logistics, and policy analysis

PRESENTATION FILE