Overview
provides guidance to transportation agencies at the state, regional, metropolitan, and local levels on how best to collaborate with private-sector freight stakeholders in planning and developing future highway capacity. As both the C15 project and the accompanying C20 project (improving freight demand models and data) indicate, transportation agencies and private-sector freight stakeholders begin with very different perspectives. On the one hand, transportation agencies are often trying to plan, design, develop, and construct public infrastructure projects that will take a decade or more to put in place and are then expected to meet aggregate freight flow needs for many more decades. On the other hand, many private-sector freight stakeholders begin with the perspective of optimizing particular supply chains. Their interest tends to have a more narrow focus and be short term in nature. Supply chains are optimized over days and weeks rather than decades, and they are re-optimized on a repeated basis. Yet, private-sector freight stakeholders are very important users of the infrastructure that public agencies are planning and developing.
This great difference in perspectives and time horizons can make it difficult for public agencies to effectively collaborate with private-sector freight stakeholders. The separately published C15 freight guide provides examples of good practices in such collaborations. The guide also provides examples of the types of stakeholder involvement that work best with private-sector freight stakeholders. Perhaps most important, this practitioner’s guide provides a clear indication of which portions of the capacity project planning and development process merit obtaining freight stakeholder input. This guidance should be useful to the many transportation agencies that are now conducting freight plans or considering freight as part of corridor plans or project development efforts.
The C15 research report shows the process by which the C15 guide was developed and includes additional information about how the case study information used to construct the guide was collected. The report is intended to serve as a basis for further research beyond the SHRP 2 program that might prove necessary to continue to improve stakeholder involvement and collaborative decision making in freight transportation planning, programming, and project development.