Director's Message: Delivering the Goods

I’m thrilled to have just completed my fourth year as the director of CTS. One aspect of working at the Center that I value most is the incredible durability and depth of our relationships with our partners. Our collective work at CTS wouldn’t be possible without the commitment, attention, and support of so many stakeholders we work with every day. They bring us questions, help resource our push for solutions, and implement new innovations and practices in their projects. Whether with internal leaders at the University of Minnesota or external colleagues from federal agencies, MnDOT, counties, or townships, our team strives to learn from and build productively on the work of each partner. It’s been such a pleasure to not only build my own relationships with individuals and institutions, but also to broaden CTS’s connections.

Over this past year, I’ve been thinking about how we can simultaneously strengthen these ties and deliver more impact to both new and long-term partners. Much of that thinking has informed our “Unpacking Freight” theme for 2025. The topics of multimodal freight and supply chains, especially the daily minutiae of logistics, are too often underrecognized as a part of our transportation network. With CTS’s strong logistical partnership with the Minnesota Freight Advisory Committee and other organizations across the sector, it makes perfect sense for us to highlight and focus on these topics. One way we’ve done this is by hosting a series of Freight 101 webinars featuring experts from across the field. It’s critical for us all to understand the work behind the systems that support our livelihoods, and this series lays a foundation for folks to continue learning how goods are moved between Minnesota and the rest of the world by land, sea, and air. “Unpacking Freight” has also allowed us to draw on the expertise of multiple members of our Executive Committee, for which we are particularly thankful.

Alongside our thematic focus, we’ve continued to work on issues that our neighbors face in their everyday lives. It’s visible in our support of small communities across Minnesota on a range of infrastructure challenges through the University of Minnesota’s Empowering Small Minnesota Communities program. And it's reflected in our work with both large urban areas and smaller rural communities in addressing transportation insecurity through our Mobility, Access, and Transportation Insecurity program. CTS’s Accessibility Observatory has continued work alongside stakeholders in public health and emergency medicine to share information about access challenges to emergency and routine health care across much of our state. The technical assistance programs we run have expanded greatly and are delivering huge benefits to the folks working hard to maintain our roads, airports, trails, and public realm.

Delving deeply into freight and supply chain issues has also allowed us to explore new connections. This fall, we’ll continue our thematic focus with events looking closely at supply chain security and a workshop exploring the nexus between moving people and moving goods. Each of these conversations will bring new-to-CTS stakeholders such as major retailers to the table as we grow our efforts to be a convenor on major shared challenges. As always, we work to find new ties across the work of the University. This includes both domestic and international partners who are visiting us, as well as our travels to partners with shared economic and infrastructure challenges. This year we’ve worked with researchers to connect with North Carolina Agricultural & Tech University, hosted a University of Minnesota alumnus from a leading Thai university, visited supply chain peers in the Netherlands, and joined an economic development delegation in Germany. We hope that those discussions and countless others will continue to bear fruit and lead to innovative and impactful partnerships.

You’ll see evidence of these efforts throughout this impacts report. You’ll also see the touch of every member of our CTS team, who make it all possible. Thanks to each of you for your partnership, which I look forward to continuing to build on in the future. 

— Kyle Shelton, CTS Director