By Kyle Shelton, CTS Director
Going into 2025, we at CTS suspected that a wide gap exists between the indispensability of freight transportation to our everyday lives and—for most of us—our relative lack of knowledge about it.
Taking a step back, it’s really nothing short of miraculous that a single item produced thousands of miles away arrives at its destination following a journey through ports, transfer stations, intermodal terminals, cargo bays, and loading docks via trains, trucks, ships, bicycles, planes, and/or feet en route to its final stop.
We aimed to help close this perceived gap by laser focusing on freight through our annual theme, “Unpacking Freight: From Producers to Front Doors.”
We kicked off the theme with a compelling keynote address at our annual research conference in November 2024 as Anne Goodchild of the University of Washington’s Urban Freight Lab presented “Innovation in Urban Freight.” A fitting bookend to this beginning of our freight journey was a keynote by Alison Conway of The City College of New York at our 2025 conference last month: “E-Commerce Evolution and Its Implications for Transportation Planning and Infrastructure Design.”
Between those coastal perspectives focused on the movement of freight to and within urban centers, we drew on the expertise of our well-established partners—including the Minnesota Freight Advisory Committee, Executive Committee members, the Transportation Policy and Economic Competitiveness Program team, and our Councils—to support a spectrum of engagement. Topics spanned general interest, such as our Freight 101 series of webinars focused on the Minnesota State Freight Plan; the movement of goods via rail, road, air, river, and lake; and the journey of a coffee bean from plant to cup. We also dove deeper on topics such as freight and commercial vehicle safety in roundabouts, advanced aviation freight, the use of e-bikes for transporting cargo, and regional food supply chains in southern Minnesota.
We were also grateful to expand our partnerships to cover new territory and topics. Throughout the year, Senior Fellow Robin Hutcheson provided valuable advice, insights, and ideas informed by her unique experience as a transportation leader at the federal and municipal levels. As the year progressed, the contrasts between the largely private freight world (focused on moving goods) and the largely public infrastructure world (focused on moving people) stood out. Robin helped us program and facilitate a workshop that brought together both new and familiar voices from each of these areas to find common ground for action and awareness.
Another eye-opening topic we helped foreground is that of cargo theft and fraud, to which hundreds of millions of dollars are lost each year. During a workshop and public roundtable, experts addressed this issue through frank and open conversation with industry leaders, policymakers, law enforcement, and others to bring to light some of the delicate—and troubling—issues behind this growing threat to our economy. One takeaway (of many): the University of Minnesota may have another role to play here as the trusted host of data to inform shippers and reverse this trend.
As CTS wraps up “Unpacking Freight" as our 2025 theme, we certainly won’t leave this topic “on the dock.” Keep your eyes open for our coverage of outcomes from the annual Freight and Logistics Symposium (held just last week)—which we have been proud to convene for 28 years. The lessons we’ve learned exploring freight and logistics and the relationships we’ve developed will continue to inform our work year after year into the future.
