Event summary: Transportation Synergies—A Cross-Sector Workshop on Moving People and Goods

A multitude of partners must work together to make transportation run smoothly for all, said Andy Mielke, senior president–business development at SRF Consulting. From road and bridge construction and maintenance to public policy and planning to research, all components play a vital role in strengthening transportation. “The efficient movement of people and goods is paramount to what we do as an industry,” he said. “This is really a total team event.”

Robin Hutcheson’s career path gives her insights into the many aspects of moving people and goods. As former public works director for the City of Minneapolis, former deputy assistant secretary for safety policy and administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, former CTS senior fellow, and recently named chair of the Metropolitan Council, Hutcheson sees great potential for partnering on areas of mutual benefit, such as safety. “It’s my goal today to bring these worlds closer together for increased collaboration.”

Designed for cars, pedestrians, and bikers, residential streets in today’s world see increasing numbers of delivery trucks, which creates safety concerns, said Nichole Morris, CTS scholar, associate professor, and director of the Human Factors Safety Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. “There’s a big opportunity here to reenvision how we design our roadways and infrastructure,” she said. Taking the human experience into account while designing freight and rail systems also supports a reduction in serious crashes. “The consequences of poor human factors design are so much larger in freight and in our rail system.”

As a director of the Office of Traffic Safety at the Department of Public Safety and a former state trooper, Mike Hanson knows firsthand the significant personal and economic impacts of fatal and serious injury crashes. Technology can help in both analyzing crash data now and predicting risky events in the future. While technology can make a difference, safety improvements rely on collaboration. “We have to make sure we have a safe and efficient system, and the only way we can do that is by working together,” said Hanson.

Tomorrow’s transportation system may look very different from today’s. Changes are under way that offer the potential to shape transportation in the future—such as the move from diesel to electric. “We are in a time of great transition,” said Andrew Andrusko, freight and railroad planning director at MnDOT. “As we think about that, there are opportunities for us to think of cross modes and purposes,” he said, including working together to achieve common goals through land use, truck parking, and right-of-way.

Kathleen Mayell, interim director of transportation planning and programming for the City of Minneapolis, understands the many demands on urban curbsides. They serve as places for pedestrians and bicyclists to cross, freight to unload, and cars to stop, as well as locations for utilities and other uses. She has worked on a curbside management policy for the city that helps define how it treats curb space. “It comes down to feet and inches of how we design our public spaces toward the bigger goals of climate, safety, equity, and prosperity,” said Mayell.

The most dominant form of transportation today is the truck, but the growth of last-mile delivery has sparked new options, such as light electric commercial vehicles. Lighter, safer, and greener than traditional trucks and vans, these vehicles help reduce the carbon footprint, said CTS Executive Committee member Marc Liu, co-founder and chief revenue officer of Civilized Cycles, which manufactures cargo e-bikes. The blend of a bike with cargo capacity creates a functional hybrid by using a traditional mode for moving people to move loads of goods. “What’s driven us as a company has been the observation of a great mismatch between how we move goods and how we move people.”

Transportation’s rich history includes many innovations—the evolution from horses to cars and now to fully autonomous vehicles. With the rapid development of technology comes a need not only to determine how to best use it, but also to consider and leverage the crossover spaces, such as data sharing, new business models, and impacts on communities, said Tammy Meehan Russell, president and chief catalyst of The PLUM Catalyst, a strategic planning and social innovation consulting firm. “When you talk about innovation, it’s happening now at a very rapid pace,” she said. “We need to figure out how to partner and deploy.”

Safety remains a foundational focus of both the freight and people movement enterprises. Workshop participants emphasized that improving safety requires balancing efficiency with human well-being, recognizing the economic and physical costs of crashes, and using data and technology to anticipate and prevent incidents. They stressed the importance of collaboration between the public and private sectors with the aim of mitigating crashes that result from driver fatigue, preventing crashes in work zones, and improving safety at hotspots where incidents or conflicts between modes may occur, such as at-grade rail crossings.

Key takeaways

• Better warning systems for work and construction zones to protect drivers and operators will offer safety benefits.
• An important connection exists between safety and economic development; the goal should be maximizing delivery of goods without sacrificing safety.
• Driver fatigue and drowsiness contribute to nearly 10 percent of all fatal crashes on roadways, and that percentage increases to 15 percent of freight-related crashes.
• Companies and operators face the pressures of a push and pull between efficiency, speed, and safety in freight delivery.
• To ensure acceptance, it helps to properly incentivize the use of advanced safety technologies and systems, such as speed limiters.
• New technologies for driver use must not also distract drivers.
• Working to make delivery a predictable process at the curb and along the street improves safety for all.

Designing for both people and freight involves integrating flexibility, safety, and efficiency into shared infrastructure. Approaches to right-of-way and curb management need to safely accommodate all modes, including freight, transit, and active transportation. Participants identified challenges that include right-of-way constraints in limited physical space and changing land-use needs and impacts that result from new delivery models and greater demands on land use.

Key takeaways

• Because of their design, large freight vehicles struggle with tight turning and on smaller streets; to minimize challenges, consider designing facilities in key areas and/or focusing on key freight corridors, as well as changing freight vehicle size or areas of permitted access.
• It’s important to address the safety and access issues present when delivery trucks use space designated for walking and biking.
• A key part of the design and access challenge, a curbside management policy can be one of the main conflict points for safety, reflecting the tension and pressure that drivers feel.
• Truck parking requires land-use and right-of-way choices critical to the safety and viability of a system. These decisions should consider future space needs and innovations that could increase space availability and provide real-time information to drivers and companies.

Minnesota lacks consistent spaces for testing and practicing new strategies in freight and mobility. Similarly, the state lacks a programming or decision-making space that crosses jurisdictional boundaries or sectors that can enable innovation or problem-solve around conflict points. Minnesota can benefit from investment in adaptable infrastructure that allows for pilot projects, such as micro-distribution hubs or temporary truck parking, as well as a focus on outcomes rather than modes to create systems that can evolve with new technologies and community needs.

Key takeaways

• Greater development of failsafe infrastructure that facilitates safety and adaptation is needed as technology and practices change.
• Identification of incentives or disincentives could help encourage the embrace of new practices.
• Explore expanding transportation modes beyond their main function—for example, using public transit vehicles to also carry cargo on certain routes.

Data emerged as critical to all themes. Participants indicated that data collection must be more dynamic, integrated, and shared responsibly among public and private partners in ways that can influence decision-making. They recommended clear data standards, ownership protocols, and privacy protections to support predictive analytics and cross-sector collaboration.

Key takeaways

• While data-driven actions help with everything from planning roadway design based on use to coordinating delivery timing to finding truck parking availability, data from both public and private actors needs to be aggregated and shared in an anonymized way that data providers can trust.
• Data standards are both vital and necessary and for data sharing. Curbside space management is one area modelling this. There also may be other areas for development and deployment of data standards.
• Development and implementation of predictive analytics tools can help identify solutions to inform freight operators and companies of issues, such as work-zone concerns, dangerous operations, and telematics.
• Determining ways to anonymize and secure proprietary data will help streamline online solutions to reduce loading and unloading wait times and support more efficient truck parking.
• Data can support further coordination of modal systems and intermodal exchange points in hopes of increasing efficiency. 

The promise and challenges of deploying emerging technologies, such as autonomous vehicles and delivery drones, will impact all modes and environments. Participants noted the importance of balancing regulation with innovation, securing freight technology, and ensuring interoperability between old and new systems. Technology must enhance, not replace, the human experience of transportation and be grounded in real-world outcomes.

Key takeaways

• Concerns about significant freight fraud, such as hacking of electronic logging devices, reinforce the importance of greater protection for freight technology.
• New technology may not work in older vehicles, resulting in a potential incompatibility between newer and older vehicles.
• Technology development requires the right environment for testing and use cases for development, as well as a process that promotes critical trust and awareness without overpromising the technology’s capability or overregulating technology.
• Technology also offers outsized potential to improve safety, including advanced driver assistance system improvements, telematics-based controls and feedback, and more.

Effective collaboration requires bridging divides between freight and passenger systems; public and private sectors; and local, state, and federal governments. Participants recommended that policies and deliberative platforms facilitate cross-jurisdictional operations, shared goals, and outcome-based planning. They also supported involving the right voices at the table, including those who understand freight operations and those affected by them.

Key takeaways

• Groups and professionals responsible for moving people or moving freight don’t spend much time together, which hinders comprehensive planning. Efforts to bring together those groups—including across government agencies and levels—will lead to a better understanding and improvement of both people and freight transportation planning.
• Collaborative planning and goal-setting can help navigate funding silos that too often separate modes, agency partners, and jurisdictions.
• Local coordination can help insulate efforts from changing federal priorities or funding decisions by defining clear goals and commitments and by helping reduce regulatory burdens and delays.
• While currently no single regional or state body exists to help identify and resolve conflict areas (e.g., an infrastructure planning or conflict audit/review body), identifying existing or new bodies offers the potential to improve coordination. Current coordinating groups—such as the Minnesota Freight Advisory Committee, the Active Transportation Advisory Committee, and the Advisory Council on Traffic Safety—could collaborate more on joint policy and action.
• For freight, policies must facilitate crossing state lines and international boundaries. 

Workshop participants agreed that planning, building, and maintaining an effective transportation system is of the utmost importance to sustaining a thriving economy in our region and state. Both freight- and people-moving systems are critical to this economic strength, but both also must be supported with the limited resources available. One key challenge involves defining ways to identify and balance the needs of both systems, while enabling continued economic success. 

Key takeaways

• Transportation and intermodal movement of goods is critical to retaining and recruiting companies to Minnesota.
• Minnesota’s geography and existing transportation infrastructure and potential augmentations make it a competitive area for shipping and supply chains.
• The encouragement of economic growth cannot come at the expense of safety for operators or other network users.