Investing in Mobility: Freight Transport in the Hudson Region

Proposes a framework for assessing alternative investments in freight rail, highway, and transit capacity that would increase the ability to improve mobility and air quality in the New York metropolitan area

It's about time: Investing in transportation to keep Texas economically competitive - Appendices

APPENDIX A : PAVEMENT QUALITY (Zhanmin Zhang, Michael R. Murphy, Robert Harrison), 7 pages -- APPENDIX B : BRIDGE QUALITY (Jose Weissmann, Angela J. Weissmann), 6 pages -- APPENDIX C : URBAN TRAFFIC CONGESTION (Tim Lomax, David Schrank), 32 pages -- APPENDIX D: RURAL CORRIDORS (Tim Lomax, David Schrank), 6 pages -- APPENDIX E: ADDITIONAL REVENUE SOURCE OPTIONS FOR PAVEMENT AND BRIDGE MAINTENANCE (Mike Murphy, Seokho Chi, Randy Machemehl, Khali Persad, Robert Harrison, Zhanmin Zhang), 81 pages -- APPENDIX F: FUNDING TRANSPORTATION IMPROVEMENTS (David Ellis, Brianne Glover, Nick Norboge, Wally Crittenden), 19 pages -- APPENDIX G: ESTIMATING VEHICLE OPERATING COSTS AND PAVEMENT DETERIORATION (by Robert Harrison), 4 page

CURRENT AND DEVELOPING ISSUES IN INTERREGIONAL COMPETITION AND AGRICULTURAL TRANSPORTATION

Agricultural and Food Policy,

TRUCKING FUEL TAXES AND ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY IN PRIMARY GRAIN TRANSPORTATION

A tax on fuel is one of the primary mechanisms for reducing truck transport externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions, road damage, congestion, and accidents. The economic efficiency properties of a fuel tax are examined for the farm-to-elevator grain trucking sector--a sector for which the road damage externality is often severe. Because trucking volumes cumulate more rapidly near the delivery points, marginal external cost is generally not proportional to distance. Further, noncompetitive FOB pricing by grain buyers implies that road tax discounts to offset price markups should be independent of location. In both cases, a fuel tax is not capable of efficiently addressing the externality. With discriminatory pricing by buyers, "cross-hauling" emerges and the optimal fuel tax is unexpectedly high because the buyer passes on only a portion of the tax to the farmer. In a simple example with discriminatory pricing, the optimal fuel tax reduces excess average trucking distance by less that 50%.Agricultural and Food Policy,

U.S./CANADA GRAIN HANDLING AND TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

The United States and Canada have developed very different grain handling and transportation systems (GHTSs) over the last several decades to compete for global and domestic markets in Canada and the United States under CUSTA. Because the grain industries in both countries face long distance hauls, GHTSs are critically important to their operations and to producer returns. There has been considerable pressure for change in Canada's grain handling and transportation sector. Some industry trends, such as the rationalization of elevators in the Prairies and investments in new high through-put facilities, are being driven by market and competitive forces. Changes in grain handling, reciprocal access to marketing functions, and elimination of rate caps may have a significant impact on cross-border grain flows. Canadian Transport announced reforms to improve the efficiency of its GHTS. Possible multi-level effects, created by the reform package, would affect the grain flow from Canada to the United States. The most significant reforms include 'port buying' by the Canadian Wheat Board, which would remove the Board's control over internal logistics and shipping, and replacement of the current maximum railway rate scale with a cap on annual railway revenues for grain shipments.Canadian Wheat Board (CWB), Grain Trade, Grain Transportation and Handling System (GHTS), Rail Rate, Railcar Allocation, Rationalization, Rate Cap, Reciprocal Access, Regulation, Reform Package., Crop Production/Industries,

A multi-agent platform for auction-based allocation of loads in transportation logistics

This paper describes an agent-based platform for the allocation of loads in distributed transportation logistics, developed as a collaboration between CWI, Dutch National Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam and Vos Logistics Organizing, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The platform follows a real business scenario proposed by Vos, and it involves a set of agents bidding for transportation loads to be distributed from a central depot in the Netherlands to different locations across Germany. The platform supports both human agents (i.e. transportation planners), who can bid through specialized planning and bidding interfaces, as well as automated, software agents. We exemplify how the proposed platform can be used to test both the bidding behaviour of human logistics planners, as well as the performance of automated auction bidding strategies, developed for such settings. The paper first introduces the business problem setting and then describes the architecture and main characteristics of our auction platform. We conclude with a preliminary discussion of our experience from a human bidding experiment, involving Vos planners competing for orders both against each other and against some (simple) automated strategies

Cargo Logistics Airlift Systems Study (CLASS). Volume 2: Case study approach and results

Models of transportation mode decision making were developed. The user's view of the present and future air cargo systems is discussed. Issues summarized include: (1) organization of the distribution function; (2) mode choice decision making; (3) air freight system; and (4) the future of air freight