nymtc regional freight plan - New York Metropolitan Transportation ...

A Freight Plan for the NYMTC Region
• 6.2 System User and Societal Benefits
The transportation benefits of the various packages were calculated using procedures from
the Surface Transportation Efficiency Analysis Model (STEAM). STEAM quantifies the
annual current dollar value of changes (in the year 2025) in the following four categories of
user benefits applied to all users (all vehicles) traveling on the regional roadway system:
• In-vehicle travel time;
• Fuel cost;
• Other vehicle operating costs; and
• Accidents (cost to users).
STEAM quantifies three types of societal benefits:
• Vehicle Emissions (CO, HC, NO x , PM 10 );
• Noise; and
• Accidents (cost to society).
For each package, a benefit comparison is made to the 2025 Baseline condition. The findings
are shown in Table 6.6, disaggregated by the two basic benefit categories (user and
society) and by the NYMTC region and the remainder of the highway model coverage
area. As shown, the Policy package produces $48 million in annual benefits; the Rail
package produces $75 million in benefits; and the Highway package produces $166 million
in benefits. This analysis takes the VMT/VHT discussion to its logical conclusion by
analyzing the differences in impacts on all highway users and vehicles. While the VMT
and VHT numbers are too large to highlight meaningful distinctions among the alternatives,
STEAM magnifies these distinctions. This again highlights the fact that the benefits of
the Rail package are concentrated on freight traffic while the benefits of the Highway package
impact all traffic to a greater extent.
The benefits of all of the alternative packages are largely user benefits rather than societal
benefits, although this is somewhat less so for the Policy package. The benefits of the
Policy package are split relatively evenly between the NYMTC region and the rest of the
larger region (primarily northern New Jersey). The benefits of the Highway package
accrue largely to the NYMTC region, by a factor of more than two to one, primarily because
that is where all of the projects are located. The benefits of the Rail package accrue more
to the rest of the region (by a factor of almost four to one) than to the NYMTC region. This
is the case for two reasons: a) most of the commodity truck trips diverted to rail by the
Cross Harbor project have to pass through New Jersey to reach the NYMTC region; and
b) benefits to the NYMTC region are diluted somewhat by the local final delivery truck
trips generated in the vicinity of the intermodal yard in Maspeth, Queens.
Cambridge Systematics, Inc. 6-9