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

A Freight Plan for the NYMTC Region
• 2.3 Specific Conditions Identified through the Plan Effort
As a result of the deficiencies identified in Section 2.2, the NYMTC region suffers from
poor highway performance, inadequate access to freight handling facilities, inadequate
infrastructure, underused modes, transportation network constraints, and insufficient
system redundancy and security. These specific conditions are described in more detail in
the following subsections.
2.3.1 Poor Highway Performance
Chronic roadway congestion exists throughout much of the day on the region’s major
arterials and highways. This congestion imposes travel time and cost impacts on shippers,
receivers, and consumers and reduces the reliability of shipping. Congestion also
inconveniences the broader traveling public and degrades regional air quality and community
health. This congestion is particularly critical given the region’s heavy reliance on
trucking (80 percent of all freight movements), which further exacerbates regional roadway
congestion and makes freight movement particularly vulnerable to the severe congestion
experienced by all vehicles. 2 Figure 2.8 shows the density of the national highway
network (in terms of tonnage transported) in the northeastern United States and in the
NYMTC region. Figure 2.9 shows the forecast for dramatically worsening highway congestion
in the region during the life of this Plan. Figures 2.10 and 2.11 show how highway
congestion is expected to worsen nationally during the same time period. Total vehicular
traffic on the region’s roadways is forecast to increase by 17 percent, but truck traffic is
forecast to increase by 21 percent for all trucks and by 51 percent for “freight trucks.” 3 It
does not appear likely that the region’s freight transportation infrastructure as presently
constituted and operated can accommodate this growth.
2
Reebie Associates, TRANSEARCH database, 1998.
3
Freight trucks, also called “commodity trucks,” are the portion of the total trucking fleet that carry
major point-to-point goods shipments within and between regional freight centers. They are
generally large tractor-trailer combinations. In contrast to the broader truck fleet (including
service vans and local delivery trucks) the behavior of freight trucks is highly regular, and easier
to influence through public policy and investment decisions.
Cambridge Systematics, Inc. 2-9