A vast step forward and accolades are deserved to many for pushing us along toward a thoughtful and comprehensive strategy for freight planning and investment.  It’s been a long time and somehow this has been very challenging.  That said, let me underline that like most “freight” studies and strategies, it seems that there is still a wall between economic strategy, competitiveness assessing and freight planning.

It seems awfully backward to devise a plan for freight that does emanate from an economic development/investment planning plan.  The historic firewall between transport planning and the wider business strategy for our country, our states and our regions is still quite strong, and that is very unfortunate.   Yes, more and more “Freight Plans” in the US are using words to indicate that they understand that there is a connection between long-term transport infrastructure planning and economic growth, but frankly there are few if any that have advanced past fairly high-level rhetoric.

Unfortunately, this cannot happen when the money comes from the transport side of the house and this is heavily influenced by the lack of sophistication from the economic development side.

Most transport planning is really based on past commodity flow data and very broad econometric modelling, so I acknowledge the realities of the baseline data.  Unfortunately, when we talk about economic development in the US – we mean to say that we are doing more than following trends, instead we intend to mean that policy, incentives, marketing, and infrastructure development can actually move the needle – not just track its past pattern.

It’s absolutely shameful if we cannot assemble a more thoughtful, joined-up and productive business plan that integrates our business and transportation
strategies.

Read about the draft plan on the USDoT website:  https://www.transportation.gov/freight/NFSP