By Matthew Kredell
Photo by Steve Lantz
The METRANS Transportation Center brought researchers and practitioners from 18 countries together for the International Urban Freight Conference, a three-day gathering in Long Beach packed with presentations, panels, expert speakers, and a site visit to the Port of Long Beach Middle Harbor to demonstrate new technology designed to improve the movement of goods.
Established in 1998, METRANS is a partnership of USC’s Price School of Public Policy, the Viterbi School of Engineering and California State University, Long Beach. Its mission is to solve transportation problems of large metropolitan regions through interdisciplinary research and education.
Urban freight impacts nearly every aspect of our lives. The food we’re eating, the supplies we use to work, the shopping we do online or at brick-and-mortar locations, the buildings being constructed all around us, and the trash being collected are all part of urban freight.
“You cannot survive living in a metropolitan area if not for urban freight,” said Genevieve Giuliano, USC Price professor who serves as director of METRANS. “There’s absolutely nothing you do in the course of a day that doesn’t need urban freight. Physical products are a part of everyday life, and there’s only one way those products get to you.”
The biennial conference began in 2006 as the National Urban Freight Conference with the goal of shining a national spotlight on this important topic. As the event continually expanded, it has now become the largest international conference on urban freight. This sixth installment, held on Oct. 21-23, drew a total of 250 participants, a 25 percent increase over the previous conference two years ago.
“From the beginning, we wanted this conference to raise the visibility of urban freight as a legitimate area of research beyond logistics and systems engineering,” Giuliano said. “Urban freight also involves planning and public policy, geography and economics. The fact that so many people are now coming to this conference demonstrates how the event represents the leading edge of research.”
“The second objective was to create effective linkages between research and practice,” she added. “We really want our work to be informed by the world and the world to find our work useful.”
Sessions included discussions of supply chain optimization, freight survey data, using technology to unlock capacity at the ports, energy efficiency and sustainability in freight transport, and how researchers and practitioners can better work together for a more rapid conversion of research to practice.
“Cooperation among freight stakeholders is the clear issue that came out of the conference,” said Thomas O’Brien, who directs the Center for International Trade and Transportation at Cal State University Long Beach, and serves as associate director for METRANS. “There’s a lot of work happening in that area, which is why we showcased supply optimization as the opening plenary. A lot of presentations also hinted at how data needs and information gaps can only be resolved by coordination between supply chain partners. Much of the technology-driven solutions people talked about depend not only on money but integrated technology.”
In 2014, the peak holiday shopping season became a nightmare at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach with a number of factors leading to congestion at the docks. Leadership at the ports worked together to improve efficiency in order to strengthen their economic positions, which has led to a much smoother peak season this year.
“We talk a lot in our public management classes at the Price School about collaboration across institutions,” Giuliano said. “This is quite a unique and interesting effort, because it’s rare to have competitors collaborate.”
Greg Winfree, Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation, focused his remarks, shown via video, on the importance of connected vehicle technology, which he sees eventually leading to automation. He also recognized METRANS in his presentation.
“The reality is that our existing approaches and mechanisms for transportation progress are designed to maintain and expand systems when this country needs to make them smarter, more responsive and more integrated,” Winfree said. “The world is becoming more and more data driven. The ability to utilize technology to turn this growing wave of data into actionable information has shifted from novel to necessity.”
He noted that U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx has kicked off an outreach initiative titled Beyond Traffic 2045 to engage the public and critical transportation stakeholders in government and industry to start talking about the future of transportation. Three fundamental innovations already providing significant benefits to freight transportation by making transportation more international include global positioning system services, wireless data communication and intelligent transportation systems fed by real-time data.
“The U.S. is counting on its transportation system to be an enabler of prosperity, and we face the very real prospect of it dragging the nation down in the global economy,” Winfree said. “The overarching challenge we face is finding a way to create greater capacity, to better manage and maintain vital infrastructure, and to move people and goods safely and efficiently, when trying to build our way out of it isn’t just impractical but ineffective. What we can do is use the technological advancements of the 21st century to make transportation smarter as users, managers and policy makers.”