UAHuntsville receives $486,500 grant to research transportation issues

(From release) The University of Alabama in Huntsville has been awarded a $486,500 grant by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration for transportation research.
UAHuntsville received the grant as part of the university’s continuing research into logistics, freight analysis and transportation issues for the state of Alabama.
“Growth in freight transportation will continue to strain the already congested roadways within the United States, and this could very well result in slower economic development in the nation’s long-term future,” said Caron St. John, dean of the College of Business Administration. “Research at UAHuntsville has positioned the university to become a national leader in the analysis of freight data and the development of tools to model freight transportation, providing a value to transportation planners and state departments of transportation that does not currently exist.”
The grant provides the opportunity for the university to continue research into the relationships among transportation, infrastructure and economic growth. Some of the projects that will be investigated under this grant include: multiple use rail integration, analyzing freight flows within a metropolitan planning organization, and developing alternate data to supplement the freight analysis framework in rail and water transportation.
Greg Harris, director of the Office for Freight, Logistics & Transportation in UAHuntsville’s Center for Management and Economic Research (CMER) is principal investigator on the grant. CMER is a research unit within the College of Business Administration.
Multiple use rail: A number of cities have short-line railroads that have limited freight transportation demand. This limited demand of freight movement could give rise to the possibility of passenger traffic along the same line. UAHuntsville will work with the Huntsville-Madison County Railroad Authority to investigate combined use for the short-line rail in Alabama.  “We will be looking at communities that have worked to successfully combine freight and passenger movement on the same rail lines,” Harris said.
Analyzing freight flows within a metropolitan planning organization: The typical planning method to allocate freight flows in a sub-county zone based on employment. While this may seem logical, according to Harris, it might not be the optimal alternative.  For instance, he said one issue that often arises through the use of this factor is that locations of high retail employment, such as a shopping mall, dominate the employment landscape of the community and thus, become the major origin/destination for freight movements. “While this might be likely for finished goods movements, these locations with high retail employment are not origins/destinations of unfinished goods or raw material. For planning, it is important to be able to distinguish between the sources of freight by the type of employment at the MPO level.”
Developing alternate data to supplement the freight analysis framework in rail and water transportation: It is difficult to incorporate freight information into transportation models and plans because freight data is proprietary and the release of that data is considered to be detrimental to a company’s competitive position. In the United State, many national freight databases aggregate information to individual states or major communities. Researchers at UAHuntsville have been working with the Freight Analysis Framework Version 22 Databsae (FAF2), developed and distributed by the Federal Highway Administration. The use of national freight data at the local level is challenging due to the high level of aggregation. It is often necessary to supplement the data using other publicly available data sources. “This project will develop the processes, procedures and methodologies for integrating data to use in place of missing FAF2 data in the rail and water modes,” said Dr. Harris.