I would like to welcome everybody to the first webcast this year for the IFTWG. I am going to go through and Paul, can you put that back up there? I am going to call out the attendees that I see here. If I miss your name, if you let us know, that way we'll avoid the roll call. I see Dan Stock, Gunther Hawk, Ken Troop, Ashanti -- Now joining. Mark Jenson. Who did I miss there? Randy. Are you logged in to the WebEx? We're in now. Randy, this is Kate; I am not logged in. Randy, there you are, Sam. Kate, I am not logged in either. Who is this? Carol Mitchell. Okay. You're with SAIC, right? That's correct. Anyone else we miss? This is Steve Long, both... Are you logged in, Steve. When I come up it doesn't list the event. You have to go to list events, and I believe -- there is a session number. It is if you're ready to write it down, I will give you the session number. 801707011. In my opinion, else having trouble logging in? Anyone else having trouble logging in? Okay. From the leadership side we're a little light today. I don't know if you know this or not, but Rich is retiring or has retired from the OT and Tony first has taken his position. Tony is on vacation today in Seattle, and our industry chair, Ben Shelton is out on a user conference in Austin. Actually, I think they're doing an afternoon golf outing right now. Mike is supposed to be here, but he is running late. We're out at Tyson's. I will go ahead and get kicked off. What we're going to do on the agenda today is run through the status of the current projects that are underway with IFTWG, and then we're going to review the Oak Brook IFTWG meeting coming up on May the first and second, in Oak Brook, Illinois, and Paul is also going to present a follow-up presentation from the Anaheim meeting on the disaster recovery round table, the group that has been assembled, that volunteered to to work on the project, and some of the ideas that's come out of that group. Why don't I get started. Like I said earlier, if you do have any questions, please type them in and we'll get to them at the end. If you would like to save them ask over the phone, please mute your phone if you can. The cross town improvement project is one of the projects that actually came out of the IFTWG group, almost a year-and-a-half ago it actually came from the San Antonio meeting we had, and as a project that may be a very strong public and private partnership working together. The project was originated with the specific intent to eliminate cross town movements in the intermodal move from moving containers from one real terminal to another real terminal specifically focused at the time that we brought it up on Chicago. Since then we have been able to put together a very strong package that includes we'll go over today. The problem statement we've been able to put together, how it affects the community and business, the potential solution we're looking at and really how this project is going from basically a rail to rail cross town project and it has moved into other modes into the ocean carrier to rail, truck rail, and also into the air, truck air mode as being potential. We were really challenged when we started looking at this project of how it could be grown in to be a solution for more than just a few specific areas, how it could be basically a strong domestic solution that can be covered on many different modes. We've also since the project we had initially had partnership between DOT, and the joint program office, and TSA. Where it really started the ground work here and working through IFTWG. The partnership has grown quite a bit, and we'll explore that as we move through it. Let's go to the next slide. Again, the real purpose behind this was to address the interchange of traffic in the metropolitan areas in the truck to rail, and also the rail to truck. Here is some of the reasons if you're not familiar with the reason why you would have a cross town movement between rail terminals, specifically when the rail is -- when the container cannot have a good, clean, steel we'll interchange F there is an issue of time in the container needs to move between two ports or two terminals, in a very expedient manner in fact in order to make connections between trains. When containers have to have cargo added to them, when the service is critical as I have already said with a cut-off, and if there is a specific asset shortage of cars. Those are the real primary reasons why we would want to do some type of cross-town interchange. The rail roads basically link up in the midwest in Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, New Orleans, we see specifically where these interchanges takes place right through the midwest. These areas specifically as you can see, Chicago was the main focus as we started this is looking at 20,000 entermodal moves a day, and nearly one third of those moves are cross-town moves. Our initial goal was to how we could eliminate at least ten percent of the tail moves. As again, let's go into the next slide. We saw the potential in the rail to rail and as we start moving further out we start seeing potential in the port area of the same type of scenario. How could we efficiently move containers from the port and the rail terminals and the next delivery point and utilize the asset coming back to the port, we either bring back chassis or empty containers or get the most out of the movement and eliminate the bobtails. Again, as we started looking further into it, we started looking at the same scenario as in the airport interchanges. This same scenario could really be focused to improve the efficiency with rail interchanges. This was our initial problem statement. The existence of cross-town rubber tire interchange creates conditions that are adversely impact the efficiency of the transportation network. The safety of the motoring public, and the security and quality of life of citizens in the communities through which they takes place. Specifically, let's look at each one of the bullet points here. Interchange volumes expected to increase proportionally in the overall freight volume cycles. Those links work on there, Jennifer? Unfortunately no, I don't think so. I didn't realize those were links at the time. Okay. We can get to them. Okay. We'll have to manually proceed here. The volume increases basically we're looking at the growth over the next 15 to 20 years, and you can see almost the intermodal growth is expected to double. The congestion issues associated with the US, and this is one of the top goals of the DOT focused on right now is congestion mitigation and how we can come up with specific projects that address taking vehicles off the road or redistributing the congestion as certain times of the day. This is to demonstrate where we have been talking about the cross town having major issues. As far as the efficiency of moves again -- we talked about the ten percent reduction in the amount of bobtails moved in a specific area as being our first goal. Estimates from some of the industry participants so far have gone as high as 40 to 50 percent and removing the bobtails from the highways. I think the next area is the air quality issues. We specifically looked at the areas we're addressing here in Chicago, as the areas that are not meeting air quality specifications today that are basically non-attainment. There was another factor that entered in as we started doing further research was the safety issue that a bobtail is basically has a significantly higher rate. You can see there over single or doubles in accidents. This goes back to a fairly old study, but we believe the same exists in respect to a bobtail moving today in the same environment. Of course the security concerns in moving between terminals, loads are really not tracked efficiently between terminals. They are tracked within a confined railroad environment, but moving it from say, UP to the BN, sometimes those movements are not tracked very effectively. The lack of integration between all of the participants, the partners, communication sometimes are basically phone-in facts, and it is a high degree of human intervention in order to make this interchange efficient. Again, we've talked about congestion. We talked about safety, air quality, all of these are huge impacts on the community which makes this project a very strong public and private project that move into achieving benefits from both parties. In order to consider the solution, we had to go beyond just saying we're going to eliminate bobtails. We had to look at if we're going to do this project, how are we going to in respect to the intellectual property after the project's completed? What is the business model for this? Is this a project that can be taken out by once it is completed and moved into a viable business for someone to basically make a profit off of, and what other modes? You can see we already started talking about the port and the air as being additional modes above the rail. We also have -- we also have the issue of whose going to operate this once its completed and what state and local environment involvement will we have with the participants of this project? The solution involves really four specific areas, and we're looking at how we can put together a intermodal exchange database that will allow us to monitor chassis utilization, be able to give the community wireless updates and address the realtime traffic monitor. The four components that we're looking at is an intermodal exchange database which is an open architecture that will provide the collaborative dispatch management for the model giving it all parties involved in it the full updates of locations of containers when they're available to be moved. The wireless updating is basically an open architecture allowing the technology to be interfaced using either cell phones, PDAs or any wireless mode that would be available to the dredge operator. The chassis utilization we talked about moving loads, we also have the capability of focusing on how we can better position chassis in order to get the full efficiency out of the bobtail movement. Involvement of realtime traffic monitoring, knowing where the traffic at, the congestion, the distribution, over the specific route and alternatives such as closed routes it be identified and specific travel time identified to basically eliminate congestion. I am going to skip through a few of these slides. Why do we want to choose Kansas City? Why specifically did we want to focus on a smaller area, less than Chicago? It is because Kansas City is the second largest rail hub in the U.S. We felt like Kansas City would be a viable project that would basically give us the same benefits that Chicago would be able to prove at a very lower scope and less expensive, and becomes very visible to the public with the benefit. This is a quick layout of Kansas City, how the partners in respect to moving the containers teen the terminals that have been identified. Right now we've actually increased the partners. Initially we started with the private partners, UPB and SL and the trucking community in Greer, intermodal terminal services, mid-cities, we also grown it to include the Missouri DOT, the Kansas City Smart Court, and the Mid-American Regional Council. All of these have been included in the solution and how we can optimized the flow of the containers and also focus on the congestion and the safety. This is a quick overview of the exactly what each participant part would be in it. Specifically let's start with the TSA on the left-hand side. We already have the approved funding for TSA. This project actually is underway. The contract has been given to SAIC. They're in the process of doing their kick-off meeting. We'll be doing the kick-off meeting on may the second in Chicago. This specifically is focused on how the security and how the flows within this environment can be improved. We have been looking and talking with the state of Missouri. There is another congestion ITS project that's been focused on freight, that has been way for some time. There is ability to merge this product in with it in order to make it again focusing on the public improvement side. We have the carriers involved again, B N, UP, NS, KCS have all focus and had participated in putting together the requirements. We've been working with several other third parties including smart port which is really a public private relationship, and of course our office and U.S. DOT Federal Highway and the joint program office, and we're in the process of requesting funds that is kind of not on hold but at a kind of a waiting period right now until we get a few things in respect to organization worked out here at COT. We have statements of support from state of Missouri, railroad companies, trucking companies and Iand. What are the next steps? Basically we've already done most of the time work in identifying the concept of operations from a very high level. We've done our work in deciding where we would like to go for funding. Really our next step is to do the user needs assessment. This will take us into really getting a good, clean concept of operations, and hopefully we will be starting that within the next few months. Again, this project is focused specifically on interchanges of intermodal equipment, and how we can improve the efficiency, safety and environment, the public environment, so you can see as it's all come together, one of the really key pieces of this was the really true public/private relationship. I think once we can pull everybody together and get it on track we'll have a very successful project. These were some business case overviews. I am not going to go through them in any great detail.