Office of Operations Freight Management and Operations
Table of Contents

MULTI-STATE INSTITUTIONS FOR IMPLEMENTING IMPROVED FREIGHT MOVEMENT IN THE U.S.

CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

In developing new institutions to better support improved freight corridor facilities, operations and services, the fundamental principle to follow is the well-worn "form follows function." That is, the designer of an improved institution will likely be more successful if the needed improvements can be clearly identified and agreed to—at least in general—before the improvements are developed.

This paper suggests the following key elements of corridor level thinking:

  • A freight corridors orientation is multimodal and multi-state, but must guard against giving too little attention to competing passenger needs—especially on rail systems.
  • A high-speed rail orientation is passenger-only, but must guard against too little attention to competing needs of freight rail, as well as to competing technologies for high-speed ground transportation.
  • Information technologies and enterprise architectures required to integrate and help solve many modal and intermodal challenges are becoming available increasingly but are not being deployed as widely and quickly as necessary to help meet pressing operational and environmental needs at the multi-state scale.
  • Existing federal transportation planning requirements rely primarily on state DOT and MPO plans to integrate modes and to reconcile the freight-only vs. passenger-only orientations. In the future, the RPOs, the Office of Intermodalism, and the Council of modal administrators may also play essential roles.
  • Transportation corridor coalitions are evolving toward an all-modes orientation that has the potential to bridge the freight-only and passenger-only orientations. But they do not have a clear role yet that is defined in federal law or practice.

The eight institutional "models" or options described in this paper are all "empty vessels." They do not automatically come equipped with a full range of responsibilities, authorities, and capabilities—or even with a standard set of beginner’s tools. The designers charged with improving multi-state corridor institutions must fill the most available vessel to the best of their ability with as many of the capabilities and as much of the needed stakeholder representativeness as they can under the circumstances within which they are working. Each corridor organization needs to be tailored to its own time and situation. The pending House reauthorization bill would set some guidelines for structuring the membership of freight corridor coalitions and beginning to establish their roes more clearly.

However, this design process is essentially a political process, not primarily a technical one. The degree of success in achieving what is needed depends upon what the political marketplace will bear in each specific corridor at the time it is being attempted. Some adjustments may be made later, but often the initial cut at it will be difficult to alter.

The empty vessels can be filled in a wide variety of ways, and combinations of institutions frequently are needed to piece together the needed capabilities without raising the specter of too much power being amassed in one place.

This paper is intended to provide a sense of the commonly available institutional options that may offer practical possibilities for the institutional architects to draw upon. The red-yellow-green table (on page 28) provides them with a handy reference to use frequently as the design process proceeds. Their job is likely to be long and arduous. There are no easy answers—not even any "right" answers, other than what can be made to work.

previous | next
Office of Operations