Current State of Estimation of Multimodal Freight Project Impacts

As available data have increased and as the national transportation funding bills have moved toward objective evaluation, departments of transportation (DOTs) throughout the United States have begun to develop tools to attempt to measure the effects of different projects. Increasingly, DOTs recognize that the freight transportation system is necessarily multimodal. However, no DOTs have clearly stated objective tools with which to evaluate multimodal freight project comparisons.

This paper fills that gap by summarizing the existing academic literature on the state of the science for the estimation of freight project impacts and by reviewing methods currently used by selected DOTs nationwide. These methods are analyzed to identify common themes to determine potential avenues for multimodal project evaluation.