Incorporating Freight Issues into Baltimore’s Regional Transportation Planning Agenda: Progress to Date and Lessons Learned

Strategically located midway along the East Coast, the Baltimore region has one of the nation’s most sophisticated intermodal freight and goods movement systems, consisting of an extensive highway system, two Class I and several smaller railroads, an international airport, and a major deepwater seaport. Further, thousands of firms in the Baltimore region are engaged in the handling and transporting of freight. A heightened awareness of the region’s freight movement needs and issues, combined with the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act’s emphasis on intermodal transportation planning, resulted in the Baltimore metropolitan planning organization’s (MPO’s) designation of a public-private Freight Movement Task Force to work with MPO staff to provide guidance and advice on freight-related transportation issues and needs. As the Baltimore MPO pursued its aggressive freight movement planning agenda, it was recognized that addressing freight needs and issues would require MPO members and staff to assume roles and pursue transportation planning activities in markedly different ways than they had been pursued traditionally. An examination of the MPO’s efforts to incorporate freight movement issues into the regional transportation planning agenda is provided, with a discussion of the MPO’s progress to date, how various challenges were addressed and overcome, freight planning products developed, and lessons learned from this undertaking that may be instructive to other transportation planning agencies as they venture into the freight planning arena.