This research will develop freight activity metrics to measure the impacts of COVID-19 on goods movement. The initial focus will be on intermodal freight drayage to and from the ports. Existing standalone data sources do not provide a complete view of freight activity. The effort will involve analyzing multiple distinct but complementary data sources, such as truck axle classification and weights from Weigh-In-Motion (WIM) sites, body classification from the Truck Activity Monitoring System(TAMS) sites, trajectories from truck GPS and traffic volumes and congestion from PeMS with the goal of understanding changes in truck activity such as link volumes, routing patterns and payloads of intermodal freight. The project will initially acquire WIM data from Caltrans from sites near the ports and the SoCal region to assess spatial and seasonal truck activity activity trends. Since standalone WIM data cannot distinguish drayage trucks from other heavy duty truck activity, additional TAMS sites will also be deployed at major corridors on the truck network in coordination with Caltrans. UCI is currently investigating the effects of a planned clean trucks incentive program on the I-710, where drayage truck GPS data is expected to be purchased from GeoStamp as a part of the study to analyze touring patterns of drayage trucks. Further integration of GeoStamp with WIM and TAMS data can provide further insights on CoVid-19 impacts on the efficiency of drayage operations and touring patterns, both in the spatial and temporal domain.

Goods movement is integral to the economy of California. However, California does not exist in a vacuum: its ports and economy compete nationally and internationally for the economic benefits that are brought through trade. Issues of throughput and mobility can create a competitive disadvantage for the state and California could lose business to its neighbors. As such, it is critical to understand how to remove barriers to goods movement transportation and delivery, while making the system safer and lessening the impact on the travelling public and communities. The wide range of academic, agency, and consultant work in this area means that there is a broad literature addressing these questions, but there is no recent comprehensive review that integrates a synthesis of regulatory impacts with potential operational and infrastructure improvements along with a summary of existing methods for assessing these strategies. This project will involve three main tasks. The first task will compile an inventory and evaluation of state and federal environmental, safety, and labor regulations that impact port freight and goods movement in California, with an emphasis on cumulative effects of regulation on the port freight sector’s economic competitiveness and workforce. These findings will provide the necessary context for the second task, which will conduct an evaluation of cost-effective port-related infrastructure investments and operational strategies that have been proposed or implemented by California’s ports and governing agencies to improve the efficiency of freight movement while also reducing environmental and health impacts in California. These potential improvements will be analyzed in the context of an evaluation of global best practices in increasing throughput at marine ports, including both infrastructure- and logistics-based solutions, with recommendations on actions that state, regional, and local agencies can take to increase throughput. Finally, the third task will review how improvements to California’s ports are assessed and planned, with a focus on the modeling and project selection process in California.