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Metropolitan Chicago's Freight Cluster: A Drill-Down Report on Infrastructure, Innovation, and Workforce (2012)

This report (PDF) analyzes freight, one of the Chicago region's strongest specializations, to identify major issues affecting this cluster's competitive advantage in the 21^st Century. The report identifies key infrastructure, workforce, and innovation challenges and opportunities influencing future cluster growth and concludes with a set of regional strategies to better align resources and investments with the needs of the freight cluster. A companion technical document (PDF) provides in-depth analysis as well as corresponding citations to support the conclusions of the summary report.

Congestion Management Process: Freight System Planning Recommendations Project (2010)

Final Report:

Note: This report was developed by Cambridge Systematics to assist CMAP in developing freight system recommendations for GO TO 2040. GO TO 2040 used the recommendations developed in this project as the basis for the GO TO 2040 Freight Chapter. The Freight Chapter represents the adopted freight planning document, part of the broader GO TO 2040 Comprehensive Regional Plan, while the report below has no official endorsement.

However, the report below is extremely valuable in its broad overview of freight issues, with multi-modal stakeholder outreach, analysis, and evaluation of recommendations. Further, while the GO TO 2040 freight recommendations will be the focus of freight system improvements for years to come, the recommendations in the report that were not carried into the plan may merit future consideration or lower-priority implementation by our partner agencies, as appropriate. CMAP is continuing to develop and improve analytical tools that may help future evaluations of adopted and future potential freight system improvements, as recommended in GO TO 2040.

Final Report. The document is posted bel0w in sections. A complete report is also posted below.

Executive Summary and Sections 1-3 (pdf, 1.7 MB)
- Executive Summary
- 1. Introduction
- 2. The Chicago Region Freight Challenge
- 3. Regional Freight Planning Framework

Section 4: Stakeholder Outreach Documentation (pdf, 0.9 MB)

Section 5: Data Collection, Synthesis, and Analysis (pdf, 6.4 MB)

Sections 6-8 (pdf, 0.9 MB)
- 6. Performance Measures
- 7. Freight Operations
- 8. Range of Policy Recommendations

Section 9: Infrastructure Recommendations (pdf, 1.3 MB)

Sections 10-11 (pdf, 3.8 MB)
- 10. Evaluation of Recommendations
- 11. Conclusions and Recommended Next Steps

Complete Report (pdf, 14.4 MB)

Appendices (pdf, 6.1 MB)

Working Papers

The following papers describing aspects of the Freight System Planning Recommendations Project were presented at the Transport Chicago Conference on June 4, 2010:

A GIS-Driven Process for Identifying Rail Infrastructure Improvements (pdf, 1.3 MB)

Development and Application of a Commodity Carrying Truck Flow Tool (pdf, 1.4 MB)

Using Performance Measures for Project Prioritization (pdf, 0.4 MB)

Interzonal Truck Flow Estimates, 2007 and 2040

To support the Freight Systems Planning Recommendations Project in 2009 and 2010, CMAP and Cambridge Systematics prepared the following interzone truck flow estimates: