Funding source: Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz)

Contract number: 17GOB034

Funding amount: $25,000

Performance period: 06/15/2018 to 03/31/2019

This project continues earlier work aimed at implementing Action 6 of the California Sustainable Freight Action Plan (CSFAP). Action 6 requires the development of performance measures for monitoring the economic competitiveness of the freight sector, as well as the establishment of targets for increased economic competitiveness. The purpose of this project is to complete the performance measures and comparison groups, as well as to identify an appropriate economic competitiveness target. As with the previous stages of this research, the research team collaborated with the Economic Competitiveness Working Group. The Working Group includes representatives of various freight sectors, as well as public agencies. The project has resulted in a comprehensive set of performance measures and a complete set of baseline metrics and comparisons.

As per Executive Order B-32-15 by Governor Brown, the California Sustainable Freight Action Plan (CSFAP) was initiated in July 2016. The Plan provides the vision for California's freight sector to be more efficient, more economically competitive and less polluting. The freight sector is vital for California as the nation's largest contributor for international trade and domestic commerce. It is also clear that the freight sector is responsible for a high portion of the pollution within the state of California. In order to combat climate change, the state of California has already set ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Plan aims at integrating investments, policies and programs within the state of California and offers a unified approach to improve efficiency, transition to zero emission technologies and improve the state's freight sector competitiveness. As part of the freight sector vision for 2030 and beyond, the Executive Order has directed the state agencies to set targets for the three main aspects: improve efficiency, transition to zero emission and increase economic competitiveness. At the time the CSFAP was approved, economic competitiveness targets and metrics had not been selected.

This is the third of three contracts to support implementation of Action 6. Under the first contract (Phase 1) METRANS conducted three meetings with the Economic Competitiveness working group, one being a full day workshop. Its purpose was to create a framework for developing metrics for tracking economic competitiveness over the life of the CSFAP. Outcomes of this work included a working definition of economic competitiveness, a high-level definition of the freight sector, a discussion of potential metrics and agreement on approach for continuing the work and fulfilling the requirements of the CSFAP (Giuliano, 2017).

The second contract refined and finalized working definitions for economic competitiveness and the freight sector (Phase 2). These were used as the basis for generating performance measures. The research team developed conceptual groups for performance measures, evaluated various data sources, and generated a preliminary set of measures. This effort resulted in the identification of critical data gaps, problems of data suppression, and adjustments of specific sub-sectors to be included in the metrics (Giuliano and Hassan, 2018)

This third contract addresses and solves the major data problems, provides a complete baseline for the entire sector, trucking, and ports; and proposes a competitiveness target (Phase 2a). Because this project is a continuation of the previous one, we summarize the work of the second report in order to place our results in context. For additional details, please see Giuliano and Hassan (2018).