Prioritization of Freight Investment Projects
Freight investment project prioritization, which is used to assist in planning and programming
decisions, differs widely in importance across states. One of the reasons for the
difference in importance is the fact that freight projects are costly, and state departments
of transportation (DOTs) face limited resources to implement them.
The National Cooperative Highway Research Program's
NCHRP Synthesis 542: Prioritization of Freight Investment Projects identifies the state of the practice of freight project prioritization and common
steps across all state DOTs in the nation.
State DOTs have a variety of motivations for freight
project prioritization, including the FAST Act. For DOTs to receive additional federal funding, a
priority list of freight projects must be produced. However, because the FAST Act regulations
do not include a specific methodology to help DOTs rank their freight projects, many different
processes are used by the state DOTs for ranking.
This report synthesizes the available literature on the subject so that DOTs creating a prioritization process can identify successful
practices in the current state of the practice.
This Summary Last Modified On: 9/26/2019