Good morning. They'll modify. What did it tell Margaret? Afraid. Friday. My name is Dr. next Associate Director at the University of Delaware. Orders IPA institute for public administration. I'm really pleased to welcome you. On behalf of the adult moderator, Craig working group. That's dell dot Dover can't account. Salts are very complicated and piano and we'll map go for those joining for the first time. This is our second scraped Friday of virtual content in work or annual impersonate afraid summit where we raise awareness of freight planning initiatives, didn't industry trends. Thank you for joining, Jack and let's get started. If we could get to the next slide points. We're going to talk about freight operations today. And we've got three speakers joining us today. One from Dell, Barbara central. Give an update on operations and talk about a seat for treatments. Loaded up the difficulty that it's legal online in the past year. We're also going to talk about provides outward or disturbance regulations. And they hadn't traffic impacts to recopy Japan. Where can they go to the next slide? And let's get started by aught to be a cliff. Take it away. Alright, no problem. Good morning everybody. And I'd just like to start by saying thanks to Troy for inviting me to chat a little bit about the dome Arbor Central Railroad. So if we can go to the next slide here, we'll get started. The, for those of you who aren't aware, the Denmark's central railroad as a freight railroad. We started out at the end of 2016, taken over about a 160 miles of track from Norfolk Southern. It was a pretty interesting operation where we basically had one weekend to get all of morphic Southerners equipment and folks and walks off of the railroad and get Rs in place. There was a real interesting effort in coordination, but it went really smoothly. And over that 48 hour transition period, we were able to successfully get the transition completed and pretty seamlessly begin service for the over 50 customers that we serve out here on the peninsula can go next line. So since we've been out here, we've really been successful in growing the rail freight business on the DOM larva peninsula. There's a lot of reasons for that. And I think the main one is the customer's out here really value and can utilize good, reliable, and dependable rail service. One of carload expresses main goals is to take rail assets that have maybe Not been invested in as much as they should have been over time are maybe starting to see some decline. Take those assets, investing them, build up the traffic base, rehabilitate the lines by installing ties, ballast, new rail. And so not even four years, we've already put 60 thousand railroad ties into the railroad, invested well over $10 million. We were recently awarded a Chrissy grant to help address some of the larger items that need to be fixed and repaired and an upgraded including three movable bridges that we operate, the largest of which is over the C and D canal. So that's going to be a multi-year project that we're hopefully going to get to kick off here in the next few months. You know, one of the things that's vital to any rail freight operation is making sure that we're providing service, that customers receive, rail service one. So by working closely with our customers, are able to really uncover some different unique and creative ways to help integrate rail into their supply chains. And so this is something that we're very proud of and we've even been recognized by Norfolk Southern, both their agricultural group and their medals and construction group for providing some, some unique solutions to some service questions and problems that have turned out to be a benefit for the railroad, for our customers, and really for the entire, you know, Margaret Peninsula. You know, I always like to say we're kind of a kind of an island out here. You know, it's a big flat Sandy pancake for all intents and purposes, and geographically unique and kind of isolated. So by working together, I think it's good for everybody and it helps our, our little economy out here really thrive. So one of the things that carload Express does in order to help provide the economies of scale that rail operators to folks that maybe aren't directly served by the railroad, is set up what are called transits, translated facilities, which is where we'll bring in commodities from across North America and to one centralized location. Break them down out of that large, a 100 tons per rail card form and to trucks. And then those trucks can deliver material to folks that aren't directly served by rail or can't take that type of material VIA rail. And this is where we saw an opportunity with the former BASF facility in C for Delaware to take that idle asset that had been vacant for a number of years and transform it into a sort of vibrant, economically viable entity again. And so that's, that's kind of where we're going to go after I give a very brief sort of update on what we're seeing. An operationally. So Troy, it asked me to kind of talk about what the railroad is seeing. Specifically, in the wake Cobit epidemic. And, you know, honestly, I am really pleased to be able to say that we have not seen any major effects on our traffic. There are a couple of isolated incidences where we've seen some things shift or change. But by enlarge this year has played out very closely to how we were sort of forecasting and expecting it to back in November and December of 2019. Primarily, some of our agricultural products have decreased in volume. Really, that's, that's a, that's a result of the really good harvest that peninsula in the region had last year said there's a lot of corn in agricultural products available out here locally that don't need to be brought into URL. And we had a really strong your construction materials last year, so those declined slightly. But by enlarge, the traffic volumes are customers, they've all held up very well to date. Knock on wood. We'll so we'll see where it goes from here. But I, I feel very cautiously optimistic and confident that we're we're going to be, we're going to be just fine. All of our customers are critical infrastructure, critical parts of the supply chain, whether it's and energy-related propane construction relating a building, roads for stone, things like that. And then obviously our agricultural customers on the, the growing sides of bringing in fertilizers, things like that. And then also are, are, are chicken producing customers who are integral to our, to our business. And they, they have really held up pretty well from, from what I've seen so far from a, from a rail car perspective. So that is basically operationally what we've seen so far. Again, the one downside I could say that, that we'd experienced. This is kind of a funny story wherein one of the materials that chicken producers bring envy or rail to mixing their feed is a material called dry distiller grains, DDGS. These are a byproduct of the ethanol production process. So ethanol is mixed with gasoline and put it in our cars. Well, not many people had been driving recently, or at least it has been a severe reduction in gasoline demand. So there's been a subsequent reduction in the need for ethanol, which has really put an interesting twist on the BT gene market for our customers out here. And they just don't really price into their, their feed anymore. So we've seen almost a complete, a complete reduction of our inbound GDG cars, which that's not a massive part of what we do, but it's still something important and quite a few cards every month. So that's sort of an unanticipated, You know, I guess the consequence of what we're seeing. But anyways, beyond that, we've got a couple of customers that are actually doing better because of it. And one plastic customer up north to they actually make pharmaceutical products and face masks and things like that. So there Doing all right. And one customer way down south is a chemical processor. And we're actually bringing in ethanol for them now. And they are turning into hand sanitizer. So gives and takes. If you have a flexible, creative customer base, they can obviously adapt to any situation that they come across. And hopefully we're there to help facilitate that. So moving under the sea for translators can go to the next slide here, this facility again was a former BASF chemical manufacturing plant. And see for industrial park, it formally broaden rail cars of different chemical products. And I think they made some plastic polymers, different things like that. But it had sat vacant for a number of years. We decided that we were going to go ahead and purchase this facility, about 20 acres as a building, a large containment area where they had tanks. They removed the tanks before they they sold it to us, but it had a lot of infrastructure that we liked. So given the fact that there were almost no locations to do any type of trans loading on the entire DOM Margaret Peninsula and see if secrets rather centrally located. A lot of sense to me. So we went ahead and pulled the trigger and purchase this property back in 202018. And there was really no specific items that I had in mind that I wanted to move through here. I didn't have any any real good leads, but it it was just an opportunity that presented itself and we went ahead and jumped on it. And then luckily, since then, in really working closely with some of our agricultural customers, specifically, we're able to uncover some different opportunities for bringing in materials URL that we're currently being trucked in from beyond the peninsula. It's really through these relationships that I was able to kind of go back up the supply chain and figure out how some of this specifically amino acids, liquid amino acids were moving and, you know, go to those main suppliers, the companies that I felt probably would be the best partners and kind of give them a pitch and say, hey, we've got this facility. Are you interested in partnering with us to bring this material India rail? Now there's benefits, the railroad, obviously there's benefits to our, our customers, the chicken companies in There's real benefits to the suppliers as well. And through that, through the, through that sort of iterative process of figuring out who would be the best company to partner with, companies to partner with and getting their buy-in. We were successful in working in conjunction with the local sea for folks in coming up with a, a really neat terminal and a pretty interesting location now that that had been completely derelict and really was kind of an eyesore. And we've got multiple trucks come in and out every single day taking this Important feed material to our to our customers. In the next slide, you're, there really are two customers that we've partnered with. The first was know this. They make a amino acid called methionine and it's produced down in Texas. So these votes partnered with us and we actually built a road next to one of our tracks. And their truck drivers come in park next to the rail cars and translate the methionine from the rail cars into their trucks. And then from there I've actually heard them that they've taken some of the Athenian they translate here all the way up as far as Canada and some other places. So, you know, rather than trucking it all the way from Texas, the primary targets were the chicken companies here locally. And we've been very successful in many of them now converting or, you know, continuing to take material from know this. But it's actually sort of reach beyond the eastern shore, if you want to call it that. The second opportunity again, is an amino acid lysine. And lysine is, maybe they use a little bit more of that in the chicken feed than the 5'10. And ATM was kinda the company that I came up with that probably would be the best partner with based on their current relationships with our customers out here on the shore. And so, you know, with this with this move, it, it made a lot of sense to me to put together a trans load operation that actually involve tanks. So I designed and we built a two tank system. Each tank holds 30 thousand gallons of lysine. We bring the rail car and then carload express pumps that material off the rail car into the tanks. And there's a nice micro motion batch processing system that we installed so the trucks can pull into those containment Bayes. Tracker gets out, it attaches the pipe from from the manifold to his truck, pushes the number of pounds that he wants into the system as the start button and the pump system that we set up, it's it's all air, compressed air powered diaphragm pumps push the material out of the tanks into his truck and he can go on his way. This facility is why did secured they've got 247365 access to it and now a ADM and notice have large supplies of this vital material for our chicken fried chicken companies here locally in a centralized location, which really reduces the dependency of those folks on long-haul trucks to move this product. And it's it's it's worked out really well. It just goes to show that if you're creative and you come up with some different ideas, you never know what might stick when you throw it up against the wall. And so this is, this is one of the things that we've done on, on the shores since we've been here that I'm pretty proud of it. I think it's been, it's been a rewarding project where we've been able to kind of indent. They invented better mouse trap, so to speak, and go to the next slide. So again, you know, by helping our customers go back up their supply chain and come up with a unique solution. We've helped really the entire community because now there's new jobs in c for that helped support this. We've removed, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of long haul semi trucks off the roads. So now the publicly funded and maintained roads are no longer having to take the wear and tear that those trucks represented on the long haul side. And we've strengthened the value chain and we've improved the diversification and the ability of our local customers and our local economy to, to provide this, this vital material for the chicken manufacturing process. So and I didn't have any specific goal in mind when we purchase this facility, but this is, you know, after about a year, year and a half of work, we've, we really turned it into something that's valuable and useful and hopefully will be here for a long time. So next slide, that's that's all I've got. If you guys have any questions, my contact information's there. We love to talk to you and chat with you about this. And there's obviously a lot of locations out here on the shore where similar types of opportunities could be developed, especially if there's a business case to be had for its and try I guess I'll turn it back to you and thank you. Great. Thank you so much, Cliff. I'm going to try to soldier on and facilitate here and people will step in if I continued issues. But we do have a couple of questions. We've got one comment. Go blue hats that actually that's go hope these, I guess so. Yeah, folkies, hokey. Come on now. But the question is, are chickens themselves transported by VIA rail? Not live chickens. But every once in a while we will get a, a rail car. A frozen chicken wants to move out to the west coast. Now, most of the chicken, I think that moves off the peninsula, as I'm going to say, is fresh. And the amount that is frozen again is probably moving more locally versus far away. Rail really tends to compete well, really long moves, no, you're talking five hundred, ten hundred miles. And so finding the right fit where you've got a huge amount of frozen chicken that wants to move from one place, which here at the origin is fine, but to a destination that's also rail sir in that type of volume. And it can take a little bit longer to move than a truck. You know, it's kinda hard to find that sort of Goldilocks scenario. So we don't move a huge amount of chicken be around now. I'd love to change that though. If anybody has any ideas, let's do it. Another question here from Josh Thomas about the accomplishment of the first unit train in 17 years. And you see this as an isolated event or is there a potential to move more agricultural products by unit train? Yeah. Nowhere. We're continuing to move material via a unit trained. It's, it's been an interesting sort of logistics problem to solve. But our team is up to the task and they've done it. And I think the service we're providing to our customers is appreciated and valued. And it's something that we're obviously continuing to offer. Any customer that we serve that we think has the facilities and the capabilities to unload a unit train in a timely manner. That the class one railroads typically have some pretty stringent requirements around unit train on loading. But with us being a short line, we can be a little more flexible and come up with some unique ways to, to get that amount of material off, offloaded in conjunction with the customers in a way that is still economically feasible and hopefully good for everybody. But certainly we're still doing it and we hope to continue to do and, and grow the a row, the ability to do that because it really helps. Again, on the economies of scale side, you know, you're talking about a unit train that'll have anywhere 80 to a 100 cars in each car, as you know, give or take a 100 tons of material in it. So it's it's a lot of product that you can move in one fell swoop with a unit train of grain. So we're, we're happy to be able to offer that to our customers and continue to do so. Another question about your territory. And they added onto you operate to and from the New York New York freight yard or the porter Wilmington? Unfortunately, no, we don't have direct access to any ports. The DC or at least starts up in Barrow, Delaware, about five miles north of the Sandy canal. But then it runs down the entire sort of western spine of Delaware all the way down through Damar, through solid Barry. Recently, within the last two years, we took on the northern 15 miles of a former railroad, Bay coast railroads and our airline expend extends through COCOMO, Maryland all the way down to Hollywood, Virginia is sort of where the line ends. And then about a year ago, I want to say, we also bolted on a couple of little small pieces of rail that are actually owned by the state of Delaware. One line runs out to Milton and the other line used to run out to Lewis. And unfortunately, part of that line, state decided was not worth investing in anymore. And so that now ends and harvest. But those are 22 lines that we now operate and serve the customers on there. And we've been successful in growing the business on this delaware ONE lines as well recently. Other question about are there any risks moving LNG LPG by VIA rail? So we move primarily propane, I I'm assuming is what that question is aimed at. And I mean, there's risks associated with moving anything in any way, but rail is incredibly safe. Mode of transportation. And now one of the things that I like to think about when you're moving something on the railroad versus on the highway, you're separating the modes where you have passengers and families driving on a highway right next to a semi trailer full of propane versus on a railroad. It's pretty discreet from most interactions. You've got crossings here and there, but by and large, no, it's, it's it's it's very, very safe, much safer than other modes of transportation to move those materials via the rail. Touch a question about how changes in energy, energy mix have affected your operations. So I guess one question would be, do transport coal to Indian River power station and then have you seen declines in that activity, but more generally that there had been effects on your operations based on people shifting to a different energy sources? Yeah. So we certainly do serve the energy power plant there at Indian River and do move call to them when it's needed. I think that that plant is maybe not burning as much as they had 1010 years ago, for example. So that that lane of traffic is not quite as robust as maybe it was before we took over the railroad, but it's certainly something that we offer and something that any way we can help, help power the economy out here and, and, and provide a service to those different customers. We're we're here to do that. Well, we don't have any open questions at the moment. Cliff really appreciate you joining today, and Cliff's been a great friend of the the Working Group, offered several presentations over the years. So certainly do reach out to him if you have follow-up questions. If you want to talk about opportunities for partnership, that's a big part of what these systems are about. But thanks. Thanks so much again, Cliff. Yep, thanks. Try appreciate it. Yeah, happy, happy weekend. Let's let's go onto the next slide and keep it moving. We're going to talk about new hours of service rules that are going into effect very soon. And I've started is as I understand it, but our speaker's going to clarify all that. And I'm really happy to have the Delaware division Administrator for the Federal Motor Carrier safe Carrier Safety Administration, fill stroke is going to present on these new rules. So I'm going to ask Phil to un-mute and takeover. Thanks, Troy. Thank you for the invitation to present. Today. I'll talk a little bit about the new hours of service. Basically hot off the press released just this month. And next slide, the changes in the rules DO create new violations under CFR 49 Part 395, daily change health, implying how compliance with existing regulations is determined with changes in the shortfall exception, adverse driving conditions, the 30-minute break requirement, and the sleeper birth provisions. Those are addressed in the new hours of service rule. Next life The hours of service. Final Rule was developed based on widespread congressional industry. Instead, if an infinite siblings to provide drivers with greater flexibility while maintaining the highest safety standards on our nation's returns. It'll also reduce regulatory costs by about 270 million hours. Excited, the FM CSA published and advance notice of proposed rulemaking on August 23rd, 2018. The purpose of this notice was to seek feedback from the public to determine if hours of service rep revisions may alleviate unnecessary burdens placed on drivers while maintaining safety on our nation's highways and roads. The agency received more than 5 thousand comments on that. Maybe this during the comment period and how by listening sessions. The agency also published a notice of proposed rulemaking outlining five potential areas for revision on August 22nd, 2092, additional public listening sessions in August and September at NCSA really received about 202,874 comments during that period. Next slide, so we'll lived through understanding these changes in the new rule next slide. The first effective provision I would talk about is the short little exception. Ctl property and passenger drivers are currently granted exceptions for short haul operations. Fm CSA change the short haul exemption by expanding the driving distance to 150 airmiles and allowing for a 14 hour workshop. A 150 mile mile radius is now consistent with the distance limitation for short haul drivers that are not required to possess a commercial driver's license. In this example on the slide under the previous will drive, a driver can travel within a 100 mile radius of doers and was unable to serve serve as several of the surrounding locations. Under the new Will, the driving ratings has expanded to a 150 miles, which increases the number of locations a driver is allowed to serve and provide additional two hours to do so. This potentially adds flexibility by taking into account any waiting time and drive and my experience in addition to his or her driving time. However, it's important to remember that no additional driving that's being added. Drivers may not drive more than 11 hours if in their 14-year period. Next life under the new rule, diving I'm sorry, Looks like failure. You've got the Delaware example up on the screen. Now you had Illinois, but now there's the Delaware maps, right? Okay. Yeah, we do a lot to the next slide. Sorry about that. You've got a lot of the other provisions of the CDL exceptional are changing. Are you maintaining time cards and the 11 our driving limits. And then you tie off initially, this doesn't change any of the non CDL short all exceptions in part 395. Next slide. Drivers and carriers using the short haul exception are not required to use a record DVD status or rods or ELDs or do they need to take a 30 minute break? It's extra time in the driving day has always been available to drivers if they opt out of the short haul exception. This change Laos drivers to retain that status. We see the regulatory relief drivers of carriers using short I'll exception must keep a record of the start and end times for each day. These records don't need to be kept in. The vehicle, must be retained for six months. Drivers who were on duty for more than 14 hours, excuse me word drive more than a 150 air miles don't qualify for this exception and must. Hopefully a lot of time on an ALB is required. Fm CSA will use records and time cards as it does today to ensure ensure short haul drivers are combined with the 11 our maximum driving limits and other hours of service regulations for drivers operating under the name within our workshop. The second effect that provision is the adverse driving conditions iPhone CSA modified it to the definition of an adverse driving condition by accounting for the role of the driver in determining adverse conditions. The adverse driving conditions exception can only be applied if the condition was unforeseeable immediately prior to driving, will dispatch driving into poor weather than a metaphor. A guest on today's four hours prior to driving would not be eligible. Norwood encountering rush hour traffic in an area where the time when that that's normal as could be expected. Next life have them CSA currently allows drivers to extend driving time by up to two hours when the unforeseeable adverse driving conditions or encountered under the new rule. This, to our extension, also applies to the drive-in window for property carriers and on duty when passenger carriers, this change will increase safety by allowing drivers more time when they encounter an adverse condition to the next line. So for example, the direct drivers 15 miles was destination and there's gravel spill on the bridge ahead. And that bridge is the only access to your destination. If driver has one hour left, a driving time and one hour left on his driving day. The driver can stop at the next exit roughly two hours until the radius clear and still have time to get to its destination without violating any of the hours of service range. And of course, if that happens, drivers should entity details about the average starting from nothing in their lawn or electronic device next life. So the third effect that provision is the 30-minute break requirements I felt CSA change the 30-minute driving Brake requirement in 395 by making the changes they gave, they making their requirements applicable only when the driver has driven. Used to be it was on duty and now it's applicable only after the driver has driven for a period of eight hours within life and without at least 30 consecutive 30-minute tribal interruption, allowing a requirement to be satisfied by not driving period for period of 30 consecutive minutes. And that can be done either through off duty sleepover or undoing driving rather than as it was for only off duty or sleep. The agency notes that many CLD drivers in a rough they're driving time during normal business operations such as when we were on leaving the truck completing paperwork, we're stopping for fuel before this final will. The break was required to be off duty time, which means no work including paperwork, no work to be done including people. And it was triggered after eight hours regardless of their drivers driving. However, the changes to the 30-minute break requirements do not increase the maximum guiding time doing the work shift. We're allowing guy after the 14 Bauer from the beginning of the workshop. The flexibility with this change will allow for Duomo breaks from driving to satisfy their requirements provided the break variety, the break last at least 30 consecutive limits. For example, driver can have ten minutes of on duty, not driving Tiny OS, ten minutes of sleep of refined plus ten minutes of off duty deemed to satisfy the 30-minute break requirement. As long as those breaks there's 10-minute breaks are consecutive, short non consecutive periods. Can't even mind to reach that 30-minute requirement number. And just as a side note, shouldn't all guys I saved before the short haul drivers are, are exempt from this requirement, will get the next line. So in the top log, this driver took a 30 minute break off duty, which means requirements update. The previous and these new hours of service rules are valid under the new hours of service for final world. The bottom line shows where the director 30-minute break as on duty, not driving. This is also compliant with previous ruled as the previous role did not allow on duty, not riding dissatisfied or even afraid quietly. Annex line and then a sleeper birth provisional instead of with provision affected. Fomc has now allows an additional additional flexibility in taking two our two off duty periods under the sleeper birth provision in 390951 period must be at least seven consecutive hours spent endlessly. Uber to be paired with another period of at least two hours spent either in asleep on Earth or otherwise AKI. As long as those two periods total ten hours. When paired, neither qualifying period counts against the drivers 14-hour Driver window prior to this role with shorter period counted against the drive that makes life So you can see an example on the slide. This assumes the drivers started his day with just completed ten hours off duty, so starting fresh, none of the four breaks shown here would count against the drivers within our window. On day one, the driver used a 773 square to get us ten hours of and say to the graph on the right hand side, the drivers using e1, e2 split between OFF VDC for birth and guiding two to g that ten hours off my next life. As I said, this is hot off the press. It was this final rule was published in the Federal Register on June first. And that a compliant state where the morality the services September 29th. So drivers and carriers must operate under the service Final Rule starting the 29th of September. I'm not before going to the next slide, I urge you to check out FM CSAs website. This is the length for any hours of service. There's a lot of examples there and a lot of Q and A's that may be helpful. The training strange. It's still under development for federal regulators and law enforcement partners. And then in addition, there will be more train being offered out to two carriers and drivers. Make sure that everybody's aware of how all these changes will effect and that's about all I have. Any questions? You have? Put one initial question for me, Phil, and he might have just addressed it a little bit. Fm, CSA, the primary resources they provide to people in the industry. Training, guidance, how would you define it? What you can provide to folks in the industry and Delaware, I'll show or a movie offer this, as you said, guidance. Some of these regulations will we kind of cumbersome or confusing, particularly when he comes in, the split sleepers and that type of thing. And we had a team here in Delaware. There's an atom CSA office in each of the states and territories, we have investigators about office that on a daily basis contact drivers, carriers to ensure that everybody followed that. Again, engines and understands that we had a question submitted about what's the main benefit to carriers under the short haul exception is and is it not having to purchase and GLD? Well, that's what that's one benefit for sure. And you'd have to read the role to make sure that you follow the short haul exemption. You leave and come back to that same place every day. And then not operate for more than 14 hours. But if you're operating under a short haul exception, you don't have to keep your time recorded on unwieldy or graph paper. You just have to record the, the start of the day and the end of the day and backend that record. Can cat dispatch? Sure. At the carriers of Asian it doesn't have to be in the trunk. And you have to maintain these records for six months in the MBA principal place of business. So it's a little bit of flexibility tracking their hours if you're using the short haul exception, right? So I might have these details wrong. That's why that's why you're here. But I understand. Do I understand correctly that they were waivers and our service during COBIT 19. Is that correct? Would you guess a little bit of the back story there and what was waived? I guess well, give little tease me again. Well, that that wavers is posted on our website and I'm not mistaken. I could be wrong here. Was the 15 of you anything that had to do with relief efforts of the emergency declaration? Basically exempted carriers involved in that, which would include our service along with other other regulations that were affected by that emergency declaration. The emergency declaration was extended by a CSA into July. However, be affected carriers that fall into that emergency exemption is a lot more limited. I'd have to be basically carry medical supplies, mask sanitizers, unit, those types of things in this extended emergency. And so could you talk a little bit about if the hours the services service challenges faced in Delaware are particularly unique. Or you think they're like what the rest of countries facing and how you think there'll be alleviated to a certain degree by the new rules. Well, while we have more and more of a finance is where congestion related issues with hours of service, it's the same it's the same rule from California to Delaware. This different different conditions as far as traffic and congestion. Hopefully, I think we grew contacting to the public and industry and their considerations and new ours is service rules with their suggestions, you know, having that flexibility year 30 minute break requirement and having some flexibility when you're achieving the ten hours off your break with so that you can start fresh bandwidth. You're 11. Our 14-hour day fires that. It gives by giving a driver more flexibility if it's gotta make the roads safer. As far as challenges or issues with that, I will just say this. I think Delaware carriers are not areas in other states experience. While I want to thank you, Phil, for taking the time to join us today and give us an update on new rules. No outstanding questions at this point, but I'm sure Phil would be happy to be be contacted and reach him through FMD, CSA. But thanks again, Phil. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation to a thing. Let's go to the next slide. Me and Phil mentioned congestion. So we're going to talk to the main congestion man and Delaware Dan Evans from will map go to talk about kind of the travel impacts that happen as Cove in 19 unfolded on Del Mar. So Dan, you can take it away. Ok. Thanks, Dr. beliefs. Right now, there's not that much cash in probably three months. But yeah, I'm here to talk a little bit about the really how Coburn 19 has impacted the transportation system in the near term. And as you'll see, more importantly in the future. And obviously it goes without saying our lives had been yeah, everyday lives have been disrupted about it. I think we all long for The Times, the not having to listening to you or hear about self quarantine, social distance, NEW norm, all those phrases that are popular right now. Or my office mate had been a high school student for the last three months. So I feel like I've went back to high school myself, but yeah. So we've all had different the different lifestyle offered lamps the last few months here. But if I go back to our industry transportation, you know, the measures that we put in place to combat the virus has certainly changed the landscape of transportation. And as I discuss for those who are on last week that we're fortunate that we have a lot of big data available at our fingertips to make this easier than before to be able to measure truly what had happening in pretty much real time data. That big data gets collected 24-7. So we're able to kind of go back and harness some of that to have a quick turnaround for the data to say exactly what has happened right now and then what is actually happening going forward. So we've been able to pull different things from private sector sources like street light, the active counters that del dot as, and other archive travel time data. So kind of data layering all these together to come up with a way to really kinda capture what had happened on the ground. Next slide. So measuring that, why does it matter? I mean, there's a bit of B, the dough factor out there that yes, there's less cars and faster speeds, we can get that. But, you know, trying to measure that. What has happened is really going to help us look into the future about you're going to start seeing especially in the month of June here for Delaware with the, you know, the bond bill and whatnot, is trying to estimate these revenue forecasts. How quickly does traffic come back to whatever level it may be that we'll figure out how fuel taxes will low tolls and whatnot. So it will begin to impact the capital side of our road improvements. Also, timing feature data collection efforts, getting down to smaller traffic impacts studies that generate Lang if activity. Back in April, him there was a few few trapping impact studies. We're trying to go forward and count april, but certainly the the result that would've looked a whole lot different than it would couple months ago. And you know what, in the freight world, you know, what is the new normal look like? Lot of questions out there. How much does the work at home trends stick around? How, what have we learned from this, from the strength of our supply chain? Obviously, with traffic not being there is one thing. But early on when this started, as they closed some of that state rest stops, there were some things that were disruptive to the freight community. Many people have been getting out of it, you know, a level of necessity, essential delivery that home how many day and become more commonplace. Next slide. So yeah, the, the idea, how much does the, once all this happens post pandemic, how much actually pays went, went from mom? Yeah, I kind of look at the term tactical and practical level. People needed this immediately to social business properly. So they had things delivered to their house, but once people got more comfortable with it, do they stay? So accompany commerce hub did a survey asking about people, you know, they've got curbs. I pick up now 75% of people said they probably would likely opt personal curbside delivery post pandemic. And these are obviously survey that are out there early on, there's the number stick, but certainly would see a bit of a shift in at least the vector of freight movement that they would like dependent continued to see that next slide, Dan. And it has yeah. Because there's one question that maybe we could go back. Actually three Sly yeah. There about the dark spots on the street, like data map, I guess. What do they mean and why are there so many of them? That's a total the actual numbers of vehicle miles traveled. Okay. So more dark is more we're now? Yes. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It's the amount of coverage is probably just a street street lights, more, more of a Illustrated image that's treelike. Covers most of the United States with their vehicle miles traveled data. Great, thank you. Demographically speaking, this externally only looked at, you know, Millennials are the ones who want to use the, you know, the delivery, new delivery options. But those 15, 49% of those 50 and over are likely to subscribe the delivery service. Filing. The pandemic Even at the ages of those who are 70 and over, 59%, they prefer to shopping stores that don't mean 40% would rather continue their, their deliveries at home. So new normal, we don't know. I think there's a lot of questions that us as a community we'll be having to look at as time goes on. Certainly something we can look at at our, at our winter meetings that we have. So we're kind of in the middle of this right now, but at least for had some good data, information to be able to kinda practice as we, as we move forward. So getting into the data, what has actually happened to traffic? We have three different things that we're going to look at here today. Just overall vehicle miles traveled than getting into some traffic volumes. And then down though the actual travel times. So the chart you see here is a daily VMT vehicle miles traveled, a total for all of New Castle County. Going back to March first on the left, all the way to the right will be June seventh. So we pretty much have a very good daily data source for this up until the end of last weekend. See in red is the date in which the emergency was declared. Now that orange line is what is the average VMT per day? So the annual average, you know, that's kind of the numbers. So you can see that the emergency was declared and you see how quickly things kinda fell by the rock. The dark blue lines are actually the weekends. You can kind of see weekend versus weekday traffic can hit a low point right around Easter weekend. But as you see, we've had a slight each week and a bit of an increase from that normal. Go to the next slide and those yellow bars show you where we were from, that 19 million and on average, the empty normal. So we started out in March and early April, roughly about a quarter of the traffic volume. But as you see, things just slowly starting to move up. Where in the last week, date end the first week of June, we've gotten just back to 56% of normal. So we're, we're moving our way back upwards slowly as things started to get loosened up a little bit with different restrictions being lifted. Next slide, switching to Suffolk County. Kinda the same same parameters right here, but as you can see there at the value's dropped off starting on the on the 13th, didn't bottom as far as New Castle County. But one thing you can see is certainly the, the, the increase has changed a bit where they're almost too about 68% of normal now from where they were back in, back in April. Next slide, and I'll point out here that you see on here. You can tell when the weather got nice, highlighted out the Friday peaks here that you can see starting back in early May, Those are the ones that kind of started leading the charge. They start releasing some of the restrictions that the at the beaches, but also simply whether got nice people wanted to get out. So begin to see those. Yeah, there's trend pop up a little bit more more quickly. A resort area like that. Next slide. So on a more localized level, you know, what actually, in terms of total traffic volume, what have we've seen in terms of changes? So this is i 95. We see a little inset map here, the blue dye it just just to the north of the Greek anime, all on I95, kind of near the sandbox area. So what has traffic done since then? The these are weekly weekday volume averages. Go back over to the left, right there. You see where it says the merge, you declare it in March. We too, you can kinda see where quickly on I95 how the traffic has had changed bottoming out. Really, that second week of April is kind of the kind of low point with a modest increase all the way up until the first week of June. Next slide. The red lines are actually weekends. So we again, certainly those who the local people around or you made a mistake of getting on I95 on a Saturday, realize you made the made the big mistake and how traffic is as we get into the warmer weather weekend. I had seen a bit of a little bit higher shift, but certainly the trend lines are still alive, are pretty much the same when you look at weekend versus weekdays. Next slide, switching to an arterial looking at us 20 to near the near the Delaware line. Kind of the same pattern, but as you can see, there was a little bit of a higher departure, roughly down 65% from the 2019 totals that we had. So yep. I'd then I wasn't clear on that. This is a comparison of what it was the same week and 192019 verses 2020. So can a year over year comparison, My apologies, I didn't clarify that in the beginning. So you kinda see the week, the second week of March as things started to bottom out and then begin to slowly make its way back up next slide. And the same can be said for the weekends. The red lines that disappeared on the, on the screen there. One thing I guess we've seen, these are just a few examples that I've given. You know, there's a few other locations that are out there identify, I think a little bit different because we're capturing a lot more regional and true interstate traffic. The, the arterials had been a little bit slower on the rebound, particularly in northern New Castle County. But these are the areas where we're kind of surrounded by much more of the larger Job Centers and retail hubs, which I'll just most of those are still shut down through there for those in our offices. And a star campus, I get to look on a night out thou College Avenue heading into new arc. And I can sit there and look for 30-40 package and see three or four cars go through. So there's certainly, you know, traffic, the BMP slide that showed where traffic has begun the increase. But there is other more localized areas where yes, it simply still nowhere near the, near the norm of what we've seen in the past, right. Next slide. Now, something afraid community is obviously more worried about is how quickly and reliably get things to and from your destination. So we've been able to pull data from the National Performance Measurement research data set, or NPM, RDS for short, looking at actual travel times two and from various quarters on the you know, in within Delaware. And kind of the same thing looking at the comparison between what it was in 2019 verses 20-20. Now that there's a little more focused on the actual peak periods. So we've looked at a and between 7900 AM, the PM period, between 4600 PM. Just to kinda get that flavor of what we've seen, you know, add that, add that localized timeframe on how traffic gets changed. How long does it take you to get from a to b? And in different, different parts of the state over all, we've been looking at kind of a collective all the interstate and US routes on the map on the screen. And powerful, kind of I call it more like the stock market index of a larger set of roadway but also rose like Kirkwood Highway, US nine, and such a county, 95 PO2. So we've kind of carved up a few of those to kind of keep track weekly and monthly as this and this goes on next slide. So overall travel times, they're rotating a little bit differently than what we've seen with overall traffic volumes. But if you look here, the AM is the blue line, Pn is the red lines. We took it back to early February to kind of get an idea of what had happened as things nationally started to unfold, really in early April and in early February, in the mid February. And make sure we're capturing some of the trends that have happened before them. In emergency was declared a second week, roughly about 30% drop or increase in travel, travel time. So it's rapid decline. We're getting a better a better read on overall travel times throughout the region. And since then, in April and early May, we've seen travel times get little flower because it began to see traffic increase along the, the major thoroughfares. Next slide, I95, taking it, so kind of looking at it as an entire chord or literally all through Delaware roughly, it's a about a 22 mile stretch from the PA line to the Maryland line. On a normal day, it takes you about 29 to 30 minutes to to make that trip. And overall, yes. As the traffic as it has decreased quite a bit. Second third week of April, we saw obviously significant declines. And as things have started to increase back up in the month of May, getting a little bit closer to normal. Now the one thing that is harder to do is obviously identified you have incident and things of that nature. So we haven't necessarily gone through and score about saying, oh, well, this is data that's off a bit because of the you know, there was an actin in or something like that. Hence, we looked at out more of a weekly period to kind of smooth that out a bit. Next slide. Now the box you see here that just popped up is the actual minute in the overall change in minutes. So if you look at the a and weekdays has a weekly average travel times from 1920192020. So yes, it usually about 29 minutes worth of travel right now you're able to do, and about 20 to 21 minutes. So we're seeing anywhere, depending on the week, five or six minute change in travel times from one end to the state to the other via the interstate. Next slide. Same pattern here for two O2, roughly about 13 minute run for 6.56 miles to go from my 95 up through the PA for 91 in in Pennsylvania. Kinda thing pattern that you've seen here. You can see where things change on the emergency, but as you see things kind of, it's still stay relatively ran that 30% all with, with travel times. As I mentioned before, this is getting into arterial area where yes, you still haven't seen the heavy retail and the commuter traffic bounced back as much as you would see elsewhere. Next slide. And yeah, you're running about making that run. Yeah. You're shaving off especially the pm three to four minutes worth of worth of travel time there north the a and a little bit different. We've seen PM traffic be more, more significant or much more more of the higher gradient as, as we've seen versus, versus looking at the yam hours. Next, we'll go into this too much. We it same thing. We looked at Kirkwood highway, roughly a 25 minute run. Next slide and this one here. So normally paid about 25 minutes, right now it's about 18 to 20 minutes to make that run their back and forth, particularly in the, in the PM hours. Next slide. Now, you know, really the next step is, as you seen those here, right? And some of the things I mentioned early in the beginning about this whole thing, new normal, I know at the phrase and I'm already getting tired of saying it myself, but we, you know, we really don't know. There's a lot of those things in terms of how, you know, how we shop, how we kind of do a little bit of everything in the next next period of time. We were I was on a conference call yesterday for our transportation performance measures and we're still there's a lot of up in the air questions about that as well. They're saying, well, people will, will, will, will peak hours looked the same? Will it be lower volumes? Maybe, maybe not. Will people not want to, you know, will people abandon using mass transit for awhile? So those who would normally take transit are hopping their car. So it kinda negate those who are working at home. How did this change what the peak hour it looks like, the change capital improvements designed to address peak hour congestion. Does that new normal really reach that? Once again, The levels we had before that as I mentioned about the pandemic mass transit, Do people kind of go back to that? So one thing we want to do is obviously continue to chart these changes that we've seen so far with this measured data. And I do want to look at more some of the hourly peak period changes that we have down below. This is us 40 in Scotland drive. As we start to see what do those PN peak look like that kind of tell you about commuter traffic in and out and the like on how how do those kind of boundaries up or bounce back? You know, there's a whole lot of unknowns here. And hence the reason when we put, I put these question down here like this, you know, there's an awful lot of them reading the names on this list here, different NPO's and state DOTs. This leads a lot more questions than answers. But at least we're in a situation where we have some, we have some good information to work from to be able to kind of see when, you know, when it is safe to quote unquote go back in the water for data collection for local a new studies? Or how does how do things look? And how does this benefit or hinder the freight community on 0s and moving deliveries during the peak periods when it generally is a time period that they maybe tend to avoid because of the the track that they're looking for a better reliability. Next slide. So thank you. My contact information is here below. As I mentioned, we do have our our winter afraid meetings as well. A couple more of these freight Friday, that trumps tutorial we plugging here shortly, but there's an awful lot of time and a lot of, a lot of things that I think us as a group you will need to be discussing in certainly taking a look at as the weeks and months. Thank you so much. Stand. There is one question so far about the information that you're gathering that's in this presentation and as we move forward, is that going to be posted anywhere? Are you planning that? I know this presentation will be, but yeah. In terms of anything that the day that I was showing here, you know, the beauty of it is as we figure this moment, it's all being collected and will be archived for the for the next couple days, weeks and months on our website. We'll map go.org slash b. And that it's kind of been our little holding Benford somebody's presentation, that ongoing PDF's and we've been posting that contain the data as we keep, you know, next week I'll add the week's worth of the empty data. Same thing with the ADT data and the travel time. So we're just going to kind of continue this over the summer and logging this data, as you could call it, that we'll be able to continue to practice over time and we'll be posting all that info. We also have we're looking at trying to use the agenda on motorized changes during this impact as well. So kind of a more of a multimodal approach that we've been capturing and we'll be, we'll be posting over, over the summer. True Grit. Feel free to add some more questions as I Talk about warning here, which is it's strikes me and I'm not a congestions expert, but that one of the costs that congestion does time, which you gave us data on. It seems like one of the other costs could be incidents or accidents. Is there any data anecdotal or otherwise about how those have been impacted during slow down? Not now, not really. I mean, the one thing is that the fewer cars, I think you probably have seen probably the fender bender pipe crashes did anecdotally speaking, those are obviously going to be much lower by, you know, literally 200 yards from our office. There was a fatality with a motorcycle a couple weeks ago. We are driving factor. So does is there a output, let's just say a lack of a dropping, severe crashes typically because of speed being much more of a factor in there. I don't know that. I don't want to go into too much detail on that, but probably the fender-bender numbers would be would be off, I think. But who knows? I think that's the question as we get the data comes out from up as they please. And the next, for the next year, we'll probably have a better answer on that one. And then a question about you mentioned people are, you know, when is it going to be safe to go back in the water? When it comes to traffic studies and using the data, do know of either the right response, what we suspect is the right response for projects that are already in the water that kind of might have traffic studies ongoing or pending. How do you think we deal with those while they're actually appeal to them are actually being dealt with using some of the good data we get from the del dot that PMT. If he had to in order to trap account. There's a attorney william account urate. We have over a thousand intersections that are covered with loop detectors. So you can kind of go back to the abbot said something that he did in 2019 and want to see whether 2018 even they're using some of that early 20-20-20 data to elite verify some of the older accounts that were collected before just to see what the rate of traffic increase. Whoa. So yeah, I know there's a few things that are being worked on to elite harness that in, in that fashion to keep some of them going. But that's probably about the best that can be done at this moment too. Try to at least keep some projects going in during, during all day. So if I understand correctly, are using the archive of data that already exists, you can work on a lot of those studies now that you can't yet, great. Well, I don't I don't see any other questions at this point. Dan's got his contact information up there. I know we've enjoyed these updates at our technical, I think I think just popped up in there. Go right from i and i, you know what? I don't have a crystal ball, but I do have a Magic eight Ball on my back. And it is gifted, accurately, decryptable, let say. So the teed up BIT, How do you see the TW experimented becoming permanent for certain sectors? And how do you think that will affect the telework? There we go. There we go, telework. How will that mind, you know, I think that I got kind of where that without having a crypto ball. I think that thing and that would allow that came out of that question are added to that a little bit yesterday? That the telework question is yeah, because I think that's where the peak the peak period issue will be affected the most because that's what a what a normal trip would be in that 709 AM period in four to six PM. Have any of those siphoned off the top a little bit. The rest of the day can kind of be the same. But I think that's where and especially when we look at our traffic, even things that we are looking at our performance measurement, peak hours of excessive delay, all those values and measures, you know, how does that bounce back? And if we go back to the one slide before that's possible. Yeah. And that's why I put this one up here about looking at the looking at the hourly volume that that Scotland dragging and kinda see the big blue lines where they, where they where they spike up 78 AM and four to five PM. That's where we were seeing our greatest difference in overall traffic volumes. How quickly does that part of the system come back is where we really are doing all our transportation planning for one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon, you know, dealing with that peak period. Hence the reason I think that probably the most important thing that we, we, we read the tea leaves on looking at focusing on our Lean peak, peak period changes, because that'll help us the most. How does that, how does that respond and bounce back in the name of congestion? So I think the idea that we're also looking at the wall subtracting the transit usage. I think that's a big one as well. The year over year comparison, because those numbers continue to stay at rock bottom, that starts to let us know a little bit that we're saying, yes, people are maybe going back to work, but they may not be using the same mode that they did over if you pre versus post pandemic. Great. Well, thank you, Dan. Appreciate the questions from the audience. We are going to go to the next slide and wrap up with a few announcements. So once you leave today's session, you'll get a link to complete an evaluation. Please do that. Let us know how it went. You can criticize my audio all you want, but that's your opportunity to do that. Our next live webinar is June 26th, or have a general focus on market trends. We have dv RPC, Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission is going to be joining us to talk about a freight study they've undertaken. And golf painter, USA, the operator of the port of Wilmington, will also be joining us. Let's go to the next slide that's on June 26th. There, two weeks from today. In the interim, I've talked with DOT Foods. We've got an interview there that's going to be posted and I'll make the link available to you. Dot Foods isn't newer edition to the regional freight community and they're going to talk a little bit about how they kind of stood up right during the covert 19 pandemic, beginning and coming to the larva and what their operations look like now and what they see them looking like in the next couple months as things unfold. So I'll make those links available. There is a conversation with DOT Foods and at least one more to come. They should be available by next Friday at our kind of regularly scheduled Live Meeting time. Let's go to the next slide. Reach out to me with questions and comments. Always. There's still opportunities even to be involved. June 26th, if you'd like, but you will be automatically registered for that June 26th event. So look for your for information in your inbox and certainly feel free to share registration information with colleagues that you think might appreciate joining. Reach out to me with any questions and comments again. And last slide, I certainly appreciate you joining me, taking time on this. What for me is a beautiful friday. Friday at this point. Thank you from the Dell Barbara free freight Working Group for joining us for this session. And I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Thanks again.
Delmarva FreightFriday: Freight Operations | June 12, 2020
From Sarah Marshall July 13, 2020
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The virtual Delmarva #FreightFriday sessions aim to enhance awareness of major freight planning programs and initiatives; share information on significant freight and goods movement trends; and encourage public-private partnership development.
The June 12 session focused on Freight Operations, with presentations focused on traffic impacts related to the COVID-19 crisis; Delmarva Central Railroad’s new transload facility in Seaford; and a summary of the newly revised hours of service regulations for drivers of commercial vehicles.
This event is presented by the Institute for Public Administration in partnership with the Delmarva Freight Working Group: DelDOT, the Dover/Kent County MPO, Salisbury/Wicomico MPO, and WILMAPCO.
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