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MPC Research Reports
View AllThis report presents the results from expert interviews with Minneapolis-St. Paul companies and North Dakota manufacturing companies. The Minneapolis expert interviews helped to identify the minimal logistical capabilities a supplier must have in order to do business with the Minneapolis companies. Ten... This research developed a methodology to optimize roadway access intersection design using an expert system to guide design in accordance with published criteria, a graphical multi-criteria evaluation system, which revealed marginal impacts of changing design parameters across three objective functions... The results of this project demonstrate the need for functional sub-classifications of rural local roads, with design parameters that address the unique characteristics of these roads. Incremental improvements are an acceptable method to increase safety on unpaved rural roads and to minimize liability. The principal investigators addressed many aspects of distance learning in a recently taught TEL8 course on bridge engineering. Their efforts are outlined in this report with respect to this course. The fruit of their effort is a better and more technologically advanced method of coupling TEL8 courses... The balance of this report will examine the experiences U.S. production agriculture has had with deregulation of the transportation industry. It will highlight the evolution of the procurement segment of grain marketing, concentrating on the wheat origination region, as it is an important export commodity... This project is dedicated toward creating an annual information base on short line and regional railroads. Three years of collection and analysis of this data is complete, with another year in process. In this report, techniques for collecting short line information by mail and electronically are discussed.... This study examined LTL carriers in the mountain-plains region of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. Many rural communities rely on the LTL industry for freight movements in and out of the region. The level of LTL service in the mountain-plains region is unknown in a post regulated environment. This study examines the cost conditions present in the Class I railroad industry. Recent mergers and merger proposals have brought forth questions regarding the desirability of maintaining competition in areas impacted by horizontal mergers and, similarly, the desirability of end-to-end mergers. This report highlights a cooperative project between the Mountain-Plains Consortium universities and the Region 8 Technology Transfer Centers. Region 8 consists of six states: Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah. Each of these states has a Transportation Technology Transfer... Differences that exist among truck configurations, trip and product characteristics, and input prices influence costs for individual owner/operators. Economic developers need truck cost estimates to compare transportation modes and accurately estimate transportation costs. Owner/operators and users of... |
