Abstract
The megaregion has emerged as the preferred unit of analysis for freight transportation and global trade. In the United States, trade and transportation barriers of state boundaries can impede the formation of megaregions, resulting in the hampering of economic development. As a preliminary investigation of the Gulf Coast megaregion, we performed a content analysis of the relationship between freight-related themes in the comprehensive and long-range plans for the metropolitan areas and the respective 11 parishes (counties) in southeastern Louisiana. Our results indicated a slight correlation between freight transportation infrastructure resources and theme frequencies in the histograms, but an overall lack of planning focus on freight infrastructure or trade capacities throughout the study area. Although freight transportation is becoming important federally, Louisiana state and local governments do not fully plan for it, leading to outdated transportation systems, inefficiency, and congestion.
Introduction
Although trade is central to the economy of the U.S. Gulf Coast, the region appears to be poorly positioned to compete for Federal funds to support infrastructure for freight movement. This finding is based on an analysis of the comprehensive plans of 11 parishes in southeastern Louisiana that include the cities of Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Improving the economic health of the Gulf Coast by realizing its freight transportation potential calls for intra-national trade agreements that will eliminate economic and governance barriers that hinder full integration of the counties and states that comprise what can realistically be termed the Gulf Coast Megaregion.
The Gulf Coast Megaregion
According to the Federal Highway Administration (2016), a megaregion is a large network of metropolitan regions that share environmental and infrastructure systems, topography, economic linkages and settlement and land use patterns. A megaregion must be a contiguous area with more than one major city center, have a population of 5 million or more and must produce more than $100 billion in goods and services.
The megaregional concept arose from increased global connectivity, international trade, and expanding domestic markets around major metropolitan areas that have generated massive economies not constrained by political boundaries. However, this international focus does not fully capture the scale of domestic trade between U.S. metro areas. As a result, federal plans for freight transportation tend to be disjointed.
The Gulf Coast megaregion consists of parishes and counties in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida that are connected by economic activity, shared transportation infrastructure, and exposure to natural hazards. The megaregion is anchored by Houston, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge, and includes the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the Mobile metropolitan areas. The Gulf Coast also provides access to the Mississippi and Tennessee–Tombigbee Rivers, which are vital inland freight transportation waterways. However, like most megaregions, the Gulf Coast lacks political cohesion and governance structures that transcend state lines. As shown in Figure 1, the Gulf Coast megaregion is composed of seventy parishes and counties in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
The Gulf Coast megaregion.
The Gulf Coast economy is also precarious. Following World War II, the overall Southern economy experienced a loss of agriculture jobs due to advancements in technology-accelerated mechanization of the industry. To avoid mass unemployment, Southern states began “smokestack chasing,” the use of economic incentives to court manufacturing plants. This proved to be a good fit for the Southern workforce, and manufacturing eventually came to dominate the regional economy (Leigh & Blakely, 2013). However, technological advancements in transportation, logistics, and communications enabled the globalization of manufacturing that once again led to job losses in an anchor industry in the Southern economy and economic instability in the region (Stich, Griffith, & Webb, 2015, p. 20).
As these factors have negatively affected the economic potential of the Gulf Coast, the region has focused on a strategy to recruit Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and retain existing high-tech jobs as the keys to improving the overall quality of life (Stich, Griffith, & Webb, 2015, p. 30, Table 4). Freight transportation is crucial to the success of this strategy because the economies of the Gulf Coast megaregion are highly dependent on trade. Because this megaregion specializes in such goods as “. . . energy, chemicals and transportation equipment . . . the region has higher freight volumes than its population would suggest” (Tomer, Kane, & Puentes, 2013).
Freight Transportation and National Policy
Federally funded transportation projects are now almost exclusively the domain of regional planning agencies, and according to Mandelker (2011), “[The] importance of transportation facilities, such as highways, to land use and development and the availability of federal funding has made transportation planning the most important planning function regional agencies exercise today.” Historically, regional transportation planning focused on moving people, but recently, the federal government has increasingly emphasized freight movement. The 2012 transportation bill, Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21), prioritized improvements to the freight transportation network. It also required states to report on the condition of their infrastructure, create freight transportation plans, and establish targets every four years, which include highway and bridge conditions, safety, congestion, and freight movement. MAP-21 was the first major attempt at integrated national transportation collaboration between states and the federal government. MAP-21 included policies establishing a National Freight Network, a national freight strategic plan, and a requirement for performance reports. The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) is now responsible for biannually creating a National Strategic Plan for future demands for freight transport and infrastructure.
Following MAP-21, the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act (FAST Act) of 2015 provides long-term funding for transportation planning tailored to investments in the intermodal freight network. In addition, FAST requires a National Freight Strategic Plan with the goal of implementing the new National Multimodal Freight Network and National Highway Freight Plan to improve intermodal connectivity and performance. The FAST Act can potentially bring a national level freight network closer to reality.
Freight Transportation Planning in Louisiana
To explore the potential to advance the megaregion paradigm in the Louisiana Gulf Coast in support of MAP-21 and FAST Act objectives, we set out to answer the following research question: How do the geographic locations of the parishes affect the freight elements in the comprehensive plans of the parishes, specifically in relationship to the megaregion? We based this question on the observation that historically, U.S. settlement patterns are reflective of geographically determined capacities for freight transportation, whether water, rail, or road, as is the case in the choice of siting for the City of New Orleans at the confluence of the Mississippi river and the Gulf of Mexico.
We studied 11 parishes, examining how concentrations of freight-related themes in the summaries of parish comprehensive plans related to parish locations. We did this for Orleans, Lafourche, Tangipahoa, St. James, Jefferson, St. John the Baptist, Plaquemines, St. Charles, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, and the City of Hammond (see Figure 2). With content analysis, we found the number of times the freight-related themes occurred, developed histograms of the theme frequencies for each parish, and compared our analyses to the history of freight transportation in regional planning (see Figure 3).
Parishes in the study area.
Histogram of distribution of planning themes by Parish.
We chose these parishes because seven of them—Orleans, Lafourche, Tangipahoa, St. James, Jefferson, Plaquemines, and St. John the Baptist—have high concentrations of freight transportation infrastructure and commodity flows, and are home to 44% of the nation’s refinery capacity. Because St. Charles, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, and Hammond are in a contiguous unit with these seven parishes, we hypothesized that this unit could be a primary node in the Gulf Coast megaregion. Table 1 summarizes the freight transportation resources in the study area.
Freight Resources in the Study Area.
Our units of observation were the 11 parish master plan summaries. Our units of analysis were the four themes of land use, transportation, economic development, and quality of life, whenever these themes were found by concentrations of “word-groups” within the plan summaries to be specifically freight related. Some examples of these word-groups are as follows:
Theme: Freight Land Use
“Seek to increase value-added manufacturing and distribution activities on port [of New Orleans]-owned industrial land”;
“The existing industrial areas [in St. Bernard parish] are envisioned in the Future Land Use Map to remain unchanged”;
“. . . future land use map for Plaquemines identifies several key freight components on the map.”
Theme: Freight Transportation
“. . . Enhancing freight rail service also will affect the City of Hammond’s economy”;
“The Parish [St. James] straddles the Mississippi River and has access to Interstate Highway 10. It is therefore ideally positioned to handle freight”;
“St. Charles Parish is one of the three River Parishes (with St. James Parish and St. John the Baptist Parish) that hold port sites under the Port of South Louisiana . . . .”
Theme: Freight Oriented Economic Development
“The Mississippi bisects St. John [the Baptist Parish] and provides existing as well as tremendous future economic . . . ”;
“. . . created a railroad development district covering the territory of Jefferson Parish and Plaquemines Parish for the primary object and purpose of promoting and encouraging development of rail service in the area of the two (2) parishes; to stimulate the economy through renewed commerce . . .”;
“. . . half of the top 6 employers in [Tangipahoa] Parish are distribution centers . . .”
Theme: Freight as It Relates to Quality of Life
“. . . ‘overwhelming’ other neighborhoods and streets [in Orleans parish] especially with high volumes of truck traffic”;
“Conflict between economic needs and quality of life. Giving away more than [St. James] parish is getting back”;
“Ensure that zoning and other [St. Charles] Parish regulations are consistent with applicable noise contours.”
We relied both on the number of appearance of certain words, such as “freight,” “rail,” “ports,” and “interstate,” and on the overall sense of a freight focus communicated in these summaries by the way the specific words were deployed in the larger phrases, or word-groups given in the earlier examples.
What the Results Show
The Transportation theme occurred in all 11 of the parishes. It was the most frequent in eight of them (Orleans, Lafourche, Tangipahoa, St. James, St. Tammany, St. John the Baptist, Jefferson, and the City of Hammond). Land Use was the second most frequently occurring theme. It appears in nine of the 11 parishes and is absent from Lafourche and Tangipahoa. It was the most frequent theme in only one parish, Plaquemines. However, it was more frequent in four of the nine in which it occurs—St. Charles, St. Tammany, St. John the Baptist, and St. Bernard.
Economic Development was the third most frequently occurring theme. It appears in six of the 11 parishes—Orleans, St. Charles, St. Tammany, St. John the Baptist, Jefferson, and St. Bernard. Jefferson and St. Bernard are where it occurred most frequently out of the six, and of those two, it was most frequently represented in St. Bernard. Quality of Life was the least frequently occurring theme. It appears in five of the 11 parishes—Orleans, St. Charles, St. James, St. Tammany, and St. John the Baptist in descending order. Of these five, it appears most frequently in Orleans and is interestingly present rather than economic development in St. James Parish. St. Charles, St. Tammany, and St. John the Baptist have more even representations of freight-related themes in their summaries than the other parishes.
There was no correlation between a parish’s geographic location and the concentration of freight-related themes in its comprehensive plan summary. Therefore, geographic location was not considered a predictor of the intensity of freight consideration in a parish’s planning strategy—a policy key to a parish’s megaregional functionality. There was some degree of correlation between the evenness of freight theme distribution in a parish’s comprehensive plan summary and the concentration of potential freight transportation infrastructure within that parish. “Evenness of freight theme distribution” refers to the degree of equal occurrence of each of the four themes within a given parish plan summary, as indicated by the histograms. That is, the more themes that a parish had represented, with fewer outliers occurring, the more evenly distributed were that parish’s freight themes. The presence of or potential for freight transportation infrastructure was correlated with more even freight theme discussion in the comprehensive plan summaries.
Planning and Policy Must Be Coordinated
One of the repeated issues was freight-related land use policy. However, some plans that include the goals of either cultivating or expanding on multimodal capacity through land-use policy at interstate highway interchanges, and the expansion of port-related freight transportation, describe serious disconnects between these goals and their potential realization. For example, where the metropolitan plan for St. Tammany Parish discusses congestion in key freight-related areas, it states, “Although such improvements have been contemplated for the last 20 years, the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development has not placed a high priority on these improvements. Because most of the major arterials in the parish are state highways, parish and local officials cannot control the timing of improvements.”
A notable exception to this pattern of disjointed regional transportation policy and planning came about as a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 that reinforced the mutually dependent relationship between Baton Rouge and New Orleans within the Gulf Coast megaregion. Before the storms, the megaregion was a conceptual framework; after the storms, it was a reality shared by Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and other Gulf Coast communities and resulted in the solidification of a regional economic unit we refer to as the New Orleans–Baton Rouge Petrochemical Corridor. It is a subregion within the wider Gulf Coast megaregion, composed of Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and the parishes that line both sides of the Mississippi River between the two cities, the economic and freight transportation hub of Louisiana’s petrochemical industry. As such, it is analogous, although on a smaller scale, to the Texas Triangle, which comprises Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin, and is connected by I-45, I-10, and I-35.
Megaregions and MAP-21/FAST
For the United States to reap the full benefits of megaregional planning and development, coordinated freight transportation policy at the national level is necessary. FAST can facilitate this, addressing “policy bottlenecks” such as environmental and historic preservation permits and also “codifying the online system to track projects and interagency coordination processes” (United States Congress, 2015). In addition, the American Association of Port Authorities (2015) cites delays in development and improvements as stemming from failure to clarify the federal definition of “freight” or “freight projects.” If government and private sector stakeholders do not coordinate efforts on planning, project selection, and funding, freight projects will often compete unsuccessfully with nonfreight projects for limited funding.
FAST was crafted to use freight policies to target economic challenges the nation will be facing by 2040. For example, under the earlier MAP-21, the freight network was still largely defined in terms of trucking, even though maritime shipping accounts for more than three fourths of the tonnage and nearly one half the value of American international goods traded. However, U.S. maritime infrastructure is badly deteriorated and in need of considerable reinvestment. FAST makes a specific commitment to “address the conditions and performance of the multimodal freight system, identify strategies and best practices to improve intermodal connectivity and performance of the national freight system, and mitigate the impacts of freight movement on communities.” It earmarks some future federal highway funds for intermodal projects. FAST also increases the federal role and coordination throughout the planning process, focusing “local governments on the needs of freight transportation providers . . . [Collecting] performance measures for leading U.S. maritime ports” and facilitating funding applications. In addition, the Trump administration’s new budget prioritizes improvements to the network of locks and dams on the inland waterway subsystem (Ewing, 2017). Because of MAP-21 and FAST, the possibility now exists for expansion of project eligibility in all Louisiana parishes.
What This Means for Louisiana
FAST’s facilitation of regional planning focusing on freight transportation, by expanding existing infrastructure and the land available, is crucial to Louisiana’s successful participation in the regional economy. Realizing the freight transportation potential of the entire Gulf Coast calls for intra-national trade agreements that will eliminate economic and governance barriers that hinder full integration of the counties and states that comprise the “Gulf Coast Megaregion.” Transportation policy in any given region, including freight transportation policy, must not only be specific to the geographic requirements of the region but also designed with the goal of full megaregional integration. This article shows that concentrations of freight transportation infrastructure in southeast Louisiana are correlated with greater thematic emphasis on freight in the parish plans.
However, the emphasis on freight in these plans does not always translate into the advancement of coherent and coordinated intermodal freight transportation policy. One reason for this could be that the freight plans are updated too infrequently to affect timely change and necessary action. This can lead to outdated transportation systems, inefficiency, and congestion. The freight theme elements in these plans should be crystallized in freight transportation policies that meet the stated goals of the FAST Act. Ultimately, FAST is about securing funding for transportation planning for the intermodal freight network for the foreseeable future. The State of Louisiana and the parishes in the study area must be better prepared and regionally coordinated if they are to be well positioned to compete for future federal funding for freight transportation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.