Anne Strauss-Wieder is a nationally respected senior executive and expert who currently serves as the Director of Freight Planning for the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA). She has over 40 years of public and private sector experience involving supply chains, industrial and economic development, resilience, and freight movement. She is the 2022 recipient of the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) Thomas B. Deen Distinguished Lectureship. She teaches a course at the Bloustein School on Freights and Ports for the Urban Planning Graduate program.
Her latest published work in Transportation Research Record is titled “Evolving with Rapidly Shifting Supply Chains and Freight Systems: The Past, the Present, and the Emerging Future”. This paper:
- Reviews the evolution of the demands placed on and the services provided by the freight system over the last several decades, as well as the crucial roles that the public sector and the Transportation Research Board (TRB) have played; and
- Uses this understanding of the past to set the stage for how we approach the future.
This paper also considers the three layers that comprise supply chains and freight movement:
- The physical movement of goods, which includes all the facilities, equipment, modes, and interchanges that must occur.
- The information flows necessary to make these movements occur, such as transportation orders, financial flows, and international trade documents.
- The governmental rules and decisions that shape the playing field, including the laws and regulations that frame how the elements of the freight system must operate. These decisions also include how the public sector may fund capital improvements; consider emerging technologies; and place freight-related decisions within the broader context of public sector goals (such as environmental considerations, safety, interaction with passenger transportation, and economic development). Such governmental roles occur at the local, state, federal, and international levels.