The purpose of the 4th National Urban Freight Conference (NUF) 2011 is to continue to examine the impacts of goods movement and international trade in metropolitan areas.  This year's NUF Conference was held on October 12-14 at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach, California.  

A Call for Abstracts (CFA) was issued in March 2011 both nationally and internationally with abstracts due by June 14, 2011.

The first National Urban Freight Conference in 2006 afforded researchers and practitioners a unique opportunity to consider the “urban side” of freight across many disciplines.  We continued that opportunity in 2007 for the 2nd NUF Conference held in December 2007 and with the 3rd NUF held in October 2009. Our understanding of how freight and international trade affect urban areas remains limited.  The distribution of economic and environmental impacts across metropolitan areas merits further documentation.  The tools for modeling and forecasting freight flows within regions are not well developed.  The nature of the goods movement supply chain is still poorly understood, and implications of the supply chain logic for urban areas are only developing.

The papers and presentations are on any aspect of urban goods movement.  Major topical areas include:

1. Models for urban goods movement
2. Port operations
3. Trucking/air/rail economics and logistics, productivity, labor issues
4. Local and regional environmental externalities:  congestion, air quality, environmental justice, etc.
5. Policy and institutional issues in urban goods movement
6. Security/vulnerability of goods movement
7. Best practices/lessons learned

Spotlight Sessions topics included Environmental Justice, Trucking, North American Research Linkages, and "What Researchers Need to Know About Industry."