Teaching lessons through Talking Freight.

For more than a year, FHWA's Office of Freight Management and Operations, in partnership with the Office of Planning, Environment, and Realty, have jointly hosted a monthly seminar series via internet and telephone called "Talking Freight," led by a variety of government and industry experts.

A component of FHWA's Freight Professional Development and Transportation Planning Capacity Building programs, the Talking Freight seminars provide current information, new training opportunities, and noteworthy practices on various freight planning topics, targeting those in the public and private sectors who are responsible for planning, designing, building, managing, and operating the transportation system. FHWA held the first seminar on July 23, 2003.

Each seminar lasts 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for presentations by transportation planning experts and 30 minutes for questions from participants. FHWA provides instructions to registered participants on how to view the speakers' slide presentations using Webconferencing tools. Participants can listen to the audio portion of the seminar by calling a designated teleconference number. Recent seminar topics have included freight security and urban goods movement and planning.

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"The feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive," says Scott Johnson with FHWA's Office of Freight Management and Operations. "Our partners have told us repeatedly that training resources are becoming more and more constrained, so they appreciate that we listened and responded to their concerns with this free and flexible delivery approach."

According to Eloise Freeman-Powell with FHWA's Office of Planning, customers also can access archived Talking Freight presentations at any time after the seminar. "This is one of the great advantages to using webconferencing technology for training purposes--it accommodates our customers' busy work schedules," she says. "In fact, about one-third of our total audience has accessed the archived Talking Freight presentations from our joint FHWA Freight Planning Web site, which demonstrates the value of this feature."

Due to the positive feedback, the planning and freight offices are exploring even more opportunities to deliver freight planning training via webconferencing technology during 2005.

For more information on the Talking Freight series, visit http://talkingfreight.webex.com