As both regulators and operators strive toward energy, security, sustainability, and carbon accounting goals, establishing a consistent approach in monitoring and comparing intermodal freight transportation becomes essential. Current freight performance tools focus on capacity, speed, throughput, productivity, or emissions and tend to be segregated within individual transportation modes. These tools are neither holistic enough for supply chains striving to eliminate waste, nor for transportation planners trying to prioritize public funding. This paper argues that evaluating intermodal quantitatively within an energy-based freight sustainability framework ensures that funding results in lower cost per ton of reduction of carbon, oxides of nitrogen or particulate matter emissions than from the practice of focusing on new engines, retrofits, or electrification.
