Officials Urge Congress to Fix Terminal Roads

ASHINGTON — A panel of intermodal experts urged Congress at a recent Capitol Hill hearing to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, which includes improving secondary roads leading to and from ports and rail yards.

An overarching transportation plan must be developed now to handle the onslaught of foreign imports through U.S. ports to rails and trucks, said officials with American Trucking Associations and other transportation groups and governmental agencies. The officials on June 15 spoke with the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure’s Subcommittee on Highways, Transit and Pipelines.

Increased efficiencies “in ports, rail yards and other intermodal transfer facilities will be for naught if the secondary roads that connect them” to the nation’s highways “continue to deteriorate,” said Timothy Lynch, ATA’s senior vice president of Federation Relations and Strategic Planning.