Transportation Leaders Haunted By Road Woes, Clean-Air Rules

This story appears in the Jan. 19 print edition of Transport Topics.

WASHINGTON — While transportation professionals keep coming up with innovations in distribution, they also are squeezed by deteriorating infrastructure and demands for improved environmental quality, industry experts said.

They spoke during several of the Transportation Research Board’s “Freight Day” workshops here Jan. 13 about new techniques for moving goods, crumbling roads, insufficient port facilities and emissions challenges created by the need to address air-quality issues from trucks, trains and ships.

“We need to pay for our environmental costs,” said Mike Jacob, general counsel for the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association. One of the problems with operating a port, Jacob said, is emissions are concentrated in very limited areas.

Jacob said the nation’s West Coast ports, particularly in California, need to find a way to expand cleanly. He said the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex has lost market share for most of the past 10 years, and collecting funds to invest in cleaner systems is difficult when overall business is lagging.

Global and U.S. populations are both predicted to increase at least into the 2030s, said Jean Godwin, general counsel for the American Association of Port Authorities, and that means more goods moving around the world. Those goods will be moving on larger containerships that will soon be traveling through the expanded Panama Canal.

“It’s like peak [shipping] season every time one of these ships comes in,” Godwin said.

To stay ahead, Godwin said the federal government should do a better job of keeping up with its responsibilities in dredging ports. She also acknowledged the importance of landside facilities, pointing out that trucks and trains need to be able to bring in or take out containers and other cargo.

“We can’t just keep the status quo. We have to fight like hell to get more” funding to maintain and update these sites, she said.

One session pointed to Tennessee as a transportation laboratory, since that Department of Transportation offers economic development programs to help the state’s robust manufacturing sector.

TennDOT works on maintaining air, rail, highway and inland waterway facilities for the benefit of commerce, said Liza Joffrion, TennDOT’s multimodal division director.

Joffrion said more than 100,000 Tennesseans work for car makers or their suppliers, and the activity is spread through 80 of the state’s 95 counties. Automaker Nissan has its North American headquarters in Smyrna, while General Motors and Volkswagen also have assembly plants in the state. It is also home to 1,000 parts-making firms.

Chris Styles, a senior logistics director for Nissan in Smyrna, said he’s talked to colleagues who have worked in plant management and logistics, and they say logistics is the tougher assignment.

“If you’re running a plant, you can see the whole plant in front of you,” Styles said. In contrast, his logistics work involves monitoring ocean shipments from Asia, 30 North American railheads, plus inputs arriving and finished vehicles going out.

The evolution of how materials arrive is being accompanied by change in how consumers obtain goods, said Thomas Goldsby, an Ohio State business school professor. He said that the philosophy of 20th-century retailing was, “Here it is, come and get it.” While that still exists, he said, it is slowly being replaced by, “What do you want? We’ll bring it to you.”

Douglas Estrada, a logistics executive at Wal-Mart Stores who previously worked at less-than-truckload carriers ABF Freight and Roadway Express, described changes at the retail giant’s superstores, the cavernous outlets with large parking lots that can accommodate trucks with 53-foot trailers.

However, Wal-Mart is also operating urban grocery stores and convenience stores that get stocked with 28-foot pup trailers or medium-duty Sprinter vans.

Just as distribution centers on the edge of a metropolitan area feed the supercenters, Estrada said, the supercenters are now used to feed the smaller groceries and convenience stores.

Goldsby said the next step he wants to see is “come find me” delivery. Admitting that he values convenience over privacy, Goldsby said he wants companies to track him down using his smart phone and make the delivery based on real-time GPS tracking.

“I want companies to know that I’m not fully satisfied yet, so keep working on it,” he said.