Truckers Complain About Slow Progress in Improving Intermodal Chassis Practices

GRAPEVINE, Texas — Intermodal truckers are seeing painfully slow progress on two long-standing and related issues — changes in the providers of chassis for container shipments and effective implementation of federal chassis safety rules, industry officials reported.

Motor carriers and suppliers tackled those subjects during American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition here as some ocean carriers are abandoning the traditional supply of free chassis to truckers and federal chassis safety rules are still being fine-tuned.

Those federal rules began to take effect in 2009 at about the same time that Maersk, the largest ocean carrier, started charging for chassis use and some competitors stopped offering them altogether.

“There has been a lot of angst,” said Curtis Whalen, executive director of the Intermodal Motor Carriers Conference, referring to the chassis situation.

Officials at leasing companies and chassis pool operators, who are stepping in to provide equipment as ocean carriers withdraw from the chassis market, acknowledge the frustration, but they are trying to stress a broader view.

“We still have a rather inconsistent approach as far as where each ocean carrier is coming from with regard to chassis,” said Phil Connors, a senior vice president at Flexi-Van Leasing and former intermodal trucker. “The different approaches [taken by ocean carriers] are very confusing. It is going to take a couple of more years for this [chassis issue] to shake out.”

At the same time, he insisted that “this is not a revolution; this is an evolution. The dialogue is improving. Anything is better than none, which is what was happening before.”

Adam Bridges, vice president of TRAC Intermodal, took a similar approach, describing the chassis supply process as, “This is not a crisis; this is a transition.”

Phil Wojcik, president of chassis pool operator CCM, also tried to convince truckers that progress is being made. CCM, which is owned by 20 major ocean carriers, is continuing to provide chassis even as individual carriers’ strategies change.

CCM’s pools “are the most efficient way for motor carriers and asset owners to move cargo,” Wojcik said. “The pool is here to stay. We have managed to meet all of our members’ needs.”

Wojcik also noted that CCM is making progress in giving truckers more flexibility in using pools and in addressing information technology questions that have arisen, such as tracking a container that may be riding on a chassis supplied by a different provider.

Pat Valentine, safety director for Maersk’s chassis supply subsidiary, maintained that “change is tough, but it is worth it in the long run.”

Maersk’s Direct Chassis Link program works, Valentine said, because its chassis can be used to haul any ocean carrier’s equipment, and its chassis equipment condition is the industry’s best.

Equipment issues, however, remain as a key concern.

“We don’t have control over our own lives,” said Randy Guillot, president of New Orleans-based Southeastern Motor Freight, a drayage carrier, who criticized indemnity agreements truckers are forced to sign for chassis in spite of state laws that limit their indemnity.

Describing those agreements as offensive, he asked, “Why would we indemnify a leasing company for your latent chassis defect?”

Whalen expressed a different set of concerns about equipment condition arising from the implementation of the chassis rules, which FMCSA is still adjusting.

Truckers pushed for those rules for more than a decade in an effort to shift the burden for chassis maintenance from themselves to steamship lines. The ocean carriers were the primary chassis providers when a federal law was passed in 2005 to shift the chassis maintenance burden to steamship lines.

Whalen complained that roadside inspectors continue to assign violations to truckers when they should have been given to the chassis provider.

The problem, he said, is that FMCSA still is working on changes to a checklist of violations used by those inspectors, who assign responsibility for a defect based on whether it was detectable during the pre-trip inspection that truckers are supposed to do before taking the chassis onto the highway.

Whalen contended that dozens of the 70-plus violations on the list should be assessed against the chassis provider because the driver can’t possibly detect them during the pre-trip inspection.

“We are bogged down,” Whalen said. “We are really at a critical juncture of getting the law rolling and making it fair for the intermodal carrier.”

Until the checklist is revised, possibly as early as next month, the violations that are improperly assigned to the truckers are hurting their federal safety scores on the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program and causing some drivers to shy away from making intermodal moves, Whalen said.