Learning to cope with congestion and cargo growth

September 30, 2006 by SwizStick  
Filed under Supply Chain Management

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One of the results of the growth in international trade has been an increase in the volume of cargo being handled at ports and major metropolitan areas around the U.S. As ports and related logistics infrastructure struggle to keep up with the growth in cargo, some areas are taking a proactive approach in coping with current conditions and planning for future cargo growth. The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this week discussed some of the challenges and issues that area planners are dealing with:

“A lot of experts are saying the volume of cargo here will double by 2020,” said Theodore K. Dahlburg, freight planning manager at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

With 100 million people living within a one-day drive of Philadelphia, transportation and logistics services are widely recognized as important to economic-growth and job-creation opportunities. So preparing for growth is critical to the region’s prosperity.
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“Distribution sites are getting bigger,” said Carl Gersbach, a Berwyn-based managing director for the C.B. Richard Ellis Inc. real estate firm. “There is a tremendous challenge ahead for the U.S. to handle the amount of imports. All of this stuff has to be put somewhere before its gets distributed.”

The nation’s seaports and distribution centers “are not growing as fast as imports,” he said.

To help prepare, 50 planners from the regional planning commission as well as state and local governments visited truck stops, distribution centers, seaport terminals and rail yards.
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Some parts of the growing problem were obvious right away, Dahlburg said.

There are, for example, far too few places for big trucks to park.

Dahlburg and colleague Scott Brady visited every truck stop and rest area in Southeastern Pennsylvania and South Jersey.

Every place they visited was overflowing and many trucks were parked in risky places along roadways. The problem is getting more serious because new limits on the hours that truckers can drive in a day are being strictly enforced, forcing drivers to park wherever they can when time runs out.

And there are too few signs directing big trucks. When a big truck gets lost it can cause problems. “It is hard for a truck pulling a 53-foot trailer to turn around,” Dahlburg said.

The planners also discovered fresh evidence of a problem that has long bedeviled many neighborhoods: the local roads that link major highways with distribution terminals. “We force freight to drop off the interstates and meander through neighborhoods,” Dahlburg said.

These are problems that every major port/logistics area need to confront and assess. They are problems that have long plagued the Long Beach/Los Angeles area for years and they aren’t going to go away, they will only get larger. It appears planners in the Philadelphia area are taking the right approach, learning what the issues are and investigating solutions. Cooperation between states and localities will also be important as regions served by major logistics points work to improve infrastructure and ease congestion. It’s also noteworthy that cities are beginning to realize the economic impact of transportation and logistics, especially from a job-creation standpoint.

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