inspection requirements unless the secretary of transportation deems otherwise. One concern the industry groups cited in 2005 in their chassis safety agreement was a patchwork of state regulations.
The FMCSA’s predecessor agency started working on an intermodal chassis rule in 1999 at the request of the ATA, one of the groups that signed the 2005 agreement. But the rule languished and was withdrawn at the end of 2003 when the FMCSA decided it couldn’t justify the rule’s expected safety benefits.
This time, the FMCSA said it expects not only improved safety but also productivity benefits for shippers and chassis owners.
“Delays at a port or rail intermodal terminal and on the road due to poor container chassis condition affect only a small segment of the motor carrier industry,” the agency wrote. “However, delays at intermodal facilities and the related issue of poor container chassis condition on the road are crucially important to trucking firms that pick up and deliver freight at ports and rail terminals.”
The FMCSA also said detailed data from four states —including California — shows intermodal chassis have more serious safety problems than other motor vehicles. Tires and brakes are particular problem areas.
In addition to the ATA, the Association of American Railroads and the Ocean Carrier Equipment Manufacturers Association signed the 2005 chassis agreement. The Intermodal Association of North America, which pressed for an industry agreement rather than legislation, did not sign on.
“Our line all the way through it was to attempt to try to do a private sector agreement that would alleviate the need for regulation,” IANA Vice President for Business Development and Member Services Tom Malloy said. “That has not come to fruition, unfortunately.”
Malloy does not expect major business changes as a result of the new rule. “It doesn’t necessarily change what they’ve been doing,” he said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency admits it did a lot of things wrong in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, especially when it came to logistics and transportation.
That’s why hiring a logistics chief and improving logistics are priorities for FEMA Administrator David Paulison.
In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, Paulison ranked logistics second only to communications as a source of FEMA’s post-Katrina failures.
The agency needs to know where supplies are and deliver the right quantities to the right places, said Paulison. He said he will hire a top logistics official to make that happen.
“Logistics, having the right things in the right place at the right time; we didn’t do that very well,” Paulison said.
Since it assessed its notoriously poor response, FEMA has quadrupled the amount of supplies it keeps positioned close to disaster-prone areas. Those stockpiles include enough food to feed a million people for a week.
“We’re also prestaging those supplies around the country in areas that we know are vulnerable, and then also predeploy-ing them when we know a disaster’s coming, which we’ve done very well,” he said.
“And it’s food, water, tarps and generators, all those things that the local communities are going to need when they respond to a disaster.”
In addition to having the supplies, FEMA wants to know where they are at all times, a new goal of “total asset visibility.”
“FEMA did not have the capability to track its supplies once they left our warehouses,” Paulison said. “Any business today can do that. FedEx does it. Wal-Mart does it. Home Depot does it. Any business shipping commodities can do that. FEMA did not have the ability.”
To improve visibility, FEMA has bought 20,000 reusable GPS devices to affix to trucks carrying relief supplies.
In addition to its in-house logistics improvements, FEMA now has a formal partnership with the Defense Logistics Agency to work together in times of disaster.
“Nobody moves supplies better than the U.S. Army, and we have a relationship with them now where they will be leveraging their capabilities to back us up as we move into these disasters,” Paulison said. “As we move supplies out of our warehouses, they can be moving supplies into our warehouses.
Flexing its muscle on behalf of shippers and their transportation providers, a leading business group is calling on Congress to address transportation infrastructure needs this year.
The National Association of Manufacturers named infrastructure improvement second only to energy issues on its agenda of business-focused government policy priorities for 2007.
“There’s clearly an opportunity for this country to think dramatically differently about infrastruc-
ture,” NAM President John Engler said in a report on the new year. “A lot of our infrastructure is aging.”
NAM’s infrastructure push also includes a call for better telecommunications networks, but it is primarily focused on transportation infrastructure across all modes.
“To compete in our economy, manufacturers must be able to move their products,” Engler said.
With information from its shipper members, NAM executives are writing an infrastructure improvement plan that will include suggestions on how to pay for expanded capacity.
NAM Vice President for Resources and Environment Policy Keith McCoy, who is leading the infrastructure effort, said the working draft does not suggest shippers pay more in fees or taxes for infrastructure improvement. But, he said, if members insisted on that, NAM wouldn’t rule that out.
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