Port of Charleston drayage drivers see more congestion ahead With turn times of 30 to 45 minutes, the Port of Charleston is a model for the efficient handling of drayage trucks, but that doesn’t mean the South Carolina port is paradise for harbor truckers. “Our issue is not at the gates. The problem is infrastructure,” Pat Barber, president and CEO of Superior Transportation, told the South Carolina International Trade Conference Monday. Barber said the freeways in Charleston are jam-packed with commuter traffic every work day beginning about 4 p.m. Sending owner-operator truck drivers to the harbor in mid-to-late afternoon is not fair to the drivers, who will be stuck in traffic and could possibly reach their hours-of-service limitations without completing a revenue move, he said. Ports across North America have struggled in recent years with congestion at their terminal gates caused by a variety of factors — chassis shortages and weather issues in New York-New Jersey, chassis shortages and a crushing 35,000 truck moves per day in Los Angeles-Long Beach, and rail equipment shortages in Vancouver, Canada. These problems are projected to get worse because carriers continue to increase the size of vessels in the U.S. trades. Charleston, an operating port, does a good job of processing trucks into and out of the gates, and chassis availability is not an issue because the entire South Atlantic region is served by a grey or neutral chassis pool, local truckers said. However, as ships get bigger and the fast-growing local economy generates more vehicular and truck traffic, the local freeways will not be able to handle the increased traffic volume, truckers said. “The governor and State Legislature have to do something about it,” Barber said. Charleston is already served by vessels with capacities of up to 9,000 20-foot container units. After the Panama Canal is enlarged in 2016 and the Bayonne Bridge in New York is raised in order to allow the transit of larger vessels, all of the major East Coast gateways will have to contend with vessels of up to 13,000-TEU capacity. With the fastest-growing economy in the U.S., the Southeast in the next few years will have to deal with a significant increase in domestic and international freight, and cargo spikes at the ports of several thousand container lifts from each vessel call. Barber said port executives in Charleston meet regularly with the trucking community, and they have expressed a willingness to extend terminal gate hours. That may mean opening the gates earlier in the morning, or keeping gates open into the evening after commuter traffic has dissipated. Of course, extended gates are costly and someone will have to compensate the port for the extended work hours. Los Angeles-Long Beach, the nation’s largest port complex, encountered this problem in 2004 and terminal operators at the landlord port responded with the PierPass program that runs a regular program of up to five extra eight-hour gates each week. Retailers and other cargo interests compensate the terminal operators by paying a traffic mitigation fee on all truck moves that are made in the peak daytime hours. The revenue helps terminal operators to run night and weekend gates. So far no other U.S. ports, even those with notorious gate congestion, have achieved consensus from cargo interests, terminal operators and truckers on establishing a similar program of regular extended gates with compensation for terminal operators that keep their gates open up to 16 hours a day. JOC NEWS - SEPT 9 2014
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 22:48:26 +0000
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