The drying-up of Central European rivers is radically affecting goods movement there.
The graph below shows water levels at two gauges, one on the Rhine and one on the Danube. Both are dramatically lower. Barges on these rivers can carry less than 30% of their capacity. This prevents containers that arrived at Rotterdam and Antwerp and Hamburg area, for instance, from making it upstream to their destinations. Those goods will have to travel by road.
That’s not a good thing. It adds to air pollution, uses more oil-based fuel, and stresses highway systems already near capacity.
Europe has bet big on river traffic as a cleaner alternative to road carriage. For a few years, it worked. Now it is threatened by climate change.
There’s no way to predict when, if ever, the rivers will come back.
Here’s a project that should have happened 20 years ago.
California’s major ports, at Los Angeles and Long Beach, have been desperate for relief from drayage traffic for containers they bring in. It was a struggle to get rail to the ports so that containers could be directly loaded. In 2002 the Alameda Corridor began to move double-stack double-track trains from near (but not on) the ports to the San Bernardino area. But rail service to the bulk of the US was still elusive. Transloading to 53-foot truck containers was the main activity in the Eastern valley. And that led to more truck traffic on the already busy freeways.
Remember that in the earlier days, pre-COVID, the land-bridge was still a preferred route from Asia to Europe. Ship to LA/Long Beach, Rail to New York or another eastern port, and ship again to Europe. It was lower cost and shorter time than any other Asia-North Europe route. And that included the numerous delays in moving goods by rail out of the port areas.
The problem has been urgent because of air pollution from the many drayage trucks traversing the area. California has been trying to address this problem from many directions. One of the first methods was the Clean Trucks program, which banned engines earlier than 2007 carrying to and from ports, and imposed other requirements on NOx and particulate emissions, especially PM2.5, a demonstrated pathogen for breathing problems. Gate reservations came next, as an attempt to articulate delivery and pickup with container movements in the yard.
But many noticed that switching from truck to rail would cut pollution even faster, and perhaps even improve efficiency. Numerous researchers, including my coauthor Chris Clott and me, suggested that moving functions off the port quickly to inland sites, called inland ports, would work. We even suggested, back when the land-bridge was functioning well, that inland ports as far away as Chicago could boost efficiency. The ports were not interested at that time.
Meantime, the ports and private firms have invested in the Alameda Corridor, which took double-stack, double-track trains through a frantically busy melange of LA suburbs, with many overpasses and intersections that had to be rebuilt, and many regulatory challenges.
Now finally, BNSF, a major Class I railroad, one of two serving the West Coast, has committed to a large inland rail intermodal terminal. It’s near Barstow, CA, out in the desert, kind of toward Las Vegas. This large inland port will be able to eliminate over 200 million truck miles by its completion in 2028.
The latest yard technology will be used, including zero-emission cranes, forklifts, and hostlers, electric plug-ins for refrigerated containers, and hybrid rubber-tired gantry cranes. BNSF has also committed to use the cleanest available switching locomotives in the yard.
The project is appropriately nicknamed BIG (for Barstow Intermodal Gateway). The press release says “By relocating container sorting and processing from congested port-adjacent communities to Barstow—a high desert hub with strong transportation infrastructure—the project enables a major mode shift from trucking to cleaner, more efficient rail.”
California and its residents are serious about industry controlling pollution.
Christopher Clott, Bruce C. Hartman, Supply chain integration, landside operations and port accessibility in metropolitan Chicago, Journal of Transport Geography, Volume 51, 2016, Pages 130-139, ISSN 0966-6923, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2015.12.005.
Trucking is a big business with a great many operational challenges. Trucking firms and fleets deal with them every single day and there’s a lot of associated administrative overhead.
So it seems strange to me that startups have not tried to address these operational problems using AI.
This article presents some of what aifleet, a trucking firm with around 200 vehicles, is using to make trucking a better place to work.
Aifleet CEO El Khoury seems to me to be very farsighted, especially in the current state of innovation in trucking.
The new money flowing to AI in logistics seems to be going to applications relating to brokering. It is not going to routing and scheduling.
But it’s routing and scheduling where big efficiency gains can be made. It’s also where the lifestyle of truckers can be improved, an area many big carriers ignore. I think there would be easy pickings for AI-enhanced scheduling and routing practices. aifleet thinks the same.
Supply Chain and Logistics 