Tag Archives: trucking

Truckers Work Alongside the Coders Trying to ‘Eliminate’ Their Jobs

Posted on June 23, 2017 by | Leave a comment

The headline is a gross misstatement of what this innovative startup is trying.  They want to write software that makes existing trucks, perhaps with a few sensors added, able to self-drive on the freeways.  A trucker will be in the cab at all times.  This approach is much more likely to be practical soon; there’s almost no chance that drivers will be eliminated from the cabs of vehicles soon. Politicians and insurance companies won’t have it, nor will the trucking companies themselves; the liability issues are way too daunting.

BloombergAt the autonomous driving startup Starsky Robotics, the present and future of U.S. employment ride in the same cab.

Source: These Truckers Work Alongside the Coders Trying to Eliminate Their Jobs – Bloomberg

You may need to log in to see the story. There’s a link to a great podcast in it, an interview with the leader of this company.

https://soundcloud.com/bloomberg-business/human-vs-machine-self-driving-trucks

Innovation in the self-driving space is definitely to evolve into a standard set that we all will be able to use; the more tries the better, at this stage, to explore the realms of the possible.

 

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Posted in entrepreneurship, Labor Economics, Logistics, Supply Chains, Trucking

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ILA concerned about NY/NJ chassis depot rents

Posted on May 23, 2017 by | 1 comment

Trucking and container chassis again moves into the spotlight. But now it’s how much to pay for the ground the chassis get stored on at the port.  The dislocation caused by ocean lines trying to foist off chassis ownership on truckers continues to hurt US ports.

Chassis provision has played a key role in the port container supply chains since ocean lines divested in 2013.  The issue was a key factor in the West Coast labor dispute at ports, and now is headed eastward.

The whole problem with pools, of chassis or otherwise, is how to allocate the burden of maintaining them, or, put another way, allocate the gains of pooling among the participants. Again it seems, truckers will not be benefiting; these players will fight over fees and split them while truckers will wind up paying in lease rates for whatever adjustments there are.  The ILA is at least bringing attention to the problem.

  Increasingly high rents charged to chassis providers by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey could hurt the port’s overall competitiveness, says Dennis Daggett, executive vice president of the International Longshoremen’s Association.

Source: ILA concerned about NY/NJ chassis depot rents

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Posted in Labor Economics, Logistics, Ports, Shipping, Supply Chains, Trucking

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Terminals in Ports of L.A., Long Beach move container chassis fee to September 1

Posted on August 10, 2016 by | Comments Off on Terminals in Ports of L.A., Long Beach move container chassis fee to September 1

Again the container chassis issue creates controversy.  Leasing companies created a ‘pool of pools’ in the LA/Long Beach area but are not paying port operators for services and storage performed on or by the port operators.  The $5 fee on a loaded chassis (whether the container is empty or not) is supposed to cover this work.

It’s another example of how hard it is to get a pool to work well.  Normal ways of compensating participants are not usually fair to all parties; nor do they usually act to keep the pool together.  But here the issue is simply that the pool is skimming profits by benefiting from free work by a non-participant; or we could look at the terminals as a dummy participant that contributes no chassis but pays anyway.

We have a talk on a related aspect at the IAME 2016 annual conference in Hamburg later this month.

LONG BEACH, Calif.–The West Coast MTO Agreement (WCMTOA) has extended the implementation date of a new tariff rule for chassis services by one month.

Source: Terminals in Ports of L.A., Long Beach move chassis rule to September 1 – Canadian Shipper

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Posted in Logistics, Ports, Production Operations, Supply Chains, Trucking

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