The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) isn’t mincing words.
In its new report Unlocking Freight, AASHTO says the US freight transportation system is facing a crisis, and that the nation’s highways, railroads, ports, waterways, and airports require investments well beyond current levels to maintain – much less improve – their performance. (more…)
Trade experts at last week’s “Pulse of the Ports”conference agreed that they are seeing early signs of economic recovery –but they also cautioned that lingering unemployment, tight credit and the depressed housing market remain significant challenges that could keep the turnaround muted, protracted and unpredictable.
As I have discussed in other posts, several recent indicators are suggesting that the economy is beginning to rebound. And now, according to panelists at the conference, we can add ports to the growing list of positive signs. The Port of Long Beach, for example, experienced the third straight month of growth in February.
In her speech last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, Commissioner of Food and Drugs, announced that the FDA is deploying a new web-based information technology system designed to more reliably monitor imports of food and medical products at the port of entry and to target high-risk shipments for further inspection.
The new system, called Predictive Risk-based Evaluation for Dynamic Import Compliance Targeting (PREDICT), uses a variety of assessments to rank import shipments according to risk. It considers everything from whether a product is intrinsically risky (raw seafood, e.g.) to information the FDA has acquired from previous examinations of shippers or producers. Officials can even factor in transitory data such as floods, hot weather or market conditions which might imply that a particular shipment is at risk of being spoiled. Taken together, these elements add up to a risk score—and the riskiest items are the ones that FDA investigators will check first, Dr. Hamburg said.
In addition to the announcement about PREDICT, Dr. Hamburg’s speech included several statistics that really drive home the message about : 1) the enormous complexity of the challenges faced by the FDA and 2) the dire necessity to improve the status quo at our ports. For instance, she explained that: (more…)
Zepol has created an extremely useful report of the top 50 US ports for port authorities, steamship lines, 3PLs, importers, and suppliers of the United States market.
Titled “The Year in Review: 2009 U.S. Containerized Import Ports Report,” the document includes a list of the 50 U.S. ports based on TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit), plus additional details about: (more…)
Standardized shipping containers have been in use for more than 50 years, and at this point, they’re a supply chain component most of us just take for granted. However, if you stop for a minute and give it some consideration, you’ll certainly come to realize that standardized containerization has had a dramatic effect on international trade –“making the world smaller and the world economy bigger,” as Marc Levinson says.
But even so, not much has changed with the simple iron box conceived fifty years ago.
Well, not much has changed. . . until now. (more…)
