Mark Solomon joined DC VELOCITY as senior editor in August 2008, and was promoted to his current position on January 1, 2015. He has spent more than 30 years in the transportation, logistics and supply chain management fields as a journalist and public relations professional. From 1989 to 1994, he worked in Washington as a reporter for the Journal of Commerce, covering the aviation and trucking industries, the Department of Transportation, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to that, he worked for Traffic World for seven years in a similar role. From 1994 to 2008, Mr. Solomon ran Media-Based Solutions, a public relations firm based in Atlanta. He graduated in 1978 with a B.A. in journalism from The American University in Washington, D.C.
The developers of a monthly index that gauges economic activity by tracking truck drivers' fuel purchases said late Tuesday that the index fell in August by 1 percent, a figure they said was disappointing but was not a harbinger of the widely discussed "double-dip" recession.
The Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index (PCI), published by the university's Anderson School of Management, analyzes data from fuel credit cards swiped by drivers as they fill their rigs. The database, created by Ceridian, captures the location and volume of fuel being purchased. Because the information is tracked in real time, UCLA and Ceridian said the index paints an accurate picture of product flow across the United States and, by extension, overall economic activity.
The picture painted for August was not pretty, especially after July's 1.7-percent increase raised hopes of a slow but steady recovery.
"The August data is obviously discouraging after the cautious optimism created from July's report," said Ed Leamer, chief economist for the PCI, in a statement. Leamer said there "is not much to feel good about" in terms of last month's data raising hopes for a stronger recovery and a drop in the unemployment rate, which stands nationwide at 9.6 percent. He added, however, that the August index "remains far from double-dip territory."
Through August, the PCI has grown by 6 percent year over year. Though August represents the ninth consecutive month of growth, the pace of expansion has been declining since June. PCI results need to reach 10 to 15 percent year-over-year growth to signal a healthy job market.
When the July PCI was released, its developers predicted a third-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate of 4 percent if August and September data came in strong. In the wake of the subpar August results, they now expect third-quarter GDP growth to be between 1.5 and 2.5 percent.
"The restocking of inventory and exceptional growth in imports that were helping drive the transportation of goods and materials appears to be over," said Craig Manson, senior vice president and index expert for Ceridian, in the statement. "We have seen August economic results from the manufacturing sector continuing their positive momentum, but it's too difficult to interpret, at this point, what it means for trucking."
“This traffic data suggests a relatively small number of bridges see a disproportionate amount of the largest ship traffic. It’s very clear where the heavy traffic is happening and these bridges should be prioritized for more careful and rigorous risk analysis,” Shields said.
To create the study, researchers used data mining techniques to identify the nation’s bridges that are the most vulnerable to a similar strike. First, they collected six years of U.S. Coast Guard data—logs detailing the precise location, heading, speed, and status of every ship traveling through the country’s waters on a minute-by-minute basis. Then they cross-referenced the geolocated shipping information with port data and bridge data from the National Bridge Inventory to determine which large ships passed under bridges. Finally, they built a program to analyze that data set to assess large-ship traffic under more than 200 major U.S. bridges.
The results show that three bridges had—by far—the most traffic from the very largest ships: The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in New York City, the Talmadge Memorial Bridge in Georgia, and two San Francisco Bay Area bridges. In addition, bridges with the most traffic from large (but not necessarily the very largest) ships include Houston’s Fred Hartman Bridge and several bridges along the Mississippi River including the Crescent City Connection in New Orleans. Meanwhile, the Francis Scott Key Bridge ranked among the top 10 bridges in very large ship traffic, with on average one ship longer than 300 meters (the size of the Dali) passing under it per day.
Shields cautioned that high ship traffic alone doesn’t necessarily mean a bridge is at high risk for collisions. Other variables that play a role include local shipping channel conditions, along with existing shipping safety practices, and individual bridge protections.
According to Indiana-based Wabash, its TaaS offering differs from traditional leasing because it ensures minimal downtime by providing a holistic solution that supports the full lifecycle of the trailer, from acquisition to maintenance and uptime management.
In addition to its TaaS service, Wabash makes products including: dry freight and refrigerated trailers, flatbed trailers, tank trailers, dry and refrigerated truck bodies, structural composite panels and products, trailer aerodynamic solutions, and specialty food grade processing equipment.
In turn, California-based Kodiak will focus on further developments to “Kodiak Driver,” its autonomous technology. The company last month said it had surpassed 50,000 miles of autonomous long-haul trucking by working in collaborations with other companies such as supply chain solutions provider J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. and tire and sustainable mobility vendor Bridgestone Americas.
The supply chain visibility and execution software startup Gnosis Freight has gained new funding from private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, the firms said today.
The investment supports Gnosis’ mission to help logistics companies work together better across the entire ecosystem, the seven-year old, South Carolina-based firm said. Gnosis says its tech provides a smarter way to track and manage containers and to collaborate with logistics partners in a single location.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
But Texas-based Vista said the “strategic growth investment” was made by the firm’s Endeavor Fund, which provides growth capital and strategic support to market-leading, high-growth enterprise software, data and technology-enabled companies that have achieved at least $10 million in recurring revenue.
“Gnosis is pioneering digital connectivity between logistics partners at a critical and complex juncture of the global supply chain,” Rachel Arnold, Co-Head of Vista’s Endeavor Fund and Senior Managing Director, said in a release.
In other recent deals, Vista last month acquired another supply chain tech firm, Jaggaer, from its previous private equity owner, Cinven, for an undisclosed amount.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) says the bipartisan legislation—called the Household Goods Shipping Consumer Protection Act—is needed because motor carriers are victimized through unpaid claims, unpaid loads, double brokered loads, or load phishing schemes on a daily basis.
The proposed act, which was introduced by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) and Congressman Mike Ezell (R-MS), offers a solution, OOIDA says. If passed, the bill would restore and codify FMCSA’s authority to issue civil penalties against bad actors. The legislation also requires that brokers, freight forwarders, and carriers provide a valid business address to FMCSA in order to register for authority.
According to Rep. Norton, the bill “would clarify that FMCSA has the authority to assess civil penalties for violations of commercial regulations, and crucially, to withhold registration from applicants failing to provide verification details demonstrating they intend to operate legitimate businesses. Americans moving across state lines need to be able to have confidence in FMCSA-licensed companies transporting their physical belongings. I'm thankful for Rep. Ezell’s partnership in co-leading this bill with me and look forward to the bill’s progress in the Senate.”
The bill has been endorsed by the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), American Trucking Associations’ Moving & Storage Conference (ATA-MSC), Owner-Operator Independent Driver Association (OOIDA), the National Association of Small Trucking Companies (NASTC), Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA), Institute for Safer Trucking (IST) and Road Safe America.
OOIDA is now calling for the bill to get a swift vote before the full U.S. House of Representatives.
"Freight fraud committed by criminals and scam artists has been devastating to many small business truckers simply trying to make a living in a tough freight market,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer said in a release. “OOIDA and the 150,000 small-business truckers we represent applaud the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee for its bipartisan approach in providing FMCSA better tools to root out fraudulent actors, which are also harmful to consumers and highway safety. Because of the broad industry support for these commonsense reforms, we hope this legislation will move to the full House of Representatives for a vote without delay.”
A coalition of freight transport and cargo handling organizations is calling on countries to honor their existing resolutions to report the results of national container inspection programs, and for the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to publish those results.
Those two steps would help improve safety in the carriage of goods by sea, according to the Cargo Integrity Group (CIG), which is a is a partnership of industry associations seeking to raise awareness and greater uptake of the IMO/ILO/UNECE Code of Practice for Packing of Cargo Transport Units (2014) – often referred to as CTU Code.
According to the Cargo Integrity Group, member governments of the IMO adopted resolutions more than 20 years ago agreeing to conduct routine inspections of freight containers and the cargoes packed in them. But less than 5% of 167 national administrations covered by the agreement are regularly submitting the results of their inspections to IMO in publicly available form.
The low numbers of reports means that insufficient data is available for IMO or industry to draw reliable conclusions, fundamentally undermining their efforts to improve the safety and sustainability of shipments by sea, CIG said.
Meanwhile, the dangers posed by poorly packed, mis-handled, or mis-declared containerized shipments has been demonstrated again recently in a series of fires and explosions aboard container ships. Whilst the precise circumstances of those incidents remain under investigation, the Cargo Integrity Group says it is concerned that measures already in place to help identify possible weaknesses are not being fully implemented and that opportunities for improving compliance standards are being missed.