View the January 13, 2021 seminar recording
Jennifer Symoun
Good afternoon or good morning. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Jennifer Symoun and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is Trucking Industry Resilience During Disruption Events.
Before I go any further, I do want to remind you to call into the teleconference for the best audio quality. If you are listening to the audio over the computer and experience any issues, I am unable to fix them as audio quality will vary based on your network connection, computer, speakers, and other factors. Please also keep in mind if you are calling into the teleconference for the audio, you will need to mute your computer speakers or else you will be hearing your audio over the computer as well.
Today's seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. If during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the chat area. Please make sure you send your question to "Everyone" and indicate which presenter your question is for. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but I will start off the question and answer session with the questions typed into the chat box. We will also take questions over the phone if time allows and I will provide instructions on how to do so once we get to that point.
The PowerPoint presentations used during the seminar are available for download from the file download box in the lower right corner of your screen. The presentations will also be available online within the next few weeks, along with a recording and a transcript. I will send a link to the recording in the next day or so and will also notify all attendees once all materials are posted online.
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Finally, I encourage everyone to please also download the evaluation form from the file share box and submit this form to me after you have filled it out.
Today we'll have three presentations given by four presenters:
Our first presentation will be given jointly by Dr. Igor Linkov and Dr. Andrew Strelzoff of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Dr. Linkov is Senior Science and Technology Manager with the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), and Adjunct Professor with Carnegie Mellon University. He is responsible for ERDC's project portfolio in the areas of crises management and resilience. He develops methods and tools for measuring risk and resilience in interconnected network and applies these tools to critical infrastructure, transportation, energy and cyber systems, supply chains and currently to manage response and recovery following COVID pandemic. He was part of several Interagency Committees and Working Groups tasked with developing resilience metrics and resilience management approaches, including the US Army Corps of Engineers Resilience Roadmap, Secretary of Deference Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, and OSD Cyber Resilience Technical Committee. Dr. Linkov has received multiple awards for his scientific achievements from the Army and other organizations. Most recently he was a recipient of the 2021 Arthur Flemming Award for outstanding public service.
Dr. Andrew Strelzoff is the former head of Computer Science programs at the University of Southern Mississippi School of Computing. He is currently the lead of the Science, Process, Engineering, Engagement and Decision ~ or SPEED Data Analytics team at the Information Technology Laboratory of the Engineering Research and Development Center which is the research arm of the US Army Corps of Engineers. A prominent Machine Learning Generalist, Andrew works on all types of data analytics including support of world class experts such as Dr. Linkov.
Igor Linkov
Thank you very much. This is Igor Linkov. It is an honor to be invited. Andrew and I are going to present a little bit about our work in the field of resilience and transportation as a case study. We are part of a research arm of the Army Corps of Engineers. We are a large organization; 2500 people, significant budget. So, in a sense we are like [indiscernable] Center for the Department of Transportation, we are the research arm for the Army Corps. But I think the difference is that the Army Corps always executes work for others, we work for multiple federal agencies. And in the research, we do the same. Not only we do kind of mission work for Army Corps, but we support multiple agencies. So, the next slide shows the outline about presentation. I will start with one example of how we supported FEMA and Health and Human Services and COVID response. It is actually a good case study for generalizing issues reflective of system affected by threats. And I will spend a few minutes talking about that. Then, I will present a case study specifically on efficiency and resilience and transportation networks. And Andrew will show an example of using AI tools and methods and where I will be going with this line of work because I think that is the future. So, after that, we will open to questions. So, next slide.
So, we started supporting FEMA and HHS in the early days of COVID last March. I was doing analytics for pretty much for everything. One area that we provided support was actually food and food availability. And what is really striking for us to see is that food supply chains are severely disrupted. This is now like outdated, but we have lack of chicken, lack of ketchup, we don't have chips for computers. But food is really amazing. Next slide. This next slide shows that we have deficiency in food supply chain. And we have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. And the next slide shows one of the issues that we identified was that remote areas were very significant. This kind of connects to transportation. It was Martha's Vineyard that you would think this is where the Clintons and Obamas reside, very vital community, but they did have disruptions and in fact, visits to a pantry have actually increase compared to previous years. And the reason for that is actually disruption in the transportation network.
So, what is happening here? Next slide. We have a complex interconnected system that drives food availability and transportation is a crucial part of that, as well as many other components. When you have significant stressors, you start to see us getting failures across this system. And what is happening, and this is why we started using this complex system vacant, is that we cannot understand all the connections in this system. This is why we need to use resilience analytics, stress testing, and other tools to kind of figure out how to deal with the situation and prepare our system for crisis best.
So, I will start with defining some of the concepts because when I started the world of resilience 10 years ago, coming from risk analysis, which is 30 or 40 years old field, I realized that there is a lot of confusion, and the COVID crisis exaggerated it even further. But, in a nutshell, we all work in risk and security. And what this discipline does is they try to keep the system functional at the current level. When you think about risk assessment and management, you don't like for the system to go down in functionality. Well, when you talk about resilience, we think about the ability to recover and adapt. And the Oxford dictionary really defines it nicely. Next slide visualizes that even more. You can see it has critical functionality of the system it may be that the second presentation will be talking specifically about trucking industry, but you need to sustain some degree of needs and trucks available. But if you have disruption, it can go down and the question is how fast it can recovery. So, risk assessment only looks at probability of failure and we like to minimize it, while resilience is more about minimizing area of the curve of disruptive functionality. And resilience is the property of the system unlike risk. Risk is a property of threat vulnerability and consequences, while resilience is a property of the system. You can design the system to be resilient, but there are many other properties of the system that we talk about that are different from resilience. Again, I do not have time to go into all of that, but we are talking about the reliability of safety or robustness, it is all different from resilience. Resilience is really ability to adapt and recover and that is how executive orders and other documents discuss that.
So, I am on slide 11 and the next slide highlights another component of the issue. Right? Our system is designed to be efficient. We have just enough suppliers to sustain production. We just have enough trucks to sustain transportation needs. But, when you have crisis, all of a sudden you have a spike in demand. Or initially, in the COVID, we didn't have spike in demand, we had collapse of the system. But, from a resilience point of view, we need to have resources to mitigate that. And efficiency forces you to optimize, but resilience requires additional investment. And this is very important question: How do you harmonize resilience and efficiency because they require different sources?
So, with that, let me go quickly through this example that I published and that I am presenting. One second. You know, I just realized that maybe I have the wrong presentation open. I am doing this from my form, so let me just make sure that I have the right presentation. Okay, I guess I sent the wrong version. Anyway, I will continue with this version. So, then the question is, how are you going to quantify resilience? And in the most general way, you can measure resilience through metrics-based approaches or through model-based approaches. So, individual metrics, indices, and dashboards is an example of how we measure for metrics, and network science and game-theoretical approaches is how you model it. So, the next slide shows how we combine this result in what we call the resilience matrix. So, once again, let me just assure that I have the right one. I do apologize. Andrew, you may look at the slide I sent because you may not have the latest version, but it's too late to change. So, I'm on slide 15. You can see resilience matters there. What we tried to do was to integrate physical, [indiscernible], social domains for a complex systems and we overlap it with cycles of resilience: Prepare, Absorb, Recover, and Adapt. In matrix systems, initially we develop individual metrics that are combined into what is called utility. And this utility is reflective of overall resilience of the system and what we can do with that is we can compare baseline resilience to resilience resulting after implementing alternatives. What happens if you add more trucks available? What happens if you improve roads? What happens if you change the structure of the network, how they are moving and all that? But, of course, this approach is a deficient so, you really need to look at slide 17, Network-based resilience theory. And that is exactly what we used in our case study that I'm about to present. We present a complex system as interconnected networks and we explicitly model movements of signals like in cyber domain of goods and services and physical domain and we track resilience as property of nodes, links, and fluxes in this system.
So, next slide 18 shows a couple of papers where we look at transportation network modeling and we use regional economic model. Slide 19, we connect resilience model of the network and regional economic model. And, as a result of that, we can calculate resilience as a property of the network and then see how much of economic impact of lack of resilience manifest regionally. Again, I am going very quickly, but we have papers that we will be glad to share.
So, of course you model network overall as a connection of intersections and roads and you look at multiple cities and if we start to disrupt links, of course, you generate delay in transportation network. And you consider San Francisco has much more delay generated by the same disruption as compared to, for example, Jacksonville or other cities. And next slide, 21, visualize that you can see we have bad winters or something, you have a drop in this case, GDP and then recovery next year. Next slide, 22, shows that if you start to calculate that for 40 cities in the U.S., all of a sudden, you can cluster them into those that are more sufficient and resilient, and some of them were inefficient and not resilient. But there are cities that are resilient and not inefficient. For example, L.A. and San Francisco. L.A. is very resilient and San Francisco is not. But the transportation networks in both cities are really inefficient, you have a lot of delays. But, if you have disruption, L.A. has no problem and San Francisco has major problems. So, the reason for that is that the network quality and lay is such that people can find ways if highways or major roads are blocked. While in San Francisco, you probably get stuck in one of the bridges or along stretches of the sideway. So, that network is different and that is reflected in how we see the system.
Next slide, 23, shows impact on GDP. We look at how GDP can be modeled if you have normal economic models when you consider preparation. If you have more delays, you have in a nutshell, more GDP losses in a linear way. Those kind of major economic models are linear with this respect. But, if we in the middle integrate resilience model, you have significant nonlinearity. You have much more financial losses because of resilience. The reason for that is very simple. You can plan for inefficiency. If you know that in rush hour in the city it takes an hour to get to the office, you don't schedule any new meetings before getting 30 minutes late in the office. But, if you have unknowns like a major accident or a rain event or things like that, the value of your time that you are losing is something in unpredictable and it is much higher. And why it is important, next slide. It's a way to deal with efficiency and resilience in transportation. So, for example, to maximize efficiency, you can just build one more lane on the highway. Right? It will make it more efficient. But, if you have a tree blocking the whole highway, it will be the same lack of resilience. So, for resilience, you need to have multiple alternative ways to execute the same function because that is how we can overcome difficulties by using different modalities for that. And so, the next slide actually starts Andrew's portion of the presentation. Andrew?
Andrew Strelzoff
Hi, I am Andrew Strelzoff. I am a computer scientist with a background in applied math and machine learning. And, today, we will talk a little bit about what machine learning means to resilience. I work in an information technology lab that runs all of the DMV supercomputers and we have a mission to help other people access the power of that. A large portion of my job is getting the experts off of their spreadsheets and onto bigger and more powerful things where they can scale what they are doing. But, in the last four or five years, we have now moved into machine learning, which is not just scaling or making efficient, but also, the ability to approach new problems. Next slide please.
So, part of my job is I generally do a lot of disciplinary work which means working with experts in other fields. And part of it than is demystifying what we do. A lot of new fields tend to make up their own jargon and make it all seem very mysterious. What exactly is machine learning? Well, as Igor was talking, we can make models of the world based on our best understanding, and we set them in motion, we study them, we see what they do, and we try to make decisions on the basis of that. But we fairly quickly run into the notion that the real world, particularly with large interlocking dynamic systems, is much more complicated. And our small abstract models like the pendulum start show limits. So, starting five or six years ago, with a lot of new hardware and new algorithms and new results, we are now able to, instead of building models based on our best understanding, we are able to build models based on available data. So, the model itself may be hidden, it may be very large, it may be beyond human understanding. Some of the natural language processing models that we work with have billions of parameters. No human can possibly understand them, but they are powerful enough to understand human language.
So, this is a very broad topic and I have a small amount of time available and for a very general audience, we will just skim topics that are kind of an important introduction if you are not aware of what this is all about and how it might relate to resilience and transportation. There are four subareas of machine learning that we are going to touch on, all of which were very actively involved in working on for the U.S. Army. One of the first problems is when we are looking at real data and considering that there is a system or network, the actual relationships may not be very easy to understand. How did the things fit together? Particularly true in freight and logistics, a lot of the data that we might want to add is not available. We need to find indirect measures to get at that data because you can go ask people for their data; it is private, it is important; it is commercially sensitive. And the third item is that once we start working with real data and we leave behind the abstract models, real-world data gets really really big. So, we have to start to think about software packages or approaches that will actually scale to enormous, enormous size. And last of all, sort of a teachable moment is okay, we have actually succeeded in creating a model of the real world and how might that be useful in assessing resilience? That also leaves us open to some vulnerabilities. But let's go on to the next slide. We are going to touch on each of those four topics.
So, the Army Corps of Engineers is deeply involved in worldwide navigation, weather modeling, water modeling, environmental modeling. And, you know, the state-of-the-art is to build a model, ground-up, from basic principles, but we are now able to do a lot of things that we couldn't do previously by trying to understand the causal factors. That is, given a series of signals from around the world, we can actually try to piece together which parts of signals are actually causing other signals. And we can think of this in terms that Igor was describing in that we have a transportation or logistics network, and we are starting to see problems, and we would like to be able to trace back that using a subfield of machine learning called causal analysis to try to find what the actual factors are and build up a network relationship. Let's go on to the next slide.
So, Army Corps of Engineers also has sensors all around the United States and all over the world in order to fulfill navigation missions and military engineering missions. What we are showing here is some actual real work. We would like to move from being very dependent on ground sensors and human intelligence to being able to make better use of satellite data. These weird looking chart on the right hand side, actually are parts of the Mississippi River and we are actually now able to incur whether control structures are actually active or not. This is very analogous to looking at a flow of traffic where you don't know where the signals are and whether the signals are working or not and being able to determine that by working backwards from the patterns of traffic that we see. On the lower left-hand side is a very active area of research. Igor and I have a large project in the next year having to do with electrical grids. The problem there is that what you would really like to do is wire up everything. You would like to wire up every big machinery and you like to have a full picture, but in practice, you can't do that. Military installations that have been built over the last hundred or more years frequently don't have an accurate mapping of their electrical grid; it is prohibitively difficult and expensive. So, what we need to do is be able to develop a standoff measure where we put a smart meter in a single or in several central locations, and from that we infer the hidden signals and the relationships that we can't see directly. So, standoff inference is a really important area and very relevant to traffic modeling and traffic observation. Let's go on to the next slide.
So, once the data gets very large, and actually Igor and I have to go because after this we are exploring commercial software because once we start talking about supply chains and economic analysis, Jason Miller, who is talking right after us, showed us a way of using some public data as a starting point to in advance of hoping to get some private data. As the data starts to get really, really, really big, and it starts to be sort of beyond the ability of the analyst to sit there and do things in real time, then that really slows everything down. So, we need to explore software packages, in this case, a huge graph engine that is very very capable and can slice and dice and analyze enormous networks of interrelationships that we just really can't otherwise approach, and that is really important. Let's go on to my last slide.
So, machine learning model. We frequently sort of think of them in big figure quotes we say, "A Machine learning model understands the world", but that has both positive and negative. Positive is that we, instead of building an abstract model, we get a model that is built from observations in the real world. The negative from the Army point of view is that that model actually contains a lot of the source information that it was built on. Those weird looking pictures on the upper right of an airplane, automobile, and bird, those are extracted from a model. Meaning there was a model that was fed a lot of pictures and is looking to recognize different types of images. We can actually probe that model and get back some of the original information or estimates of it. In the Army, this is a big no-no. One of the most valuable things that we have is our understanding of the world and we don't want other people to do that. What is shown on the lower area is one method of combating this called homomorphic encryption, your Google word for the day, which is a method of which instead of using sort of open data, using encrypted data. So, instead of passing in handwritten numbers, we pass in encrypted versions of those. The model can actually learn to use patterns in the encrypted data and produce an encrypted result. The food for thought idea is that if we are successful in building machine learning based models of logistics (freight, traffic) and what we are basically looking for is problems (possible problems, ongoing problems, future problems), that represents both a huge opportunity to head off those problems, but also we really don't want people who are bad actors to get ahold of and be able to understand those models. We need to make sure they are secure because that is exactly the kind of information we would not want bad people to have. With that I am going to toss it back to Igor who has some conclusion slides.
Igor Linkov
Yeah, we are running out of time, so, I will be brief. We tried to show you that resilience can be calculated as simple as a couple of metrics or as complex as artificial intelligence tools at a massive amount of information. But what is important about resilience is that it models approximations of the real world and resilience is a property of interconnected systems; it's the systemic property. And the way to manage resilience is actually to look at disruption of the system and ability of the system to recover. So, slide 33 really highlights the importance of moving away from efficient systems that we have now that failed in crisis like you know, clearly indicated by COVID, including financial system to add resilience. So, in the future, we need to have both efficient and resilient systems whether it's transportation, tracking, or financial system. And, the next slide, the way to do it is really think about designing systems to be resilient; we call it resilience by design, or designing a support system that can come and help you if your system cannot be recovered. That is what we call resilience recovery. And if you think about any issues for transportation or flood response, you really can model everything by thinking like how you do the system to be resilient or do we have agencies like FEMA or structures like stockpiles that provide resurgence if you need your systems fail and cannot recover. That is a good way of thinking about that. And I will stop here. The next slide shows a bunch of papers and the very last slide, a bunch of books that we have published and will be glad to share. And, as I mentioned, Army Corps is working always for others, and we will be glad to cooperate. Thank you and sorry for taking an extra five minutes or so.
Jennifer Symoun
No, that's no problem. Great presentation. So, as I mentioned at the beginning, we will take a few minutes for questions for Andrew and Igor right now as they do have to leave due to another commitment. So, a number of questions, I will try to make it through all of these. I want to make sure we have enough time for the other two presentations in the questions as well. But let's see here. How, exactly, do you think the freight transportation system could have been resilient to what was essentially a black swan event? Namely, the pandemic's sudden profound switch from area one shopping retail to everyone ordering everything online when the trucks, drivers, shippers, containers, et cetera, were just not there to meet the demand and orders from everyone?
Igor Linkov
Yeah, it is very simple if you have all the money in the world, you just buy 10 times more trucks. In normal situations, they stay and do nothing, and you still pay them. If you have a crisis, they are available. But obviously, that is inefficient, but it is very resilient. So, the question that they have in turn is how you figure out trade-offs. Right? How you figure out how many extra capacity you need if you have unknown events like this one. And I don't have any answer. You know, I think on this call we have people who do it for a living. But I would encourage you to think about alternative ways of doing things. Like in a crisis situations, like in the federal government working for FEMA, we get all kinds of creative solutions. When companies start to produce ventilators, and we remember we don't have enough. Utilizing different resources and completely different technologies. So, maybe there are other ways to get materials moving and maybe if you operate a trucking business, you have agreements for other performers in place before something like that happens. But what I try to say here, you need to think about trade off because you are in the business of making money in a sense and you cannot waste money for holding extra capacity. I hope I answered you.
Jennifer Symoun
All right, thank you. Another question for you regarding highway resilience, would you say that highway networks have had greater interconnectivity and or fewer geographical or geological barriers such as waterways, mountains, hills, et cetera, are generally more resilient?
Igor Linkov
To some extent. Think about like all the smart systems that we have. Say basically you have computerized control, you make a system more efficient, you know what's happening, but you really need to think about resilience. If you start relying on that, if you have a cyber-attack for example, you cannot recover from that. And I have experienced getting to Martha's Vineyard when the ferry system was attacked and they were unable to recover like in two weeks so that the ferry can still move, but it was a huge line and, of course, they lost a lot of money. So, the fact that you have a system interconnected and networked and controlled and smart, it doesn't mean that it is more resilient.
Jennifer Symoun
All right, thank you. Let's see here. I think the transportation itself was for the most part resilient during the first few months of the pandemic, but our just-in-time supply chain model broke rather quickly and still have not sufficiently caught up to the way goods are ordered and purchased. Network resiliency is important, but how should state freight planners help industry actors such as port entities, warehouses, supply depots to think about creating more resilient supply chains and what role should governments play in helping improve supply chain resiliency, if any?
Igor Linkov
This is a huge area. I started in supply chain resilience seven or eight years ago. Actually, it was a project on actually making supply chains less resilient for adversaries; it was a classified project. Anyway, the mechanism is the same. And what I realized at that point is that supply chain as the field is focused on optimization. All times of supply chain is about making it more efficient, but disruptions are not taken into consideration. So, I think we now see a surge in supply chain resilience as the field. The way we approach them, and I think Andrew's showed some slides, but the problem is in the supply chain, you usually know your first level supplies, but you don't know second and third level, because you cannot control suppliers of your suppliers. And when you have disruption, you have this cascading failure. So, for example, your member in the early days of COVID, we had a crisis in meat. And it was not because we had deficiency in meat production, it was packaging. So, how we can figure out that the packaging was an issue in the whole meat supply chain. So, what we are trying to do is to try and develop stress testing strategies that would allow to see first how to first develop the supply chain with a known supplier through intersectional data, and second, how you stress test it. So, it's all a work in progress. I don't think there are any theories in practice. So, I really encourage those of you who are in a position to do something about that to talk to people like me and Andrew who can really build a new way of thinking about this because it is really needed.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. I will combine two questions I see here. One is what are some basic strategies that would improve resiliency and then for those organizations that are resource constrained, what are the best sources to identify and manage risk and develop resilience, especially in a transportation system?
Igor Linkov
Yeah, it is really difficult question because resilience analytics is not developed and the measures to improve resilience like you know, building extra capacities is very expensive. And I wouldn't recommend it because again, if I am running the business, I don't like to have an extra 10 trucks sitting there just in case somebody needs them, right? So, I don't think I have a recipe. But in a financial system, they have all this insurance type of different packages that they pull together in different financial mechanisms that are supposed to kick into play when the major business lines are disrupted. So, I think we need to think about something like that in transportation as well. And I would not be surprised if resilience will emerge as a field in the insurance industry or in the transportation industry when some companies will be offering these resilience interventions. For example, we have FEMA. This is an example of how government resilience intervention would work. We have FEMA as a nation that can sit and do little, but when you have a major event, they get mobilized. They have a tracking mechanism to find people who can help. We have iterations to processes that like my team gets pulled into FEMA to support COVID. So, something like that should be created in transportation industry.Â
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. We have a few more here. We will try to get to some of these quickly. Should the U.S. create, mandate, or incentivize strategic reserves with more essential goods, not only oil and cheese, should companies prefer to maintain low inventory as a cost saving strategy?
Igor Linkov
Again, I'm not representing government here, it is my own view. But I think we should think about that, because I have this extreme event related to the climate or cyber-attacks situation like what we had in supply chain disruptions going to be more frequent. And in fact, this morning, I got an email from Strategic National Reserve to discuss this very issue and how to really think about supply chain in that context.
Jennifer Symoun
And how do you address the four Rs: Robustness, Redundancy, Rapidity, and Resourceful?
Igor Linkov
Yeah, read our paper on system affected [indiscernible]. We tried to go through these characteristic and discuss how the are different. People are often confused and moreover what they see, they try to define one of these regularly defined properties by three other even less defined. So, you just need to be careful and really straight what does it mean. But I still don't know what resourcefulness really means and how you measure it. But anyway, I don't think we should spend time here. We published some of that.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright. And then, one last question. How do we minimize the times that FEMA needs to get involved?
Igor Linkov
Well, again, we work closely with FEMA and one of the things that they learn in this crisis and they are going to change is ability to do data analytics. We found that data analytics was largely missing in FEMA operations, especially in the regions. And they now have more capabilities and in the next level of funding we will build that. Because we are now data-driven, and headquarters people are in FEMA were polled in the White House, and it was a severe lack of data analytics that regionally is required. But I think FEMA, structurally, I found them quite deficcient, incapable. Again, nobody was ready for this global crisis. So, that was part of the problem. So, maybe, now, we will be changing a little bit how we work in government in crisis situations to be better prepared. But, you know, no matter what you do, the next crisis will be different, and you cannot be ready for everything. But, yeah, thank you. These were really good questions. Feel free to contact me and Andrew and we will be glad to answer and talk off-line. Sorry that we are pulled to another presentation. I will try to keep an eye on what is going on with his call, but I will be in parallel on another call. Feel free to contact me later. Thank you.
Jennifer Symoun
Okay. One last thing for you. If you do have a version of the presentation because it sounded like you may have used the wrong version, if you can send that to me, I can get that out to everybody because there were a few people that asked about that.
Igor Linkov
Okay, I will.
Jennifer Symoun
And the other thing someone asked for, Andrew, if you have time before you go, if there are links to these reports and publications, if you type those in the chat box. Alright, thank you, both of you. We appreciate your time today.
We will move on to our next presentation now, which will be given by Dr. Jason Miller, a tenured Associate Professor of Logistics in the Department of Supply Chain Management at Michigan State University's Eli Broad College of Business. His primary research stream examines issues in the for-hire truck transportation industry including safety, productivity, pricing dynamics, and driver turnover. He also conducts research in the manufacturing and retail sectors that focuses on the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jason teaches courses at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral level.
Jason Miller
Thank you so much for that. What I will cover today, real quick, is providing sort of a perspective as kind of a macro economist for the on-scene right now, the dynamics working as a truck transportation sector building off the prior presentation. So, focusing a little bit on where is activity at right now, talking about employment, what has been happening with rates, And then really talking as we think again about resiliency, what are the challenges from a macrolevel perspective about building resilience into the truck transportation sector.
So, with that, as we are thinking about measuring activity, there are many different indices that exit out there. The U.S. Bank has an index, Cat Freight Systems has an index, the American Trucking Association has an index. What I'm showing here is a new index that is published by my colleague, who is now the University of Tennessee, and myself. It essentially measures truck ton miles from output of 41 different industry sectors based on the commodity flow survey that is done by the Census Bureau and Bureau of Transportation statistics that we then link over to measures of real output. So, in other words, adjusted for inflation in every major freight generating sector of the United States. So, just to get perspective of what we have been through with the COVID pandemic. The West plot is showing our 10 mile index back as far as we can run it to 2004. You can see, a typical recessionary cycle with the Great Recession, we had this massive drop in activity of over 20% from peak to drop. So, if you think about it, 20% of all ton mileage was essentially eliminated from December 2007 through June of 2009. Then, we had a slow, steady crawl up where we had kind of a peak in the early half of 2018, which many of you will remember was a very hot time period for carriers in a very rough time for shippers. But then, activity started to slow down in the back half of 2018, and it was very stagnant for 2019, and if anything, actually started actually declined throughout the year. And then, obviously, we had a major plunge with COVID with the shutdown. In April, we saw activity drop by essentially 10%. But then, this very, very, very, rapid increase and rebound in activity.
So, if we take a look like right now, we are essentially seeing today, our volume in terms of overall demand has been generated by the 41 industries that are recognized as generating freight, it is essentially at where we were in the first half of 2018. So, keep that in mind, we essentially went from being down 10% to being back up to where we were at the highest level that we have seen. Â But, if we take a look at what happened with regard to the mix of freight, it ties into the challenges of you upset the apple cart and then we start to have a different mixture of freight taking place. If we look, for example, durable good production is measured by the Federal Reserve Board, and it is down about 6% from where we were in 2018. On the other hand, though, if we take a look at the amount of tonnage being hauled of retail freight, that is up roughly 17 percent from where we were back in 2019 and roughly 20% from where we were in 2018. The dynamic that has taken place is that overall ton mileage figure is essentially right where it was in the first half of 2018, but we have a mixture that is less manufacturing and substantially more retail than what we would think.
That creates a lot of disruption, which is compounded by the fact that if we take a look at what happened with employment, the chart on the left is the overall truck transportation employment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Labor Productivity and Cost program. Very importantly, this includes all of your independent owner operators. This is not missing those individuals because it comes from a different program. In 2020, we essentially saw 74,000 fewer individuals working in trucking on average than we saw in 2019. So, a level that on average was even lower than where we were at in 2018. You start thinking about that. We have activity back to where it was in the peak of 2018, but we have even less employment because especially in the long haul sectors we have not seen employment rebound aggressively yet. But the overall employment figures that we have right now, the most recent data, what we can see is there has been a major secular reallocation of truck drivers. If we look at where employment is, and this is just pure employees, this is going to miss many of your owner operators from a different BLS program. We can see that from May 2021, the last available month of data relative to May of 2018, we have a very different mix of drivers. We've got about 16,500 more general freight local. So, that is going to be individuals who are dropping off large, bulky e-commerce purchases. But we are down in the general freight side for LTL and TL; we are down about 14,000 individuals from where we were back in May of 2018. So, when we start understanding what has happened, why are things so tight, it is because we have had demand rebound in near record levels, but our number of long-distance drivers is down substantially from where we were even three years ago during that same time period of essentially record high demand.
So, what does this result in? Well, it results in spot prices skyrocketing upward. If we take a look here at once the pandemic hits. We had a sharp uptick of prices in March 2020. This is due to all the disruption created by the need to restock grocers and your Walmarts, Targets, and Coscos of the world as people panic bought. We take all that freight demand out, prices plummet downward because there are a lot more trucks on the road than there is demand. But then, as demand starts aggressively rebounding as relative to employment, we start to have spot prices go up and up and up because routing guides do not inherit. So, in other words, a lot of carriers are rejecting freight offered to them by their shippers. Now, we saw those prices peak, initially, toward October or November of 2020, and then they started to stabilize. But then we had another disruption take place and that is the polar vortex of 2021. It disrupted activity, especially in the south and most especially, Texas. And what that did is essentially cause a reset of the market because demand was essentially dropped very substantially in February, and we had to make it up in March and April and May. Though it does seem that the system is correcting itself again, especially for the seasonally adjusted data which was starting to trend downward in June substantially from the all-time high that we have seen. But again, as we started think about what happened, first we had the COVID shock, then we had the turn on of demand without supply coming back, and then we had an unprecedented weather event thrown into the system.
So, if we take a look at how contract rates have adapted right now. Well, they have adjusted upwards dramatically. So, there is two different statistics for this. One is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; that is going to be this line in black. The other is from the Cass, their Truckload Linehaul index. You can see the statistics follow each other very, very, very closely for measuring prices. Which you can see is that essentially, is as the spot prices went up and we started to see contracted prices reach record high levels for both indices. So, right now, we take a look at overall truck load long-distance prices, we are looking at this index being up about 12 to 13% over the highs that we previously saw at the end part of 2018. But, for shippers, as we start thinking about this, this has been very unevenly felt. We have got two lines here on this spot. The redline is showing the general freight prices. Notice that this has responded upward much more aggressively than this black line right here which is for specialized freight. This is going to be refrigerated, this will be for flat bed, dry bulk, et cetera. Most consumer freight is going to be dry van and more of your industrial freight, so your machinery, is going to be flatbed. So, as we start to think you know, what is going on and what can shippers expect as we're moving forward. Well, it seems most likely that the upward increase and the dry van contract prices is essentially leveling off. But, for shippers needing specialized capacity, it seems that we may be in for a little bit more of a run-up right now as manufacturing keeps coming back.
So, all this ties together for resiliency consideration in truck transportation. The sort of lesson that I think we take away from the pandemic is for a high enough price, you can obtain capacity. Now, the sector is never going to have a substantial amount of excess capacity lying around. It is just impossible given profit margins in the 2-5% range for many firms when we consider everything together. That is compounded by the challenges of the fact that there is such pronounced economies of scope across hauls that you need balanced [indiscernible]. We saw this in March 2020 where you're putting a lot more demand into areas with a lot more consumer population that may not have much outflow. The only way that will be achieved is through higher spot price. And then, lastly, carriers do tend to be slow to add capacity when the market is tight. So, in other words, even if we start seeing demand rebound substantially, it is going to take a little while for that capacity to come online. So, that creates a system where you are always going to have the unevenness that exists. It also is why we overshoot like we did in the latter half of 2018 and 2019. We had too much supply and that causes rates to plummet. But with that, that actually covers everything that I have. So, I am going to be happy to hand it back, so Scott can come up.
Jennifer Symoun
Well, thank you, Jason. We will move on to our last presentation and then we will take questions after that. So, continue typing your questions in to the chat pod. Our final presentation will be given by Scott Grenerth. Scott works for Truck Specialized Parking Services, Inc. (TSPS) where he works with both the public and private sectors to provide accurate real-time truck parking solutions. He has over a million miles of safe driving as a company driver and owner-operator of his own equipment. Throughout his career he has been an advocate for truckers at the State and Federal level. His involvement with the truck parking issue has included hosting a FHWA National Coalition on Truck Parking Regional Meeting and serving as the Champion for the State, Regional, and Local Government Coordination Group for the Coalition. He participates in the TRB Trucking Industry Research Committee where he completed a survey of over-the-road truckers and state DOTs regarding the response to permitting food trucks in rest areas and presented this to the committee. So, Scott, I will bring up your presentation and you can begin.
Scott Grenerth
Ok, I got off mute and you can hear me?
Jennifer Symoun
Yes, you are good.
Scott Grenerth
Ok, good deal. Alright, we'll advance it to the next slide here. And there we go. Alright, so, the key thing with this here is you heard my background there, is that last line. That last year that I knew with my background as a trucker and the many truckers who I do keep in touch with very regularly, that April 3rd of 2020 was going to have consequences. So, we will get into that in just a moment here. That is a key point there. So, last year, we all know about the impacts of COVID. So, I will skip over that quickly there. We know about the toilet paper, we know about all that stuff, we know about all that fun we had. But when it comes to the impact with over-the-road truckers, that is what a lot of people may have missed. There were issues with stores shutting down of course, businesses shutting down, and cutting back hours dramatically. So, that really hit the hardest, of course, in this case, is regarding food availability of restaurants, diners, and absolutely that included truck stops as well, too. There are a lot of them that did stay open, but with very reduced hours and reduced capacity for seating, all those kinds of things. Let's keep in mind, too, we see that May 5th info there, also, August 5th. We have hit these spikes of up and down, up and down many times now as we know. And, you know, late last summer, things were starting to look better in many regards. Still, as you can see, from this article from Yahoo Finance, TA Travel Centers of America, one of the major truckstop chains was decreasing capacity and decreasing items available in the restaurants. So, there was a definite issue as an over-the-road trucker finding foods. This included friends of mine who literally could not even get a cup of coffee because, of course, anything like buffets, stuff that people touch in a communal fashion were shut down right away. And just so you know, too, truckers can't go through drive-thrus. I don't just mean to be funny, because you all know that a 13 foot 6 inch tall vehicle as long as it is, isn't going to go through, you can't even walk up to a drive-thru because of "liability concerns". Trust me, if you want to try it sometime, you will find out it doesn't work, they will not let you do that. A very few small percentage of businesses out there found ways of accommodating truckers in some way like that and it kind of grew a little bit, but it still was minimal. So, as the truckers, even thinking hey, can I stock up stuff before I leave the house? Remember, even just being able to find stuff at your local grocery store was a challenge. So, lots of things cutback. Access was hard to find. And then lastly, even when truckers are trying to plan, like hey, I know, I will show up at my local Hyvee, Kroger, Walmart, whatever, I will show up at 8:00 in the morning. Right? That's when the just restocked it over the night. You may not be able to do that because truckers are at the mercy of their schedule with shippers and receivers, and they can get that messed with all too often. It is really one of the biggest frustrations of a trucker. And then lastly, keep in mind, too, here, that being able to fix food, even when you think about oh, I can I bring food with me, it is not always an easy thing to do depending on the type of tab you have. So, here we go, Martha Stewart's kitchen. That is not what a truck cab looks like, I promise you. In reality, you have people with a day cab that just has two seats and that's it. And then you also have people who are the over-the-road truckers that are out at least one night on a typical basis. They will have a little bit of more room for those two seats, they will have a spot where they can probably put in a cooler or a little mini fridge, their clothing, and a bunk. But, again, as I say at the bottom here, even if you do, remember, how do you restock the kitchen?
So, let's get back to that April the 3rd date now that we have that background. And actually, it should be the 1960s. There is a prohibition on commercialization of rest areas along the federal aid highway system. So, the bottom line is this. That image you see there, the Coca-Cola vending machine, that is all that is permitted for rest areas is vending machines, plain and simple. What happened on April the 3rd 2020 is FHWA to their huge credit, have been listening and understanding what truckers are experiencing and they issued what is called a Notice of Enforcement Discretion. So, let's put into my words. They said you know what, you're still not allowed to have any commercial activity at rest areas, but what we are not going to stop you. And they tied that very specifically to the national emergency declaration that the president had issued. So, as long as that was in effect, food trucks were in effect permitted at rest areas by the fact that they were not going to enforce the prohibition. So, that's what happened. Now, let's take a look at what the reaction was out there.
So, three states I could tell you for certain, immediately, like as fast as lightning, said we are going to do this. We are going to permit food trucks in rest areas. So, Arkansas was lightning fast getting it out there. And my neighbor over in Indiana, the did it right away also. And my home state of Ohio, I'm glad to say, also too action. Let's dive into Ohio to give you an example firsthand info direction from Ohio DOT. It was free, no cost. The only rule was really simple: Don't compete with those vending machines because that is a special program there and that is for people who need that business. And they did very clearly say but please, do sell fresh coffee. They got that right; they knew what their priority was. So, let's dive down slightly further in Ohio. What was a response when they put out this notice in Ohio? About 275 applications went to ODOT. And keep in mind there are only 86 rest areas. But, also, being realistic about this, there were definitely not 275 people that set up. There were are a lot of people that just said hey, let's apply and let's see what happens and let's think about it, but they didn't go out.
I do want to point out one thing really quickly here, as you see those two gentlemen, by the way, this is in Bowling Green, Ohio, just up the road from my house here. A local TV station went out and did a video interview and you can see those two gentlemen standing there, perfectly socially distanced, probably seven feet apart at least. And they are outdoors. So, people did a great job in responding. So, there you go. You can see the notice from Ohio DOT saying it is open. They tweet it out to let people know about it, get permits. So, this program is underway. It has been underway for several months. Last summer is getting a little bit through the later part of the year. And what I was thinking is okay, this is huge this is a big deal. As a trucker, and with friends who are out there dealing with really lousy circumstances, I really wanted to know what was going on. So, what I set out to do was get feedback. So, here's what I did. First, direct feedback from friends out there. I talked to people one-on-one. I also frequently am on Sirius XM satellite radio on some of the programs on the trucking channel there and we had this as a topic. We got feedback from truckers calling in live. Also, from very good quality moderated Facebook forums where it is not just people who are angry at everything in the entire world, they actually have good discussion. Trust me, those actually do exist. I got great feedback there as well. Those are the two questions I asked. No other agenda, just I want to know: Have you seen any food trucks out there? And has it been helpful to you for truckers?
So, I'm going to now give you a quick snapshot of some of the responses I got from people here. You can see that he talked with them over there. And on the bottom right you will see an app that shows the highlighted and the darker color, that is the part of the country that they were operating in if you want a visual aid. They said hey, we saw one thing down here in Florida giving away free food, but nothing else in all those other areas that they traveled, all the states. By the way, these people, just so you know, all over-the-road truckers who are way out just beyond their home state on a regular basis. And I was thinking earlier today, they probably all have at least about 20 years of trucking. So, these are experienced folks. Jeff said it was harder to find food. He was smart; he used Door Dash to help make sure he could actually get food. So, he didn't have to get delivered to him. That way, he at least knew was coming so, he didn't take his truck and go somewhere only to find nothing is available. And he saw one food truck. One, in Arkansas. That was it. Greg, again, ne food truck somewhere out on I-40 near the West Coast. And an important trend here, only in a small sign propped up at the entry to the rest area and that was it to let him know it was going on. I don't even remember if he said he actually saw it in time when he was going to the rest area or not. Sandy and Stephen; this is a team operation going on all over the place, but they specific dimension here, yes, they saw them in Indiana and Ohio across I-70. And importantly, they said yeah, they were being utilized. Every time they went by, they saw people using them and so, that was good. I want to present every spectrum of responses I heard. So, that includes my friend Henry Albert saying he didn't really have much problem finding food in his case. Henry just for perspective, he has probably 40 years of experience. He runs that corridor all the time. So, he really knows that area very well. I think that factored in a lot. But, also, he did note he didn't see a single food truck. And then Shane, his biggest note was no food trucks he saw at all running from Colorado to Canada. But the reason I have Washington state highlighted is he said his favorite place he goes to had really limited options, very limited hours. So, it wasn't anywhere near usual. This is the one I will read completely. Melissa, this one here. I saw them in a few states. California, Arizona, and maybe a third state like Oregon. There were only a couple though. We were hoping to see more. With the restaurants all closed down, being on the road for four weeks at a time was rough to say the least. They run all 48 states as a team. The ones they saw were not marked time. So, we didn't see them until we were driving by. One did have some kind of a sign, maybe in California. Again, you see this theme of they didn't know that something was there. They were going by them and it was too late. And the last couple, Brian Spoon said yes, here in Indiana, saw them. The governor did a good job of getting the word out. He actually heard about it through media. But he did say, and again, this is a guy who was did logistics in the Navy and trucking and all that. He said you know, still, would've been great to have this three weeks before he even started because the need was already bad. Lastly, Johanne Couture. I saw one inI-75 in Ohio. Now, why this is important is because she said when she woke up and saw it there because again, she had no idea when it was going to be at the rest area, no notice or anything. The key thing is people were taking the time to walk over there. Keep in mind that we just heard the presentation on the economics of trucking here, is that truckers get paid by the mile, not by the hour, overwhelmingly. To use the phrase my trainer used is "if your wheels aren't turning, you're not earning". Any time a trucker takes time away from those wheels turning, that means that they value what they are doing. So, what she is saying here is she recognized it was important because she saw just about every other person going over there and getting food from the food truck. So, there really was a legit need demonstrated by them taking that time.
So, in aggregate here, I asked 56 people about the simple question. Did you see at least one single food truck? And it was a 50-50 split. It was exactly half said no, I didn't see a single food truck, and the other half said I saw at least one individual truck somewhere in this entire country that we have. Also, to get feedback from truckers, I have a good friend who is a great perspective journalist at Overdrive magazine, Todd Dills, and we authored a piece together that he published and as part of that we asked for feedback. So, he did this online and you can see the response right there with even more truckers saying no, I did not see even one food truck out there. Why I think that there is a little discrepancy there is for the first survey results, the ones where I was calling people cold and asking them or getting solicitation from group truckers, they didn't really know where I was going with this and what I was looking for. With that article, there was a little bit of bias because I'm sure people saw the title of the article and went oh, are they going to tell me where these food trucks are at? And they were interested because they were probably mad that they hadn't actually seen any food trucks out there even though they heard that this was happening.
So, now, moving on to the last part is with this in hand, knowing what I heard from my friends out there, I wanted to find out what was going on with the state DOTs in their decision-making, their processes, et cetera. So, thanks to the AASHTO Committee on Transportation System Operations, working group on freight operations, the folks who work with the rest areas specifically, we were able to work with my TRB committee and them to get a Survey Monkey survey. We got 16 responses and I'm going to hit the highlights of this here. So, I'm not going to talk about every single screen, just want to show them so you can see the data for yourself quickly here and you can go back and look at the download later. First question was: Did you even consider having food trucks? There were indeed two states that said no, we did not. The rest said yeah, we at least considered it. Then, did you allow food trucks? Now we flip that around. The majority did not. The minority said yes, they did. And, I also wanted to know, because remember, this was late summer as things are looking better. And so, I wanted to know when did they end the program? You can see was all over the board. May, June, and July; we've got three different months right there in a row when people ended the program. I did find out later that CalTrans ended in August. They were one of the last ones that I'm aware of at least. They still did have 13 active permits and eight different operators out there. So, it was still going in that case, still valuable to people. Because keep in mind, those operators would be there if they were making money. And then, I wanted to find out, you know, what did you do, did people have to jump through hoops basically in order to get this? Overwhelmingly, the answer was pretty much no, not really. And, you know, it was pretty simple, straightforward. And, again, you can see one response in here where I asked about it, they were still issuing permits as you can see there. Some of them had, you know, single point of contact. They had to contact an appropriate person. Other states like mine of Ohio, it was very simple and straightforward. Again, no permit fee, nothing major on that screen there. Did you receive feedback from truckers? Which, to me, I cannot overstate to you all enough how almost emotional my friends get when state DOT people really reach out and sincerely want to get their feedback. I have had examples recently with Missouri, Ohio, and Texas with that where I have organized sessions for feedback for freight plan purposes. At the end, it is like a lovefest. The state DOT people said thank you, thank you, thank you, you had great feedback and the truckers saying thank you, you actually listened to us. Because often doesn't happen. Especially for in this case, I'm matching up with over-the-road truckers, not just people who are local, so they can get that broader perspective. So, anyhow, the feedback was nothing major except you can see when they are saying that they did get some feedback and they really appreciate it. And the vendors also really had cool stories about the interactions with drivers and how much they were appreciated. Again, nothing special on that one. And then, you can see here, this is going back to the earlier mentioned Ohio DOT tweeted out hey, we're going to have food trucks to set up at rest areas. So, one of the food truck operators asked how are you going to let the truckers know that we are there? And, this is one of the more curious things I ran across where, and I love ODOT immensely from the bottom of my heart, but I don't know how some people thought that you know, people were going to crowd around food trucks all of a sudden at rest areas, but that was a concern. I get the health implication, but at the same time, you saw the picture from the TV coverage, people were doing a really good job not clustering around the food trucks or anything. But, just, a worthwhile thing to keep in mind. Then, I asked was anybody notified. This is the key one here we're getting to the main point. Were trucks notified of the presence of food trucks with enough time to exit and get in? You will see what I noted later, see question number eight. And, no, they did not. Then, again, not really. And then just yes. I don't know what further detail was there. So, then no and no. And then let's go to question eight. So, do you have advice? I wanted to have an open-ended question for feedback. What was there so we could have a forum like this and learn from it. You know, one state DOT saying no, there was not much of an interest. Another one said they did not really feel there was a need for it. Again, keep in mind, with this, I completely understand certain parts of the country experience very different scenarios at different times. So, at one point, they may have thought yeah, no, whatever. But that is what we heard. And, then the last one you can see there, we need to better advertise the program and include signage on the mainline in advance of the rest areas where they are offering it. And, letting industries know, again, kind of another one about the health concern was an issue that they didn't want people to crowd around together. Which again, seemed to really, in my real world experience, not be a concern. But, then again, people did not know that at the time. Let's see. Last. So, here we go.
So, let's kind of wrap this up here. How was the participation again in Ohio, 275 applicants, by the time they ended the program in mid-June, there were only two food trucks still left out there in that final week. And then Ohio ended the program when the restaurants were allowed to reopen. We also know that California and Colorado, for example, it went much later and continue doing things. So, the overview to me is obviously, things are very different regionally, state, county, city, we all know that. Some locations were really bad, some others were not as bad. Also, it definitely fluctuated. Some states were able to react quickly. One example of where that could not happen is talking to people in the Florida DOT, they were not able to enact any program because of the way that the state's laws are written, and they would have had to go through the whole legislative process to fix that and decide to not pursue that. I realize there were challenges there. Some states pushed on through them and others did not, but the bottom line is that truckers largely did not know where the food trucks would be. Which means that the food truck operators were not getting money and were not able to help people. There was nothing good about that problem. That is a serious issue there to be dealing with. So, wrapping it up here, it's time for a sing-along. You can sing the 70s version of the 90s version, whatever you want, no judgement from me. But we definitely just need to make sure that whatever comes up like this kind of response truckers know where they can get the help that they are going to be seeking, that the extraordinary measures are being taken to provide for them. Whether that is the overhead variable message signs are permanently up there, or the ones that you can haul behind a pickup truck, any of those would help. And a you can see here, this is just my spit balling list of hurricanes (I grew up in Miami, Florida, so I think of that first), severe flooding, whether it is hurricane or major tropical storm, wildfires, all of that. But we just need to make sure they know about that. So, and, thank you to Dan Haake with the committee, AASHTO and that committee, Dave and Pat there that helped to get that info to me. There you go. I'm done.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright. Thank you, Scott. We have a few minutes left, but I think we only have a few questions to get through here. So, we will start. I think some of them are for Jason also, but, both of you, feel free to jump in on any of these questions. Jason, the first one that came in during your presentation was, Can you discuss any challenges to the trucking industry associated with the ongoing fires in the Western U.S. or weather events in general?
Jason Miller
So, right now, the fire situation in the western U.S., it's one of those that creates a disruption, it's going to be much more difficult for shippers who need to get freight into those areas and/or out of those areas just because carriers are not going to want to service that area. So, there is nothing really special to say about that. I haven't seen any real statistics yet on how much of a sort of a macro level disruption that is creating in comparison to let's say a Hurricane Harvey back in 2017.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. And Scott, is there anything that you want to add?
Scott Greneth
No. That's fine.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright. Jason, another question for you. Are there regional imbalances in driver dry van availability and prices and how is the trucking industry addressing these imbalances?
Jason Miller
I mean, there is always freight imbalances. Right? I mean there is a tremendous amount more inbound freight to the New England area then there is outbound freight. You know, whereas conversely in Southern California, there is a lot more outbound freight than inbound freight. Those imbalances are addressed just through differences in pricing. Shipping from Ohio to Massachusetts is a much more expensive trip from Ohio to Massachusetts than it is from Massachusetts to Ohio. So, in that regard, the price mechanism is what essentially addresses those imbalances. Unfortunately, that is painful for shippers who may have, you know, they have got a facility in Ohio and they've got customers in the Northeast and they're having to absorb the freight. There is really nothing that can be done about that.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Scott, this is more of a comment, but I wanted to see if you have anything in response to it. The possible explanation for the lack of food trucks; these vehicles are often regulated by County Department of Public health. Unless the state gives them an exemption, they would still be in trouble for operating during the pandemic regardless of the federal notice of enforcement discretion.
Scott Greneth
Yeah, that is certainly a valid point there, that could come up. The only thing I would note is in all of the conversations I have had with anybody about this so far, including giving this variations of the presentation to several audiences, of state DOT people, people who are locally in Ohio, and beyond, nobody has actually mentioned that yet. So, that doesn't mean it wasn't the case. I just don't think that was a widespread concern there.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. We are about out of time. And I actually don't see any additional questions that have come in. So, I think we will go ahead and close out for today. I do want to thank all of our presenters for their presentations today. And thank you everyone for attending. I am putting into the chat pod right now how to receive AICP CM credit or a certificate of participation that you can use for 1.5 credits if your licensing agency will accept it.
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