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Talking Freight: ITS MARAD Truck Staging Program

March 20, 2019

View the March 2019 seminar recording

Presentations

Transcript

Jennifer Symoun

Good afternoon or good morning to those of you to the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Jennifer Symoun and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is ITS MARAD Truck Staging Program.

Before I go any further, I do want to let those of you who are calling into the teleconference for the audio know that you 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 notify all attendees once these materials are posted online.

Talking Freight seminars are eligible for 1.5 certification maintenance credits for AICP members. In order to obtain credit for today's seminar, you must have logged in with your first and last name or if you are attending with a group of people you must type your first and last name into the chat box. 

PDH certificates are also available for Talking Freight seminars. To receive 1.5 PDH credits, you will need to fill out a form. Please see the link in the chat box. Certificates will be emailed one week after the seminar. A seminar agenda has been included in the file download box for those who need to submit an agenda to their licensing agency.

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 one presentation given jointly by Tom Phelan of Gannett Fleming/BHX Engineering & Planning LLC; Ryan Macdonald of the Georgia Ports Authority; and Keith Chase of Gannett Fleming.

Tom Phelan has more than 20 years of experience in the management and performance of traffic and transportation consulting services in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada. He has managed a variety of highway, transit, freight facility and land development projects, and specializes in regional freight transportation planning and industrial development. Tom is a licensed professional engineer in the State of New Jersey and his areas of expertise include transportation planning, freight planning and operations, and industrial land use planning and truck/rail access.

Ryan Macdonald is the Manager of Strategic Operations & Planning for the Georgia Ports Authority.  He has over 25 years of experience in the logistics industry, mostly with a port focus.  In 2005, he became an employee of the Georgia Ports Authority and was primarily engaged in the area of terminal operations review and process improvement.  In his current role, his responsibilities have shifted to mid-term and long-term planning for the organization which involves all aspects of the port operation and more recently with greater attention to the company's Strategic Intermodal Operating Plan.

Keith Chase is a Strategy and Management Consultant with Gannett Fleming Inc. Keith joined Gannett Fleming in 1995 after 14 years with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He served as PennDOT's Deputy Secretary for Aviation, Rail, and Ports and while Deputy Secretary he led the PA Double-Stack Rail Clearance private-public partnership, numerous regional and shortline railroad projects, and several goods movement regional planning initiatives. Early in his tenure as a consultant, Keith managed the Strategic Freight Plan for the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council in St. Louis, and later designed and facilitated a successful summit of over 70 public and private freight stakeholders in that region. It resulted in a major public-private freight / economic development initiative.

I will now turn it over to Tom Phelan to get started.

Tom Phelan

Thank you so much and welcome to everybody onboard. It sounds like we're going to have a pretty good crowd here and quite a few registering. A lot of names I recognized and some I didn't.  I'm going to introduce the project here. A general description, we have been engaged by the US Maritime administration in the ITS joint program office to conduct a feasibility assessment and economic analysis to deal with the ongoing chronic problem and the growing problem with port terminal congestion, primarily out of marine ports. But as we see when we work our way through this presentation this is a problem we are starting to see and inland ports and river ports in the interior of the United States as well. There are number of participating agencies within the US DOT. We are going to work our way through these. Starting on this presentation, I will go briefly through an agenda. We had our introductions, and I will have additional folks I will mention by name here on the next slide. I will go through a brief background of the project. A research process and overview will be involved. We will talk quite a bit about our port Stakeholder Outreach. We will bring up port authority perspective here and that's why Ryan is on phone, Mr. McDonald has been very generous with his time in helping us with our Stakeholder Outreach and also in his willingness to assist us in this Webinar as well. I will present the summary of findings at the very end and as Jennifer mentioned we will have questions and answers at the end of this presentation as well. And then just to wrap up at the end at the very final step of this process.

There's a group of folks here and, believe it or not despite all these names, this does not do justice to the involvement that we have seen, particularly on the federal side here. Each of these organizations is listed once: The Maritime Administration, the Federal Highway Administration, the Motor Carrier Safety ITS Joint Program Office. Their involvement here has gone beyond the names of the folks you have seen here. This is a process started back in late 2017, so we are about a year and a half into this. Doug Pape of Battelle is the senior research engineer and the Contract Manager for Battelle. Gannett Fleming has been retained as a subcontractor to Battelle. And I, through BHX Engineering, my own firm, I work under contract with Gannett Fleming on this and a number of other initiatives as well.

We'll go briefly through a background of this project, the challenges and issues that we are dealing with as a nation. And this is not unusual, we see quite a bit of this around the world. We had some brief outreach elements with other international partners as well in terms of trading partners with the US. They were not actively involved in the project itself, other than their contribution of information. Many folks will be familiar with these problems here, particularly at our major marine ports terminal congestion, largely driven by economic growth. As a population grows and there's more economic activity people generally will buy more products, and the drive up of activity we see at our marine ports, as well as on our freight rail system and on our highway system as well, with the substantial growth in trucking activity. One particular item we have seen that has driven a lot of these changes at certain ports and in certain areas of the United States has been the development of larger container ships and the infrastructure improvements associated with them, such as the channel deepening and the widening of the Panama Canal as two particular examples. Anybody who has dealt with the trucking industry over the last few years, even beyond that, over the recent decades, can speak to this issue of a chronic shortage of drivers in the trucking industry as it relates to the marine cargo. Dredge truck companies are our interest, as this is a subsector of the industry that serves marine terminals and operates quite differently in some ways than your typical over-the-road trucking in intermediate and longer haul trucking industry.

The effort that we are going to be talking about here relates specifically to the strategical goal #5 of the US Maritime Administration's Strategic Plan and that relates to maritime innovation. I'm going to talk briefly here about a couple of ITS Joint Program Office initiatives. One of the things I will highlight as I go through these very quickly is that none of what you read on the screen relates to freight in particular. These are general ITS Joint Program initiatives that relate to transportation efficiency across the board, both passenger and freight. And without going through and reading these, I want to highlight the second one here, one of the two strategic priorities from the Strategic Plan that have been identified as advancing automation and shaping the ITS program around research and development in these technologies. And some of which we will talk about today.

I want to highlight this particular element. There was a business case analysis conducted into 2017 that was finishing just as this team was getting started. It involved a look at 20 different ITS technologies that are in use at various US ports, and screened them down to four high priority ones in terms of what seem to be the most attractive in terms of reducing terminal congestion and addressing efficiency at marine terminals. One I will highlight here is the Port Community System, and this ties to some of the other things we will talk about specifically. And at the risk of sounding a little boring, I want to read the definition of a Port Community System as it is defined by the International Port Committee Systems Association. It is "an electronic platform that connects the multiple systems operated by a variety of organizations that make up a sea port or airport community." To summarize that, what this means is that various players at a marine port in particular along a supply chain – think of the ocean carriers, think of the terminal operators, think of the drayage firms and the customers who are shipping and receiving cargo through a port – the Port Community System gives some of them an interface, where they can interact with each other across uniform level playing field and have access to similar information. There's a reason why I highlight this one in particular, because it will come up in some of our future items here we will discuss.

Current efforts here relates to a 5th technology that we identified beyond the 4 from the phase 1 study. This involves analysis in detail to determine the state of the practice in truck Staging, including queuing and parking at maritime ports and to identify the needs of port terminal operators in the trucking industry. We performed an economic feasibility study of automated truck cueing as a technology solution. In summary, what this means, I'm sure most people on this call are familiar with ongoing research in the development of automated truck technology. This is a research effort specifically looking at possible applications of these technologies in a port environment. This effort has received some attention in the latest publication, the Automated Vehicles 3.0: Preparing for the Future of Transportation. This research we have been doing has gotten some advance notice of this without going into a lot of detail. We are presenting this detail now.

In very broad terms, this is an aerial photo of the MARAD terminal in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. I grew up not far from here, within a few miles of here up the New Jersey Turnpike in Hudson County. And we don't need to point to anything in great detail here. The photo is small, but for those of you who have a good view of this there are quite a few trucks queued up at this terminal, at the gates both on inbound and outbound sides. The question we are looking to address here is whether automation could play a role in addressing terminal gate queues, and what are some of the options for looking at this and for implementation here. I wouldn't advise anybody to try to count these, if you have a chance to look at this later, but I do know the number of trucks you can see in this photo is in the hundreds. You can imagine what the inefficiencies are that are related to this on a daily basis on a typical day at a marine port in the US.

We'll go briefly through this research process that we have followed here. We did some background research on a number of industry publications, research that has been done already on the part of the US DOT, as well as its various partners. State DOTs have looked at this. MPO's have been involved in looking at addressing some of these issues. So, there's plenty of research out there that we have used as a basis for our study here. Interestingly enough there has been plenty of research and ongoing developments even since we started. So, this is the kind of effort that changes almost on a weekly basis as different technologies are going through different phases of research and development on the automated truck technology side. We conducted a number of interviews with port stakeholders. Keith Chase will talk about those a little bit later. Separate from that, we had an online questionnaire that other stakeholders were asked to answer. The core of the study was an economic feasibility analysis of some potential solutions for addressing queues at marine terminals. And then our summary of recommendations at the very end.

And at this point I will turn the presentation over to Ryan McDonald at the Georgia Ports Authority. As just a very brief introduction from what you already know, he was one of the most informative stakeholders who we had interviewed as part of the initial stakeholder interviews outreach process. The Port of Savannah was one of the representative ports where we had conducted this outreach effort. So, at this point I will turn this over to Ryan.

Ryan Macdonald

All right Tom, appreciate that, and we are very happy to be a part of the process. Thank you for inviting us to both the Webinar and your study. It's very important to discuss this emerging technology. And as you and I discussed, I won't say we are behind, but we have a lot of work to do to find ways to incorporate this very useful technology that's coming at us. So, I have a few slides I am going to cruise through and basically narrate at various levels. A typical import cargo move by way of truck – of course they can also come in by rail once they hit a marine terminal – but we will focus on the truck drayage piece today, particularly from a port's perspective, which is why I am here. I wanted to focus on (I'm going to use a green arrow) – this red arrow here between the Marine terminal and the truck drayage, from our perspective is very key. Basically, that translates into terminal dwell, which for us is our existence. Moving freight across our docks as quickly and efficiently as possible so that we can be as large as we should be as a terminal. For instance, our facility here in Savannah moves about 4 1/2 million TEU's, but can grow to about 8 to 10 million. So, we can only get there by driving our dwell times down. So, ocean carrier – the vessel arrives, the marine terminal discharges, the truck drayage moves it on to its final destinations where ultimately the shipper receives the freight.

Part of this process, even though I will give you a high-level and simplistic view, due to the multiple handoffs and all that's involved in it unfortunately does lend itself to some level of inefficiency. And if we didn't have any, we wouldn't be here today talking about remedies and how the technology can help us. But to kind of mitigate that inefficiency in the supply chain, BCOs and shippers tend to build in slack to account for these unknown events which creates leeway. And they do this to assure some level of reliability. I'll give you an example of what some of these events or delays might look like. It can be anything and everything from ocean transit weather that's experienced, weather events; you can have unscheduled repairs or maintenance at sea that happen mechanically; you can have port closures due to weather events such as hurricanes and whatnot; you can have ice events; you can have delays at prior port calls. For us, we are not always the first port of call, but there could be delays at another port prior to calling Savannah, so those tend to compound. Truck driver shortages – of course, has already been mentioned and we are all well aware of – by way of lack of drivers, or the effect that the electronic log devices are having on the amount of hours that a driver can pull in a day. We also have things like CBP holds and inspections, which we all know are necessary and good, but the fact is they do add to delays and dwell on the supply chain. And last but not least, we have equipment complications by way of which takes us to our next slide. I won't say mismatches, but basically the challenges that we see between containers and chassis. Which for those not familiar with the International Transportation System, it's unique, different than that of say a typical domestic van drayage move. The difference being in a domestic van drayage move, the truck simply pulls up to the trailer, the trailer and the wheels that entire unit is intact, pulls and goes. Not so with an iso-container. You have to load that box onto a set of wheels or a chassis (which is the bottom arrow). And you can't just do it with any old chassis it has to be the right chassis for the right container. Without getting into all the stories and frankly novels of this, looking at it you would say why not, why can't all containers be a grey container and all chassis be a grey chassis? And there's a whole list of reasons. Just know that at the end of the day it has to be the right match to work. So that certainly adds a level of complication to this because the chassis are finite. Of course, containers are too, but you can literally run out of chassis and that's happened here recently.

So, on the good side of things, this system, the supply chain that we have here, can be incredibly efficient and most of the time is compared to a conveyor belt where it stays on and goes. And again, for the most part it is a smooth flow of freight and we are breaking records, we move boxes, and that's a great thing. But how do we keep the conveyor belt moving when we all know we are growing? We're growing as an economy, freight continues to pour into the country, so the challenge there is how do we keep that conveyor belt on? How do we respond to volume growth? Ships are getting larger, more volume is coming and it is happening as we speak. We see the records daily in headlines. For us here we feel it, we see it, and I know other ports in the country are as well, and it is just amazing to see all this coming at us. Big ships, of course we talk about volume growth, but a compounding factor to this is how that growth gets here. And it's getting here in surges and slugs on these larger vessels, again compounding the effect of not only more freight, but more at one time. Terminals can respond by adding equipment. We purchase equipment, we hire operators, we train the operators. For the most part, we can do that without much trouble. Not so in the other links of the chain. We all know drivers are not always available. Lots of companies hiring and cannot hire enough. On the BCO side they have decisions to make as well. Extending their operating hours probably translates to overtime and additional cost. So, as we start to receive these large slugs of freight, and more of it, how do we process it efficiently? Again, from our perspective, all of this cannot translate to additional dwell time. If we are looking at 4 to 6 days today to get what we want to be as a terminal, we have to drive that dwell time down to 2 days. So that freight has to move as fast as it's coming to us, it has to move off the terminal.

So that brings us to why we are here today, to talk about how we do that and move it off terminal. And it is back to that terminal gate transition, which is the focus of the study. How do we help move this freight and what are some of the technologies available to us to allow us to advance our processes and not impede volume growth? So, we are right back to that red arrow. And to me, ultimately what I remind myself of his how do we help keep freight flowing. And that is to me is a great question. That's the end of my portion of this presentation so thank you very much and I'm happy to answer questions at the end of the presentation. And, Keith, I'll turn it over to you.

Keith Chase

Thank you, Ryan good afternoon, everyone I like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to learn more about this important project today. Over the course of my career I've always felt that wherever we could focus on issues where transportation mobility and access come together with economic performance, economic efficiency, it is really time well spent. So, my general charge to all of us, including the many who are on the Webinar, is pay attention to this research. When the reports come available in the future, I think you are not going to find them not only interesting, but you'll find them practical on several levels including the depth of information that we did obtain for through the stakeholder outreach. And in fact I would be remiss if I didn't credit our steering committee of the various DOT participants who really from the very beginning of this project placed a great emphasis on engaging stakeholders. And not only over the phone and not only through surveys, but face-to-face. So, a strong foundation for this research and a strong foundation for the findings and recommendations that Tom will speak about is that we did not do this work out of the ivory tower, quite the opposite. We are all proud to say that there is a stakeholder outreach that is both deep and wide in many respects.

So, I'm going to highlight several of the components and what they entailed. Early in the project a questionnaire was administered online. And when you see 25 total respondents you may think that is not a very large response, but it is a rather extensive survey. That 25 respondents is one of the many indicators that those who we did outreach with, those whom we engaged, are deeply interested in this topic. Extremely timely in terms of what Ryan spoke about in terms of the challenges at the port, but there's also an expectation and anticipation that technology may be part of the solution. As transportation and technology, the marriage of the two come closer together, how can we really leverage that to make our ports operate in a more efficient manner? 65%, two thirds of the respondents to the initial questionnaire, indicated that their ports are being challenged in terms of delays and cues. You've already heard both Ryan and Tom reference the cargo surges. Think about that. When the vessels are coming in and it is not metered like certain highways, this creates an enormous challenge when extensive amount of freight has to be handled at one time. So, that was a focus of the questionnaire. And we found as well that when it comes to the optimism and the hope and the openness for technology solutions, let's not limit this only to larger water ports in our thinking, but that it really is indeed scalable, and we will come back to that.

Certainly, some unique challenges got pointed out. Not only containerized traffic, but similar challenges relative to bulk terminals such as the Port of Miami. I noted the scalability of technology solutions. The fact that we have this broad-based range of port operators and others does underscore the importance of this scalability and different applications. We did speak with people and interviewed people about what they have already done to date. Many have implemented different strategies for staging to mitigate congestion. But juxtaposed to all of that is that as the activity increases at the ports, and it aligns with increasing economic prosperity, increasing economic activity, you have the parallel development of real estate going up in value and becoming more challenging to obtain such as for Truck Staging areas. So that was the questionnaire. In depth were a number of interviews. Most of these were face-to-face, several of them were several days. And they took place at this mix of port regions as shown before you hear. We have very good geographic mix spanning the country.

Not only that, but these stakeholder engagements had another particular strength I think we could all keep in mind. And that is, wherever possible, we brought together that range of stakeholders who was affected by this issue. Not only the port authorities, but the terminal operators, the trucking firms, railroads, industry advocacy groups and associations had some excellent input in various locations from the state DOTs. And even in places like Seattle, the city Department of Transportation, which to their credit are very much focused on the efficiency and effectiveness of the ports of Seattle and Tacoma. And certainly, the involvement of our planners. And we are very glad freight has become such an important focus among our regional planning organizations nationally.

To highlight quickly the kinds of topics that were covered in these face-to-face engagements. We did establish a baseline of information about the port, the region, trends, strengths and weaknesses. We discussed and documented some of the operational constraints that do relate to truck access queuing and staging. We talked about some of the coping strategies, things that have been tried. Some of the weaknesses and challenges, particularly as the last bullet point alludes to, that even as we look at technology as a fix – and that is a big focus of this research of the study – one of the recurring themes is that we also need to be good at the institutional issue of bringing the multiple organizations not only involved in the supply chain, but the other organizations such as the public sector, to really be operating and tackling this issue outside of our silos and all being around the table. So that is the item that has been highlighted here. And keep that much in mind, that one breakthrough of course is technology. Certainly not a panacea, there are other solutions that are not technology-based. But some of the greatest breakthroughs may actually be in terms of creating more of a seamless approach across multiple organizations – public, private, and the supply chain. Talk about the current initiatives that are taking place, discuss potential strategies, potential for technology solutions including where automated vehicle technology might fit in. And I think we got a lot of sober response on automated vehicle technology, that the complexity of port operations may mean that there's some limited application for automated vehicle technology, but it is going to be extremely challenging for many tactical and operational day-to-day issues. I noted the institutional impediments and here I will underscore that. And note that in places like Seattle where there is a very active association there in the Northwest for both ports whose mission is to bring the different players together, there is a belief that even the institutional impediments are insurmountable.

So, I've already alluded to some of the highlights coming out of the interview. I will pick on several of them here that maybe I have not yet alluded to or touched on. It is good that transportation planners now are very much focused on land-use. Probably like never before over the past decade or so. And I just wanted to remind all the players on this Webinar today that land-use and transportation is as much a key issue for our ports as it is for our highway and transit and metro areas. Part of the overall problem-solving is how do we ensure that there is land identified and obtained or used or leased as need be to address a problem of space. The use of the automated vehicles at marine ports, as I noted, is likely limited to some very specific applications, but it would be unwise to think of it as a panacea for congestion at ports. We did find and we will emphasize that the one size does not fit all also in terms of ports, in terms of the markets in their metro areas varying to a great degree, and that becomes an important consideration in solutions. The growth of cargo surges and often the lack of information, to be able to prepare or adapt to it, is a real challenge going forward. Likewise, another highlight indeed is that single terminal ports multiple terminal ports can indeed function very differently, and that has implications for the solutions.

What do we mean by cargo visibility? It really has to do with the data chain, the data availability, with the supply chain. Often participants in the process speak to the need of having a greater ways of sharing data to be able to create more efficiencies of the movement of cargoes. Beyond technologies there are often low-cost operational solutions for improving the cues and minimizing container list is certainly a critical part of any strategy for improving operations. Another backdrop issue is labor agreements. We found through the outreach, through the engagement, that this is simply a reality. It's going to be a major consideration, part of the overall problem solving approach in terms of addressing the labor component of it. The last point or close to last point is that port operations are complex. There are multiple players and bringing them together in terms of the solutions is both an opportunity and a challenge.

Tom Phelan

Thank you very much, Keith. That was a great recap of the industry outreach. I'm going to go through relatively quickly, but we will have plenty of time here to focus on some of these in terms of highlighting the most important elements of this and a general summary of the findings and analytical process along with it. I will rehash a couple things that came up in prior presentations with both Ryan and Keith. And these are generally as we move forward the three key underlying themes. The first being minimizing turn times and maximizing the number of turns would be the absolute most critical element for the drayage trucking industry. This is what drives efficiency from their perspective. From a terminal operation perspective and the overall supply chain, minimizing the number of lists for a single container, the handling of a cargo, is another important element and is a key element of maximizing the efficiency of a port facility. Underlying all of this, we mentioned this briefly with the issue here about the labor agreements, that this Uniform Intermodal Exchange and Facilities Access Agreement – we refer to this by its original acronym, UIIA – this generally governs all of these relationships, and we will talk about this a bit later. This ties into the complexity that Ryan talked about, about how the cargo handling process being transferred from one player in the supply chain to another. There are legal issues and responsibilities that come along with this. When one player takes possession of it from another one, and who handles it, and who is responsible for the equipment that is being used to handle it. These are all tied into this Intermodal Exchange Agreement that governs this process, where most of the players in the supply chain have some involvement in developing these agreements.

I don't want to go through all the detail here about the 4 categories of potential solutions that we looked that. Very generally, it's at a high-level, general measures to expand capacity and manage demand. In some cases there are measures to improve the efficiency of an inbound truck moving into a terminal or an outbound to address inside the gate queuing. And then a more general look at automation in different contexts – inbound, outbound, or both – tied to potential staging yards as well. We'll get into some detail here.

We broke the potential solutions into two groups. The first being what I'll call kind of low-tech. They're not necessarily low-tech, but they are staging technologies that marine terminals using conventional trucks. These are low-tech from the truck equipment standpoint, where it's no different than where an over-the-road tractor that you might see queued at a port terminal. There are opportunities and applications, some of which were analyzed in detail in that 2017 business case analysis, and others which involve improvements inside the gate. That core community system that I spoke to earlier in this presentation, that would be one of these potential solutions in a Group A. And then Group B gets down to the details of potential automated truck technologies. We didn't go and look at any specific technology and identify one as better than others. It was the overall general approach of automating trucks at one or more steps and the drayage process.

We had a long list of potential solutions. I don't want to go into these in great detail, because a lot of the folks who are on the call will be familiar with these. One I would just point out is this Gray Box container system. Ryan spoke to it generally earlier. This idea of having containers and potentially even chassis that are not required to be used for any specific haul, that there is just this large pool that any drayage truck and any customer can use any container and any chassis could actually help the process. We didn't look at this in detail here as one of the long lists of solutions that had been mentioned in our outreach process.

In this group there were three solutions that raised to the top in terms of how receptive our outreach partners were and the input that we got from the ability to quantify the benefits of some of these. One of which would be a simple off-site staging and parking area. And another would be an off-site staging area combined with an appointment system. The third one of these that we will talk about in some detail would be an off-site staging area with what we're calling a virtual gate.

I've highlighted the middle, and the two green ones were the two that we took from the list and screened into a more detailed analysis. There are several reasons why we took this off-site staging area with the appointment system off the list. It was screened out because it's really a capital-intensive version of a truck appointment system, which is already on the list. It's basically an appointment system where a port authority or somebody has to go out and obtain a piece of property to stage trucks off-site in combination with this appointment system. So, the cost profile was much higher, but the benefits were not much different than what we would've seen otherwise with other improvements. And another reason why we screened it out is because it provides less benefit than a virtual gate at a similar cost. And again we will go into some details on what exactly this virtual gate entails.

This Group B, there are three items we identified as initial options for screening. The first would be an automated trucking queue that I will describe. The second seems to be like the first, but you will see when we move through the slides that it functions quite differently, because it's more of a shuttle operation as opposed to a general truck technology. And the third is this alternative transport mode to and from an off-site staging area. And for those of you who are familiar with this, this was a particular item of interest at the Port of Houston because they had been engaged in some conversations with the Texas Transportation Institute about the freight shuttle that TTI has developed. We included the automated truck technology. It's an automated technology, it's not quite a truck, but we did not screen this to the end as one of the ones we looked at in detail for that very reason. It has its own operational parameters and its own cost and benefits that really are being developed independently of any of the players in the study.

Let's talk about what exactly level of automation means here for those of you not familiar with this. This is the breakdown of the automation levels established by the Society of Automotive Engineers. The level 4 you can see, and I'll read this so everyone can understand the importance of this. This is a high level of automation involving the control of all driving, even if a human driver does not respond to our request to intervene. So, in other words, this is about as close to full automation as you can get without having a robotic truck that does not need an operator.

Let's look very quickly, and for those who are in the port industry I want to apologize in advance for the simplicity of this, it's really just to give an overall view of how a typical terminal operation works. And then we will go into how the different solutions may play out in the context of this. The aerial photo on the left shows the path of a truck coming in off the highway system, accessing a terminal, dropping off or picking up a container or both, and then going back out again and serving the shipper or receiver. The graphic on the right shows this circular operation, and it's done repeatedly over the course of hours, days, and weeks during a typical marine terminal, how it operates. The highlight here, the red bars on the graph, is to show where the interaction takes place between the trucking industry and the terminal operator; the red bars being the terminal gates in this case. As we go through these you'll see these bars will change a little bit as we remember from the MARAD terminal aerial photo, this is where those build up at a typical operation today.

The first solution I described before is a sample off-site parking staging area and basically just takes the queue from the terminal gate and moves it elsewhere to a place that might be more suitable to hold a large number of trucks that are waiting to get into the gate. Again, for context purpose here, we are showing an off-site staging area up the road from the terminal here. In reality, the research we've done and the interactions we've had with various port stakeholders indicate this could be quite some distance away, could be several miles away, and a lot of the folks in the industry will tell you that the distance is less important than travel time here, and having a good path from the staging area to the gate would be critical to this operation.

When we look at an off-site staging plus a virtual gate, it's similar to the one I described before but there's one important change. And that is that if there's an opportunity to stage trucks away from the terminal, why not take this opportunity to begin the transaction process and maybe some of the activity that would currently take place at the terminal gate could be done at the off-site staging area, where the truck and then proceed directly into the terminal, and with little or no interaction with a terminal operator can get onto the site and process and/or drop off a load. Automated trucking queue is similar to the original current operation, with the exception that for a certain portion of this trip the vehicle can enter into an automated mode and proceed into the terminal and load, and then proceed out of the terminal at some level for automation. You'll notice there is no staging activity being done here. No land cost associated with it. There would be a vehicle cost associated in terms of automating the vehicle.

And this is where we get into something that is pretty substantially different than what is being undertaken right now, and this is an automated truck operation between the main terminal and an off-site staging area that is done independently of the drayage truck move. You will see in this graphic on the right. It is actually two different sets of vehicles. Your traditional drayage trucks take these loads from the off-site staging area to the customers and vice versa. That's where you see there the terminal gate transaction where the interchange between the terminal operator and the drayage truck takes place. And then the green bars at the terminal gate indicate there is little or no processing. It is just a constant shuttle operation from the terminal to the off-site staging and loading area.

We tested these various solutions through five different scenarios. The first one I will call a generic port. And when I say generic port, what I mean is there was a generic port establish in the 2017 Business Case analysis with a certain size, certain number of lifts, certain operating parameters, that was the basis of much of the analysis that we conducted here. We then looked at four different types of port markets as Keith mentioned earlier on his outward section of the presentation. A major urban port that serves the local market, such as New York and New Jersey, where a substantial bulk of the cargo moving into the port is landing at destinations within the relatively short distance of the terminals themselves. The second of those four, the third bullet on this page, would be a Local. And it combines Local/Hinterland market for major urban ports, like Los Angeles and Long Beach, where there is a substantial local market as well as a very large volume of cargo moving into the land destination and functions a little differently than a place like New York or New Jersey, for example.

Ryan is from a port we designate as a Minor Urban Port where they serve a primarily Hinterland Market.  Savannas is a busy port, but the city of Savannah itself is not a major market for the cargo that is moved through here. Atlanta is a substantial destination of much of the cargo moved through here to other destinations. Memphis, Tennessee being another one in the Southeast and moving out towards the Midwest. Then we also included an Inland Port here; we used Columbus as an example. There's a lot of marine cargo being handled at the inland port areas that comes via rail from the East Coast. In this case, from Norfolk along the Heartland Corridor.

The benefit-cost analysis that we conducted, there was a number of cost elements here; the land itself, the improvements to the land, there are capital and operating costs associated with these, vehicles, technology, labor being a major contributor to the operating costs. In terms of quantified benefits, what we estimated here were these reductions in queuing time and transaction time, there was a numerical benefit. We used the DrayFleet® Model that the EPA has developed over the course of several years and multiple iterations to estimate the benefits in reducing idle omissions idling fuel savings, and overall from a regional planning perspective just reducing truck miles traveled and truck hours traveled as a measure of quantified benefit. There are a number of qualitative benefits that we also identified for each of the solutions in the various scenarios that we looked at. Congestion reduction obviously being one. Community benefits; just the benefit in an area like Port Elizabeth or LA and Long Beach of not having trucks staging and parking on neighborhood streets. This is a major issue up in the Seattle/Tacoma area from our interviews with these folks.

And I'm going to highlight two of these here, because they relate to several of the parallel efforts that are ongoing here in terms of improving safety freeing up truck parking capacity in existing facilities. We had done some very cursory data collection and found that if you go to a truck stop or a highway rest area in the vicinity of a port facility during the overnight or early morning hours, we have found somewhere between 5 and 7 percent of the spaces were occupied by trucks that handle marine cargo. Jason's Law, the truck parking survey that FHWA is undertaking right now, specifically relates to this point. If we can free up capacity in these facilities by moving marine terminal drayage trucks out of these parking areas into staging areas, then that will have a qualitative benefit beyond providing these trucks you see here photographed parking off the highway shoulder off the road and into a parking area.

I'm going to spend a little bit of time on this graphic because this really wraps the whole thing up and summarizes this in terms of each of the 4 solutions that were screened, which ones seem to be the most attractive in terms of their relative benefit-cost ratios, and which types of markets they would be most applicable to. Let's look, for example, at an off-site staging and parking area. When I identify what is, for example on this page, a moderate relative benefit-cost ratio would be from our analysis a benefit-cost ratio above 1, but not substantially above 1. This type of operation could help in many of these types of markets. It does not help at all, as we can see here, in these major urban areas. So, you think of LA Long Beach, or the Port of New York and New Jersey. As you can imagine the capital cost of going out and acquiring real estate specifically for a large port operation and staging trucks off-site, it is very high, the land is very expensive. Which is why these two markets, these two scenarios in particular, did not grade out very well.

Once you start putting the virtual gate in this staging and parking area, if there's some way to reduce the transaction time and improve the efficiency of the operation, potentially improve the throughput of the port itself without expanding the terminal area, this is where the benefits start to get a little bit higher. And if you look at the one blue box in particular, this Minor Urban Market to Hinterland, Port of Savannah being an example of this, this grades out higher in particular because the cost of the real estate is low compared to the volume of cargo this move through here. Again, it is a very busy port, it is not a huge metro area, so the cost of the real estate here is substantially lower than it is in most of these other places. So, the benefit-cost here is fairly high.

So, what we call the simple automated tracking queue option, this is a drayage truck that is driving from 100 miles away, could be driving from 20 miles away or 10 miles down the road, picking up a load and operating in in automated mode while in queue at the terminal gate and it's circulated through the terminal. Somewhat to my surprise it did not get flagged as a substantially attractive option. And the reason for this is that we made an underlying assumption that this would involve a full fleet of vehicles; that every truck serving a port, for example, would have to be instrumented with some kind of automated technology, so the capital cost here was fairly high. So, just as an example, here at the Port of New York and New Jersey, there are about 7,000 or more drayage trucks that serve the port. Instrumenting all of these for this option here tends to drive the cost up, with some benefit as well. For solution B2, this involved that automated shuttle from the port terminal to the off-site area. This grades out higher because it's a dedicated fleet. In the case of New York and New Jersey, instead of implementing 7000 trucks, for example, it would be a dedicated fleet that would be operating under the control of the terminal operator, and the drayage trucks would be picking up cargo at the external staging yard. So this option tends to look very attractive, mainly because the capital cost for the instrumentation of the vehicles is much lower.

We are getting close on time here, so I will go through quickly the barriers to implementation. Keith talked about a number of these, the legal and jurisdictional hurdles. Think about this, if you have an automated truck does it operate behind the gate, is it inside the gate, is it outside the gate, is it not a public road? The labor agreements are very big issue. I don't want to oversell it, but I certainly don't want to understate this. It is absolutely one of the primary considerations that every port terminal operator and every port authority representative we spoke to had mentioned as an issue to deal with. The complexity of the supply chain obviously being one we have talked about a number of times here in this presentation. And look at this divergence of cost of benefits across the supply chain and think of this in the context of the solutions we had talked about. Who pays for these improvements? I highlighted this one terminal gate interaction that Ryan had spoken about and I'd spoken about previously. If there's a substantial cost involved in the doing the automated truck implementation, for example, at a port terminal, whether it's shuttle operation or the drayage truck industry, who actually benefits from this and who has to pay the cost to it? Will the terminal pay the entire cost if the trucking industry is the major beneficiary, if they can get more turns in during the course of the day? This is one of the barriers to implementation, that somebody has to be incentivized to actually go out and spend a substantial amount of money that it would require to implement some of the solutions.  

We have come up with a number of next steps we've identified. As I said earlier, this Uniform Intermodal Exchange Agreement is critical here. And the various players involved in this would absolutely be interested stakeholders here. Folding them into this process would be a prime next step. Additional research on this automated truck applications with similar constraints. Some of these would be related to marine cargo. Boat cargo handling was one of areas we had looked at in interviews. Did not get a lot of solid information about this. Much of the focus at the ports we dealt with was really on the containerized cargo side. But we do know that there are certain ports where boat cargo, seasonal issues with grain terminals, for example, is a big deal often and to talk about what they're dealing with now. And then border crossing has been flagged. Again, not as a MARAD issue here, but we do know that FHWA is working with the US Customs and Border Protection on a number of research initiatives at border crossings. Continuing industry and public agency stakeholder collaboration; we are glad to have so many players on this phone call from various public and private entities. DOTs and MDO's are absolutely interested parties as these technologies emerge. Enabling these agencies to compete for grant opportunities through various federal resources, some of which are listed here. And then during the course of our outreach, again, I mentioned some of these international ports that had some interesting technology developments that they are doing some research and implementation on. It's worth keeping up with these, from our perspective. Ideally, a pilot project or a series of pilot projects if there are interested ports of various sizes. I was very impressed with the receptiveness we had come across with some of these interior river ports; how cognizant they were of constraints. And one port on the Mississippi River where they looked at the Port of Virginia almost like an older brother or older sister and followed technology developments at the Port of Virginia and they used that to select some potential applications that might fit in their smaller port operation. So, with the second ports and obviously inland ports like we talked about, there certainly some potential opportunities for implementation in these facilities.

With that, we ran two minutes over, but I think we did a pretty good job as far as presenting all of this without glossing over anything too much. Again, this is a pretty intensive effort, and we will open it up to questions.

Jennifer Symoun

Thank you to Tom, Ryan, and Keith and we will get started with the questions posted online. We have quite a few in the chat box and I'm going to just start scrolling from the top of the chat box and going through the questions and any presenters feel free to jump in and respond.

A recent report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics challenges the narrative of a shortage of truck drivers, saying that the issue is really a shortage of driver pay. Others in the trucking industry also object to the driver shortage claim. What are your thoughts on this?

Ryan MacDonald

I appreciate that, I can give it from our perspective. And I understand what they are saying and, frankly, I am a little confused myself because I get the same kind of mixed information, if you will. But what I can do is go out to what we are actually experiencing. And I think what we see is on the big vessel events, when we have those, and they're multiple times a week now (for the West Coast, it is a daily event, but for us it happens a few times a week now) where we get a 10,000 or 12 or 14,000 TEU vessel and there's a lot of container exchange, that is when it really comes to light that there are not enough drivers in the community to dray off that many containers within the same amount of time. Again, if we're talking about in today's world, say 4-day dwell, they just can't get to them that fast, so something has to give. And that's where we see it. But our concern is this is going to become a more frequent event. So, this driver, I'll say shortage, that we experience today is only going to be exacerbated unless there's some arrival of new drivers or some implementation of driverless technology.

Tom Phelan

And to follow up on that, I understand exactly what is being said here as well in terms of the issue of number of drivers versus driver pay. Interestingly enough in my area, in the Port of New York and New Jersey – I don't want to speak for drayage trucking firms necessarily – but because these haul lengths tend to be much shorter here, the drayage drivers are usually returning to their home at the end of the day. Which is one of the nonfinancial factors here. It's not related to pay, it's the quality of life issue for the driver. You probably get less of a concern in these big urban areas that serve local markets than you would in other places in terms their driver shortage. Their issue is primarily on improving the operation, improving the throughput. If a driver can get 4 turns a day instead of 3, that would make their operation more efficient and they wouldn't even necessarily need the extra drivers, and it would help them use the drivers they have much more efficiently. I don't know if that answers a question, but it's an excellent issue that applies to long-haul road trucking.

Jennifer Symoun

What is impact of treating drivers as contractors rather than as employees to avoid overhead costs?

Tom Phelan

I will answer that as best I can. I don't see that as playing a substantial role here. It may relate to the driver pay issue. Much of the drayage industry is generally run on a pay per load issue, and fitting more turns in the course of the day would help that operation substantially. But I don't see, from my knowledge, where it would be any different from an owner-operator versus a company driver, as far as the terminal operations in drayage hauls themselves.

Jennifer Symoun

Are all the chassis owners shipping lines?

Tom Phelan

That's generally not the case. In fact, as time goes on there are fewer and fewer chassis that are owned by shipping lines. Most of these are owned by third-party pools, which have their own challenges. I don't want to get into a lot of detail about this, but my understanding from the outreach (?) what we have is the port of New York and New Jersey operate differently even than most other ports, because of some legal or contractual concerns their legal department has, as far as how the chassis will operate and where the chassis are stored. But for the most part, I believe the shipping lines have been looking to get out of the chassis business for years. And I don't think that necessarily plays a role here. It is still a different owner than the cargo owner. In more and more cases we are finding that the trucking firms, because they rely heavily on roadworthiness of chassis, the trucking firms are buying their own chassis to the extent that they can use them. So that's just something else we have learned in the course of our work here.

Jennifer Symoun

What is the timeline for the project?

Tom Phelan

I will speak to that. We are actually extending the timeline, and I was going to mention this at the end in my wrap up time and in my thanks. But we are in the process of reporting the findings, and there will be a report published later this year.

Jennifer Symoun

Would truck signage helped managed operational flow?  Been a while since I looked at this, but do we need to consider some trailblazers in MUTCD for truck?

Tom Phelan

I think it's an interesting question overall. In none of our outreach did we get much of a response from trucking industry representatives who thought this was a big deal. One of the advantages of working in the drayage trucking industry is that these firms typically work in and adjacent to existing ports, and they are familiar with how the ports are accessed and how they operate. And very often they are very well aware of shortcuts or informal staging areas where they can hide and wait for a couple hours before they go to a gate. So, we never got any indication. I think it could be helpful in general for the trucking industry, but in this particular segment of the industry you get familiarity with the operation, at least once drivers are acclimated to it. New drivers might be a whole different story. This isn't something we got a lot of feedback on.

Jennifer Symoun

How many ports are using a pass of some kind?

Tom Phelan

That's a good question. I couldn't answer that. In general terms the bigger ports have been more ambitious about implementing some of these technologies and these port passes. But other than a transportation credential, I don't know what they mean by a pass. Is this something along the lines of a PierPass on the West Coast?

Jennifer Symoun

Did the survey ask about delays due to road capacity?

Tom Phelan

Yes, in fact constraints on access roads to the ports is one of the background items that we had asked about in our interviews. Some of the stakeholders identified this as an issue, but what I found interesting is that they also identified this as one area where they had seen the most progress, believe it or not. Because most of the jurisdictions where these bigger ports operate recognize the importance of the port from a general regional economic health standpoint. Because, in many cases, the port authority has their own bonding capacity and help finance off terminal improvements, that generally the sense has been that it's an issue in some of these cases. And anybody will tell you I think it always improves something in terms of access. But our sense is that the access roadway capacity constraints are dwarfed by the terminal queuing issues at the vast majority of these major ports.

Keith Chase

We did see some good indications through the outreach that the players, the partners, are looking at their regional transportation networks as a system and trying to solve the problems on that regional scale.

Jennifer Symoun

Go back to the question about the pass, Howie did confirm that he was referring to a port pass for tuckers.

Tom Phelan

I don't know that, I couldn't answer that question specifically, because we didn't get responses from every port operator. My general sense is that the bigger ones are starting to look at this, and LA Long Beach has been at the forefront of this for quite some time. But in terms of knowing how many of these across the board are using this type of PierPass-like technology, I don't know the answer to that.

Jennifer Symoun

Was there any discussion of direct rail access to the dock side or other intermodal access?

Tom Phelan

Yes, in fact they weren't necessarily part of the initiative, because they don't relate to truck terminal queues. Most of the ports we spoke to are in the process of implementing or have recently implemented on-dock or near-dock improvements, specifically to migrate some of their longer drayage truck hauls to rail move. Ryan, you might want to speak to this as there was recent ongoing changes going on down there as a study unfolded, too.

Have you recently completed an on-dock rail project there, or are in the process of upgrading your rail capacity to give you further penetration, really to release pressure from on your terminal gates from the trucking perspective?

Ryan MacDonald

Absolutely, we are about halfway in to what we call the Mason Megarail Project. We'll double our intermodal capacity, we'll have 1 million lift capacity. Half of that will be available at the end of this year and the other half will be available in 2020. So, yes, we are doing everything we can to maximize our intermodal facilities.

Tom Phelan

And basically, what that is doing, in response to the question there, is that it is providing additional capacity on the truck side, getting those longer hauls out of the truck mix, and streamlining the process out to get hinterland cargo off the pier quickly and to the interior of North America.

Jennifer Symoun

Is a correct that minimizing lifts really means not grounding containers?

Tom Phelan

That is an excellent question, and I'll have to look back at the transcript and see. I didn't go into detail about that. For that solution, B2, that shuttle operation using a dedicated fleet of trucks to move out to a staging area where the drayage trucks would pick them up and take them to their ultimate destinations. In our analysis, we made an assumption that there would be no containers stacked there, that it would be a grounded terminal. Those would be containers on chassis stored there simply to facilitate the most efficient movement of the cargo. An automated truck could potentially move from the terminal out to the staging area, drop the chassis with a container on it there, and then the drayage truck could simply come in and hook it up and take it away. So that is an excellent point. And when I identified that minimizing lift as one of the parameters, one of the goals here, that is exactly what we had in mind when we use that assumption for the off-site staging yard in conjunction with the automated shuttle.

Jennifer Symoun

Has anyone thought about the increased port security that an automated truck to staging area might afford?

Tom Phelan

Absolutely. And that is exactly what one of the reasons to take this another step further and rope an organization like IANA into the process; that's right for these legal jurisdictional hurdles. Beyond just the security issue, just a very basic issue would be if there is an off-site staging area with a virtual gate and there's a shuttle operation going out to it, from a labor perspective is that considered inside the terminal, does it require ILA labor to operate the facility, or can be done as an external or third-party operation or related operation. Those are absolutely critical issues that would have to be addressed here. And obviously cargo security is first and foremost. One of the reasons it takes quite a bit of time for these trucks to process at a terminal gate is that there's quite a bit of paperwork that has to be handled to ensure the driver is credentialed and that the driver's picking up the correct load and the load is not being handed off to somebody who shouldn't have it. So, this type of thing like electronic sealing on containers something that has come up as an option. But absolutely cargo security and related issues associated with that would be a major issue that would have to be addressed.

Jennifer Symoun

What is the basis for selecting a 3% discount rate?

Tom Phelan

The basis for selecting that was simply because there were two different scenarios that were played out in the 2017 operation. The 2017 business case analysis that was done, they used the 3% and 7% discount rate. The result we showed might have been a little bit different if we used 7% present analysis. We identified 3% the one we selected from the prior study.

Jennifer Symoun

Why is auto truck plus off-site parking at HIGH for major urban to local market if land costs are high?

Tom Phelan

<referencing from slide 46>

It says high here because even though the land costs are high, the off-site staging area is smaller for this since it's a shuttle operation and it doesn't necessarily require the extensive multi-hour potential stage of a truck. So, the land costs are high in the areas, but the off-site parking area is not as high for this particular improvement as it would be for the general staging area. But then also, something else to keep in mind, is that even with the higher land costs in the Major Urban to Local Market and the Major Urban to Mix Market scenarios, the volume of cargo is so large that even incremental improvement in individual lift can have a substantial aggregated benefit simply because of the volume.

Jennifer Symoun

When is the signal that the truck can move to the terminal made, and by who?

Tom Phelan

That would be a detailed technology answer here, tied to something that's simple, believe it or not. There's an off-site staging parking area with what we call an appointment system. It could be as simple as what is used at some of these very small ports that handle bulk cargo where it functions very much like a cell phone lot. Where a grain terminal on the Mississippi River one of these ports that sent a response back, they have indicated that they use an off-site staging area. And it's literally a cell phone call to the operator. "Hey now there's space for you to come in here, why don't you drive in here and pick your load up" and then off you go. It could be as simple as that. But the more advanced ones would have to be tied into some sort of a port community system with an automated dispatch, notifying the driver that their load is ready.

Jennifer Symoun

Where can we find the reports mentioned by Tom (e.g. 2017 Business Case Analysis, Industry Scan, Automated Vehicle Report)?

Tom Phelan

I'm not exactly sure. I don't know if one of the MARAD folks on the call would want to answer. I don't know where that currently sits. We had an internal copy of that. I don't know if that's already been published.

Jennifer Symoun

Did the study examine the operation of existing or proposed staging operations?

Tom Phelan

We didn't go into great detail about the existing operations other than what we were told by the facility operators during our outreach. Partly because for a lot of them, there is not a consensus as to what the value is of the staging area. In New York and New Jersey, for example, they were not too keen on it and for obvious reasons related to the cost of real estate. They saw other improvements as lower hanging fruit that they could potentially implement in the shorter-term. The staging operations where we had the most familiarity came from the trucking industry side where it is not a port authority or a port terminal operator who established the staging operation, it is a private drayage firm that would have a substantial amount of business at a port. In this case it was the Port of Savannah where we got the most remarkable feedback from the trucking industry about their own staging areas they set up to stage their load and stage their drivers, really because of the length of the haul. So, we did have some insight on this and input from this. But we did not look at, say an existing case, where somebody went out and implemented one of these and said, "Hey, this is the port authority of so-and-so and we have built a hundred acre staging area, and look this is a benefit we got from it." We did not go to that level of detail.

Jennifer Symoun

How would AV work with reservation systems?

Tom Phelan

Truthfully, I would think AV could be potentially tied directly into the reservation system. If it's an automated vehicle, the reservation system can serve as a platform for that. Especially if it's that shuttle operation that we saw on the outside, the solution B2. The reservation system – we call them appointment systems here – they tend to be in very wide windows of time and it's one of the things that limits their effectiveness in some of the port environments. We would see that the need to have an appointment system narrowed down to a very small window of time could then serve as a basis for one of these automated vehicle operations.

Jennifer Symoun

Would the industry and public agency stakeholder collaboration effort mentioned in Next Steps include the legal and jurisdiction hurdles mentioned as a barrier to implementation for these technology solutions?

Tom Phelan

Absolutely. In fact, we see that as the most important step to take to start addressing some of those hurdles. And we don't think those hurdles are insurmountable. But some of the solutions we looked at today that we are proposing for next steps for implementation may not be implementable today under existing contractual relationships, but they certainly could be. Contracts can be changed, agreements can modified, and even labor agreements can be negotiated down the road to account for some of these. That's an excellent point.

Jennifer Symoun

Can you explain how a virtual gate would work?

Tom Phelan

We didn't go into a lot of detail about this, because this would be tailored to specific terminals. The way we envision this would be that for a remote staging area that a truck that's coming to pick up a load or drop off a load would pass through – for those on the call familiar with today's gate operation – that some of the functions in that first stage could be done at the remote yard. That 2 miles up the road or maybe 10 miles up the road if the technology exists to somehow capture that truck and enter the facility. The credentials are checked, whatever steps in the credentialing process can be handled at the off-site location. The truck is now in the yard and can wait, it is legally entitled to be there and is credentialed. And then once the truck leaves the yard to go and actually drop the load off or pick up a load, that there's some trigger that identifies this truck as having left the yard, and within a certain period of time has to get down to the port terminal gate, because if not then it is possible it strayed from the rout and picked something else up. That's the kind of vision here. I'm thinking of a geo-fence around the facility where there's real-time information about where the truck is located to help ensure it doesn't get stopped along the way.

Jennifer Symoun

How do I interchange equipment and a million-dollar load with an AV? Can you imagine a carrier turning over a container of single-malt scotch to an AV?

Tom Phelan

That is exactly the big question. The security of the load, that's a critical consideration here. But when you think about it, this is what they're doing today. There's a load is that is being transferred from one handler to another; from the vessel operator to the terminal operator to the drayage trucking firm, and eventually to the customer. So, addressing all the security issues, the legal issues, and the ownership of the cargo and the responsibility of the cargo is absolutely one of the critical elements of this implementation.

Jennifer Symoun

To what degree are cities/municipalities in charge of land use controls engaged in identifying and "reserving" potential off-site staging/parking areas? 

Tom Phelan

I can speak to that in general. In my experience, we've had very little engagement in terms of actual locations. Some of the ports that we had spoken to, Seattle-Tacoma and Seattle in particular, they were interested in working with the port to identify possible locations. They didn't get to a point where they're looking at exact parcels. They are really looking at this as an issue they need to address to see if there are other options here for dealing with this. Ryan, do you want to speak to anything what may or may not be going on in Savannah as far as staging areas off the terminal?

Ryan Macdonald

I appreciate you asking me. I think you touched on it earlier where you said many of the trucking companies have taken it on themselves to create and run these what we call intermediate yards. So, a lot of that happens there. The other thing about Savannah that we just don't experience like some of the other major urban ports is we don't have that queue problem that spills out onto the community. Most of the time we can accommodate our queue within our premises, within our terminal facility. So, I think we are different that way. We don't see some of those challenges that Seattle-Tacoma, LA Long Beach, New York, and even Norfolk see.

Keith Chase

Takeaways today will be that the problem-solving has to be innovative, has to involve a lot of stakeholders. I've seen a few of the comments emphasizing the importance of municipal involvement and land use, and I think that theme is coming across strongly in this work. There are some creative things that are taking place and a number of them are around making creative use of land. But it is not a zero-sum game, so the land-use component of this is indeed extremely important with the municipal involvement as part of that.

Tom Phelan

I wanted to address the one question related to what seems to be perhaps a misunderstanding about the idea of a wheeled operation at an off-site staging location. Dan Smith had said, and he's completely right about this, about no US port having the room for wheeled operation and that there wouldn't necessarily be a need for a staging area if they did. Just remember, we are speaking about this particularly in a context of the off-site staging area that may be located 5, 10, or even more miles away if physically possible and jurisdictionally possible. It's not intended to suggest that you push the gate out a little bit and now you have a wheeled operation adjacent to an existing port. This is really about an off-site location as shown graphically on our map as many as a couple hundred yards up the road. But, depending on how the technology can be implemented, our sense here is that it could be several miles away and maybe some options here that are not available for in terms of the stage close to the terminal.

Ryan Macdonald

I would like to add one thing. When we think about an off-site staging area, because again, everything is on the table and we consider any and all. But we are looking at that to help us drive those dwell times down, so that if a box on terminal does creep up into the high dwell area, we can dray it off. But we see those off-site stacks or those off-site terminal locations as more as a grounded facility. In fact, as a grounded facility is how we are coming at this. There may be wheeled applications, I don't know. But we kind of see that that exchange of freight perhaps might happen at a near-dock off-terminal facility. And especially on the export side, then we can start calling that freight in based on vessel ETA such as if a vessel falls back or is delayed for any reason, we are not handling that freight on our terminal until we know that vessel is on its way. So, we might be seeing that a little different. We see those as a stacked and grounded facility and not wheeled operations.

Tom Phelan

Interestingly enough, the examples that I cited about the trucking firms that are including their own staging areas, it's the ones in Savannah where they have the long hauls that we're most interested in, and most seem to be further along in this and any of the other ones. And theirs happen to be wheeled operations, but it serves the same role where they're staging it for an export load, because they have to fit it into a vessel loading window that's different than on the import side.

Ryan MacDonald

Absolutely As that one operation isn't going to necessarily need to handle the amount of volume we would as a terminal, so we would obviously have the handling equipment there and they wouldn't necessarily need that. So they can get by with a wheeled operation.

Tom Phelan

Exactly. Sorry for the confusion there anyone. Didn't mean to panic anyone.

Jennifer Symoun

We made it through most of the questions. If the presenters have a minute or so there's one more question we haven't gotten to yet. Will there be an effort to lead an effort for implementing recommendations from the study?

Tom Phelan

I can't speak to that. We are operating under a contract here and MARAD would have to speak to how that would be played out.

Jennifer Symoun

Travis if you want to type anything please go ahead. I think we've gotten through everything now.  I want to thank all three of our presenters. Thank you also to all for attending today's seminar. The recorded version of this event will be available within the next few weeks on the Talking Freight website. Registration is not yet available for the April webinar but once it is information will be sent through the Freight Planning LISTSERV. The Freight Planning LISTSERV is the primary means of sharing information about upcoming seminars. I encourage you to join the LISTSERV if you have not already done so. 

There is also information showing on the screen about getting AICP CM credits as well as a PDH certificate. With that we will end for today. Thank you everyone and enjoy the rest of your day.
Updated: 05/02/2019
Updated: 5/2/2019
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