Institute for Trade and Transportation Studies

I came upon the following picture of airplanes taking off from Hannover airport, and it reminded me a flock of sparrows launching from a tree.  (http://aviationjustice.org/2012/12/18/ho-yeul-ryu-airport/)

I am not going to lecture about the importance of air travel, etc., but normally, we think about transportation as items of one:  one truck, one plane, one barge, one train… but in relativity it is an ongoing conveyor belt of material, components and people.  It is a system that works, but in many ways, it is a system that always seem to be staining at the limits of what could be, going everywhere in a hurry.

Recently, I gave a speech where I mentioned Scuffy the Tugboat. For those not familiar with the story, Scuffy is a toy tugboat  who travels from a little stream to the mouth  of a large river. In reflecting upon this story, I realized that, when talking about transportation planning and policy, we tend to focus  on two areas: the broad stroke of the system  (what I call the “Big F” of freight) or the local,  smaller shipments (what I call the “little f”).  Oftentimes, it is the “Big F” that gets the attention, such as the growth in international trade or a trade lane between two markets,  ports and/or border crossings. We tend to overlook the “little f,” which includes the local bakery, grocery store, and small manufacturing plant, all of whom receive and generate  freight shipments.

These small firms are important to the nation. For example, there are over 5.7 million firms in the United States, of which 5.1 million  firms have fewer than twenty employees. For the ITTS region, there are almost 1 million  firms, of which roughly 88% are firms with  less than 20 employees. At the same time, there are roughly 293,000 firms engaged  in exporting, of which roughly 97.8% were  small- to medium-sized companies.

The complexity arises when we tend to  think about national policy in the terms  of the “Big F”, but then consider our own  regional needs as a mix of both “Big F” and  “little f ” elements. But clearly, we do not  necessarily think about the system as being  beyond our respective state borders. According to the Freight Analysis Framework, trading among the SASHTO states is the region’s largest freight flow, followed by intrastate  trade within the member states. Regionally, freight movements internal to the region  accounted for 60% of the tonnage moved  in 2010. The other movements consisted of  international trade or shipments with other  domestic U.S. markets.

The need to look at the regional importance of these corridors becomes important,  both in supporting the primary freight  network as outlined by MAP-21, but also to  improving our own regional economies. So,  it is important to the region to see itself as  a series of corridors (or “My River” as Scuffy  would say).

At the end of the story, Scuffy was scared as he headed out to the ocean, only to be  rescued by the “Man with the Polka Dot  Tie”. In some ways, the economic clouds  and waves continue to swirl around, but  instead of being frightened, we should see  this as an opportunity to understand our  interrelationships, largely carried on these  rivers of commerce, which support both “Big”  and “little” freight traffic.

The growth in exports has been well documented, but normally these are reported as simply tables, showing the growth of trade.  As such, we tend to forget that trade is a sum of many different commodities moving to many different markets.    Part of this is that when I first started working on ITTS, I was pushing the growth of exports to promote regional trade.  And well, exports from the Southeast have exploded, not only from the National Export Initiative, but also from a weak dollar and some movements in certain commodity markets.  The sum is that exports have increased as well as its relative importance to the economies of the ITTS region.

These tables and charts, combined with the statistics that are available on the ITTS website, should be considered as simply an asset to help researchers understand the importance of trade to the region’s economy.

Arkansas

Florida

Georgia

Kentucky

Louisiana

Mississippi

Virginia

West Virginia

 I had the pleasure of attending the Kentuckians for Better Transportation (KBT) meeting in Lexington recently. As always, attending state-specific meetings leads me to believe that more people are understanding transportation’s importance. My pre-sentation, “Trends in Global Waterways and Implications for Kentucky,” outlined how the world is looking at waterways for freight mobility and economic growth. Although the U.S. remains the largest inland waterway user in the world, we need to consider waterways as a part of integrated supply chains.
 Like most attendees, I spent my time at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) running between presentations, committee meetings, and simply visiting during the breaks. I did participate in TRB Session 522: “Benefit Cost Analysis for Freight Projects: Moving Theory into Practice.” My presentation, focusing on Corps benefit-cost analysis and some thoughts on multimodal analysis, is posted on the ITTS website.

“The Heartland Intermodal Corridor: public private partnerships and the trans-formation of institutional settings” by Jason Monios and Bruce Lambert was published in the Journal of Transport Geography (Issue 27 (2013), pp. 36–45). The paper developed a framework to look at institutional settings and how they influence transportation through six key factors: reason for collective action, institutional setting (public sector), institutional set-ting (infrastructure), interaction between various parties, common sense of purpose, and leader firms. Research for this paper was conducted during the Heartland Cor-ridor Trip organized by ITTS in 2010.

Today we are talking about record lows in the Mississippi River value with its implications on restricting shipping, while in the recent past we were talking about record high water.  In both cases, this complicates navigation, as mariners must respond  to changing waterway conditions.

While the Mississippi River is generally recognized as a key commercial corridor for the United States, it is normally not understood how that system relates to the modal systems until something happens that forces people to consider its importance to the nation. In the case of low water, navigation channels become both shallower and narrower.  This means that towing companies tend to load lighter or with less total barges, leading to additional costs to both barge operators and shippers.  In response to these lower levels, portions of the Pinnacles will be removed to allow for navigation.  A second rock removal project is planned to begin in February.

Regarding trade, the Mississippi River is a large gateway for U.S. exports, as agricultural products, petroleum products and chemicals comprise the bulk of the export traffic.  (Figure 1.  shows the sources exports that leave the Lower River, and each state’s estimated share of exports that depart from the Lower Mississippi River.)  However that corridor remains very dependent upon barge traffic to bring exports downriver (and imports northwards).  See my presentation on the Lower River.)

Exports by State of Origin, 2011 through the Lower Mississippi River, 2011.

For the months of December and January, the financial value in economic impact is expected to exceed $7 billion.     Reducing barge traffic generally results in some cargo switching to highways, and not railroads, as the alternative mode part based on studies conducted by the Corps of Engineers and others.  This implies that when a system fails, even partially, it can lead to large modal disruptions in other parts of the network.  There are also changing shipments of grain, such as inbound grain shipments arriving in Port Manatee, Florida.

In other ways, the Mississippi River seems to be part of a general sense of uneasiness in the transportation industry.  The Mayan Calendar predicted the end of the world.  While the world has not yet ended, the low water conditions on the Mississippi/Missouri Rivers, longshoreman/labor issues, changing in global markets, and unease in the domestic transportation volumes; suggest that the future will look different from the past.  In this regard, how do we manage these systems, recognizing that operational constraints may limit our ability to respond quickly, or in a way that is consistent with the previous operational framework?