DC Velocity - May 2015

inbound

Public disagreements in this industry generally are passionately pursued by organizations whose members have a stake in the outcome, but they typically are not personal. However, the long-running feud between Bob Voltmann, president of the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), and James Lamb, head of the Association of Independent Property Brokers & Agents (AIPBA), has gone quite public, with each slinging mud at the other via e-mails with many ( presumably) interested parties copied in.

Lamb accuses Voltmann of having orchestrated federal legislation to hike the minimums for the surety bonds brokers must post, to $75,000 from $10,000, an increase Lamb says threw thousands of small brokers out of business and paved the way for TIA members—many of them bigger fry—to grab additional business. Voltmann and TIA contend that the increase, the first in decades, was reasonable; that it was needed to protect all parties against the risk of bad brokers absconding with shippers’ freight, funds due carriers, or both; and that small businesses make up a large chunk of TIA’s membership.

The enmity between the two reached a crescendo March 31 when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the Department of Transportation subagency that regulates brokers, rejected AIPBA’s request to overturn the higher bond limit, saying it was in no position to circumvent congressional intent. The following day, which happened to be April Fools’ Day, Lamb distributed a bogus e-mail announcing Voltmann’s resignation in the wake of the FMCSA’s action. Voltmann, for his part, has not hidden his disdain for Lamb in several of his own e-mails.

While we all appreciate some excitement now and then, these behaviors do nothing to improve the reputation of transportation brokers, or of the transportation industry as a whole.

Brokers’ clash gets
personal

Our daily dispatches from the ProMat 2015 trade show in Chicago in March were packed with updates on new products, recaps of keynote speeches, and similar news. But there were plenty of interesting, sometimes humorous, sidelights that didn’t make it into the newsletters. Here’s a sampling:

b Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple Inc. who designed and built the first two Apple computers, does not have high-speed Internet access in his Los Gatos, Calif., home. Wozniak, who spoke at the show’s concurrent educational conference, said that his area of Los Gatos was never connected for high-speed Internet, probably the only place in Silicon Valley that wasn’t. Thus it is that one of the 20th century’s great technological innovators can only avail himself of high-speed connectivity during his frequent road trips.

b The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) had a booth emblazoned with the cheeky slogan “Don’t be a dimweight.” Unlike its rivals FedEx Corp. and UPS Inc., which recently shifted to more expensive dimensional weight pricing for ground parcels measuring less than three cubic feet, USPS has opted—at least for now—to stick with its traditional pricing methods and is using that as a competitive differentiator.

b Every trade show has one or two exhibitors that go to unusual lengths to grab attendees’ attention. This year, the talk of the show floor was Irish lift-truck maker Combilift and its “dancing forklifts.” Every 30 minutes, Irish music would begin to play, and operators would swing two kelly green omnidirectional trucks in circles, deftly weaving around each other in a display of agility, smooth cornering, and tight turns. Although you won’t get the full effect—the almost painful decibel level has been toned down for the video—you can see the performance for yourself at www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EFxiIvigrk.

The lighter side of ProMat

Life on the road has long been a source of fascination for writers, poets, and musicians. A new book of short stories by John Bendel, a former driver who now heads the transportation marketing firm Bendel & Bendel, tells trucking tales from an insider’s perspective. According to the author, the book, Crazy Dan, The Demon Truck and Other Stories of the American Highway: 13 Trucker Tales as Told by Luke Underwood, “reveals the romance, mayhem, terror, humor, and many other facets of life behind the wheel of a big rig.” (Luke Underwood is an invented character who narrates the tales.)

The stories in the collection were selected from a series Bendel originally wrote for Truckers News and Roadstar magazines. The book is available for download to any Kindle device and can also be read on most smartphones, tablets, and computers by using the “Free Reading Apps” at the Kindle store.