DC Velocity - November 2014

32 DC VELOCITY NOVEMBER 2014 www.dcvelocity.com
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sible for intermodal trucking, a fragmented $15 billion-a-year business that sits near the bottom of the international trade pecking order, to meet the growing demands of railroads and steamship lines under dray’s current rate structure. Kellaway, who has been involved in drayage for more than 30 years, called the current situation “as bad as I’ve seen it” in his career. He added that terminal operators who deal directly with draymen “are not being held accountable” for the myriad of problems the dray component faces.

BYE BYE, BABY

Whoever is to blame, the reality is that drivers are leaving the business, and fewer are coming in behind them. By some estimates, up to 15 percent of draymen have exited the field during the past five years. “If we don’t take care of the draymen, we’re going to lose them,” Ward Chaplin, senior director, supply chain management of Southern Wine & Spirits of America, a Miami-based beverage distributor, warned in September at the Intermodal Association of North America’s (IANA) Intermodal Expo in Long Beach, Calif.

Chaplin called on port executives to get more involved in providing a decent operating environment so draymen have a fair shot at being productive. For their part, port executives at the expo agreed that drayage has become a crisis that demands immediate attention.

“Motor carriers need to see [an] improvement in their turns,” said Jon Slangerup, CEO of the Port of Long Beach. Gene Seroka, executive director at the adjacent Port of Los Angeles, the nation’s busiest seaport, admitted that “there is a paucity of truckers in the Southern California market.” J. Christopher Lytle, executive director of the Port of Oakland, said that ports need to be more proactive in assuring that dray is a business that folks can make money in. “The days of ports just being rent collectors are long over,” he said.

Port executives are not standing still.

Executives in the Southern California basin
said the “PierPass” initiative, formed in
2005 by marine terminal operators at the
two ports to ease congestion and improve
security and air quality, has boosted pro-
ductivity by giving terminal operations
point. “The system suffers from a
lack of fluidity,” said Ken Kellaway,
president and CEO of RoadOne
IntermodaLogistics, a Randolph,
Mass.-based intermodal company
whose services include port and rail
drayage.

The proliferation of megacon-tainerships capable of handling up to 18,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers is likely to exacerbate terminal congestion because of longer loading and offloading times. In addition, tougher federal rules governing drivers’ hours of service have made driver queuing an even costlier proposition as operators now have fewer productive hours in a day than before.

As if low compensation and
lengthy terminal delays weren’t
enough, drayage companies and
drivers have been forced to adjust
to a new world of chassis availabil-
ity. For decades, steamship lines
made chassis—the frames on which
containers rest during their move-
ment—readily available to motor
carriers. In the past few years, how-
ever, liners have been exiting the
chassis provisioning business, leav-
ing the job to a handful of leasing
companies that pool the assets.

The chassis transition has been painful for everyone. Assets that were once fixed have become variable. Equipment imbalances have become the norm, with no units available in one location and an overabundance in another. No one has suffered more than draymen, who often must make an extra trip to procure a chassis before they can get in line for a load. “It’s like going to the grocery store and being told that you first have to go to Home Depot to get a cart,” said Kellaway.