WASHINGTON: With new vehicle sales and production in North America still running at record levels, the region’s vehicle-handling ports are running out of room. Larger vessels, sometimes arriving in bunches, are putting more pressure on terminals and yard space. Land for expansion, meanwhile, is hotly contested because port authorities have competing claims on its use, whether with the much larger container trade, or with real estate developers keen to invest in waterfront property.
With federal infrastructure grants limited in scope and slow to materialise, and container ports attracting the bigger portion of the funding for better hinterland connections, there is a real need for focused public-private partnerships to improve the velocity of throughput for ro-ro and finished vehicles.
At this week’s Finished Vehicle Logistics Import Export conference in Baltimore, Maryland, leading figures from the port authorities and terminal operators looked at where investment was coming from and where it needed to go to better manage car volumes.
Bill Kerrigan, vice-president of logistics at the auto division of terminal operator SSA Marine put the case clearly: there is not a lot of room left for ro-ro in the US ports and Mexico is moving at a snail’s pace to put the port infrastructure in place needed right now. While the vehicle logistics industry has spoken for years about building inland mixing centres, multi-storey garages for storage and increased terminal space, the reality is that none are likely to happen in the time required. The only answer is to improve road and rail connections for ro-ro volumes and speed up their movements in and out of the ports to avoid congestion and ‘vessel bunching’ outside the ports. That is going to need investment and more scrutiny in its allocation.
“Greater velocity is better for everyone,” said Kerrigan, pointing to the urgent need for operators to more closely study the entire process mapping the movement of finished vehicles from factory to dealer. “We as an industry need to separate out the different segments and look at the numbers to see what is happening,” he said. Mapping that process also required a historical perspective to gauge seasonal demands.
Kerrigan added that there needed to be a common EDI or XML messaging platform shared across all of the supply chain providers involved in each stage of the vehicle delivery process, as many continue to email spreadsheets, requiring processors to create bill of lading manually. Speakers also suggested that there was a pressing need for vessel sharing agreements between the maritime operators and a greater adoption of RFID technology on a national scale.
