US rail network heading for gridlock
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Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer US
Published : 16 May 2006 20:16
A leading transportation executive has warned that America’s aging infrastructure cannot keep pace with growing international trade.
“The US economy has been transformed by unprecedented growth in containerized imports,” said John Bowe, President of The Americas for global container transportation company APL. “Growth in the transportation infrastructure hasn’t kept pace. If we don’t fix this, supply chains will bog down, consumer prices will go up and the economy will suffer.”
Speaking at the Innovations in Transportation symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bowe called for public-private collaboration leading to a national freight policy, significant new investment in the US rail network and increased productivity at US ports. “The private sector will have to play a larger role,” he said, “but we’ll look to government to provide incentives that stimulate investment.”
Bowe went to Washington DC earlier this year to warn President Bush’s Domestic Policy Council that containerized US imports from Asia would grow by about 30 percent in the next three years, but ports were not improving productivity fast enough to keep pace and railroads were not adding enough track, equipment or terminal capacity to handle the load.
“We’re pushing too much cargo through a pipeline that is not growing fast enough,” Bowe told the audience of businessmen at MIT. “Eventually it will be overwhelmed. We need to act now to prevent gridlock.”
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