By G. Ray Gompf, CD
In this case, the last mile refers to that final leg of the trip to have your goods delivered. Now in the past, in the days of regulated transportation companies, every carrier had a cross dock and the inter-city trucks would be unloaded and cross docked to the smaller intra-city trucks that would make that final last mile for your products.
Upon de-regulation, routes were no longer protected and virtually anyone with the wherewithal to pick up your freight and deliver it to your customer was able to do so, as long as they followed the rules.
Effectively, what de-regulation achieved was to change the model for road transportation. Road transportation for its part modified its modus operendi and the cross dock was no longer part of the scenario.
Now fifty years into the direct shipping of large loads and successfully so, the model is changing. With the advent of on line shopping, there is again a need for more last mile shipping. Sure, those packages that arrive on your doorstep have been on a big tractor trailer, for much of its trip but then it’s broken down so a small van or even a car can deliver your package. It’s not practical from either a profitable point of view or an environmental point of view to have a twenty eight foot tractor pulling a fifty three foot trailer to deliver one package here and another there and have those loads perfectly organized so the most efficient routing.
Municipalities are now recognizing that having big trucks working inside city cores is just not practical. These municipalities are now considering having, for lack of a better term “cross dock facilities” where the inter-city trucks can deliver their loads and then intra city carriers, or last mile carriers, can organize the shipments and have them delivered much more efficiently than expecting the shipper to receiver, one truck, model.
This new concept model, fits in well with the municipalities adopted responsibility within other segments of the transportation industry. There are many government agencies responsible for a variety of tasks at city airports. Certainly, you won’t see that 767 delivering the passengers to the local hotels. No, there is a last mile taxi, uber, lyft or some methodology to get the passenger from the airport to the destination.
In maritime transport, again, there are multiple municipal and or government departments involved in ensuring there is last mile delivery of goods shipped by boat. Even the railways have terminus points where freight is unloaded and forwarded to the receiver by other means.
Why then would truck transportation be handled differently? But, it is.
Municipalities are searching for ways to reduce the number of vehicles, especially in the core area. They have built considerable infrastructure to move people into the core areas without the need for private vehicles, large parking lots, and wall to wall traffic jams twice a day. Add to this private traffic the commercial traffic generated from moving individual people and goods and cities are night mares at best, wreck heaven at worst.
Municipalities use rail rapid transit, either subterranean, or above surface. Then there is the public bus type of traffic feeding the rail rapid transit. But to date few municipalities are even considering dealing with commercial truck transportation within their boundaries.
The concept of transfer parks along the outskirts of their urban boundaries, to allow for intercity freight to be handled by local delivery organizations to the last mile.
This would do many things to improve the efficiency of freight movement, from allowing better scheduling of deliveries, and an opportunity to solve the overnight parking for truck drivers involved in long haul operation, to easing the load on the environment.
Municipalities have, for the most part, treated transportation less than professionally for decades, and not truly on purpose. There’s been no guidance from either the industry that knows how to move freight most efficiently because few even considered asking the question. Often, too many politicians feel they are adequately equipped to make decisions when they clearly are not. Transportation requires a life-time learning curve, a politician at best has to learn a task he or she has never seen, let alone done in seconds so it’s really not their fault for any miscues.
Traditionally, politicians have resorted to the use of consultants to offer opinion but then the consultants have no real life experience or very few do. Those within the industry haven’t stepped forward because they’ve had better things to do. Nobody in the industry wants to change something that’s working even if there could be major improvements in efficiency.
So, it is up to municipalities to figure out their own solutions to their own problems. But when one municipal government starts to say, “if you want to do business in our municipality, then you will do it our way”. After that the rest of the municipalities will take note and follow suit. The industry will fall in line because it’s to their advantage to fall in line, just no one wants to be first.
