Together with 15 other trade associations, the Coalition for America’s Gateways and Trade Corridors (CAGTC) called on the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to formally establish the Office of Multimodal Freight Infrastructure and Policy (Freight Office) as required under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, P.L. 117-58).
Read the full letter and a statement by CAGTC Executive Director Elaine Nessle here.
The Board of Directors of the American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA) is pleased to announce that Cary Davis will be the organization's next President and CEO, effective October 1, 2023.
“Cary speaks our business in a way policymakers and international maritime partners can grasp,” stated Paul Anderson, AAPA Board Chair and Port Tampa Bay CEO. “With incredible enthusiasm, he creates an understanding that seaports are at the heart of a modern, global economy, and most importantly, he knows how to tell a compelling, collaborative industry story. Cary is the right leader to keep AAPA growing and innovating together now and in the future.”
Following the announcement of Chris Connor's pending departure as President and CEO earlier this year, the vetting process considered multiple strong candidates over a period of five months, after which the specially convened selection committee unanimously recommended Cary to the board. The board unanimously adopted that recommendation.
“I am grateful for the Board's confidence in me and want to thank Chris Connor for all of his diligent work leading AAPA, along with the example he has set,” said Cary Davis, incoming AAPA President and CEO. “We are living in era of great disruption - economic, political, technological, and environmental - and our association serves as a beacon in the midst of the uncertainty. Advancing the cause of America's seaports, dynamic, and often underappreciated, economic assets, is the highest honor.”
Read the full release here.
The White House released an updated technical assistance guide that focuses on federal and state technical assistance programs aimed at accessing and deploying Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act funding. The updated technical assistance guide builds on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s Guidebook, Rural Playbook, and Tribal Playbook, and the Inflation Reduction Act’s Guidebook and Tribal Playbook. This new guide highlights programs that help communities navigate programs and resources that can help them deliver infrastructure, clean energy and climate resilience projects. The White House also maintains a webpage with resources on the Inflation Reduction Act’s “elective pay” (often called “direct pay”) provisions, through which tax-exempt and governmental entities can, for the first time, take advantage of tax credits for building clean energy projects.
While some of these programs offer hands-on and intensive planning and delivery support for communities, others are more self-directed resources and tools such as webinars and websites, or funding that can support project planning. The guide covers more than 150 technical assistance and capacity building programs encompassing well over $1 billion in Federal support. In addition to federal programs, the guide is also highlighting over a dozen new commitments from states to support local government applicants.
Read the full release here.
The Intermodal Association of North America (IANA) and the Bureau International des Containers (BIC) are extending their collaboration on container facility identification, which began in 2021, to include geofencing. IANA will take the leadership role in collecting and reviewing geofence coordinates for North America intermodal facilities for inclusion in the global BIC Facility Code database and in the IANA Intermodal Facilities Directory.
The BIC Facility Code database is a global database of over 17,000 container facilities and provides a facility name and address, latitude/longitude point and harmonized facility code. As part of the 2021 harmonization exercise, the locations in IANA’s North American Intermodal Facility database were assigned a global BIC Facility Code, and an API synchronization was put in place.
The database is being expanded to include geofences coordinates to help support the industry’s adoption of smart containers. The methodology and recommendations for the project were developed by a global working group assembled by the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and includes ocean carriers, IoT providers, and software platforms.
The objective is to provide a neutral open library of geofences linked to container handling facilities to ensure that all parties in the supply chain can reference the same geofence for a facility regardless of the provider or platform they may be using, thus improving reliability, interoperability as well as safety and security.
Read the full release here.
Travelers in Washington logged a lot of miles on state highways in 2022. A heck of a lot.
Vehicle miles traveled by drivers in 2022 may have increased a modest 1.2 percent from 2021, but there is nothing modest about the 34.2 billion miles traveled, more than enough for 182 trips to the sun and back.
Annual performance data like this and five-year trends for numerous travel modes on select state-owned roadways are available in WSDOT’s recently released 2023 Multimodal Mobility Dashboard. The dashboard provides quick access to information about the state's most-traveled corridors, examining how congestion and corresponding mitigation strategies like incident response and HOV lanes affect travel.
The dashboard analyzes travel by car, public transit, passenger rail, ferry, airplane, walking, and biking, as well as multimodal freight mobility. These strategies and modes work together to help improve the movement of people and goods on Washington state's multimodal transportation system.
Some of the highlights from the Multimodal Mobility Dashboard:
- Drivers traveled 34.2 billion vehicle miles on state highways in 2022, a 1.2-percent increase from the 33.8 billion traveled in 2021.
- Total air cargo tonnage in 2022 was 1.99 million tons, a 5.2-percent decrease from the 2.10 million tons in 2021.
- While transportation measures show some level of recovery compared to 2021, most have not returned to their pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
Read the full release here.