The steady growth of transloading in Southern California is welcomed by officials at the local ports because it represents an opportunity to attract more import cargo, but the trend also has implications for port development that need to be better understood, according to a regional transportation planner.
Reloading smaller international containers into bigger domestic ones is done by large retailers and other importers to save on transportation and inventory costs. Consolidation also allows retailers to better manage the inland flow of goods by customizing loads to distribution centers based on current demand data.
(The growing awareness in the value of transloading is described in American Shipper's February cover story, "Tapping Transloads," and the Web side-bar, "Inside look at transload operations," which looks at how two big logistics providers carry out the logistics practice for customers.)
Analysis by rail equipment lessor TTX Corp. indicates that 35 percent of imports into the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will be transloaded to intermodal rail containers by 2016. And a study by Cambridge Systematics on behalf of the two ports estimates that 40 percent of import traffic is transloaded, including trucks. Another 38 percent of imports moves directly inland by intermodal rail via on-dock and off-dock rail facilities and the remaining 22 percent of cargo is for local consumption.
Regional planners and port authorities need to know how transloading is evolving to make better land use decisions, Jolene Hayes, a supervisor with engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff and a former transportation development manager at the Port of Long Beach, said at a session of the Transportation Research Board's annual convention in Washington this month.
The ports are making massive investments in infrastructure to load and unload unit trains on the docks for quick ship-to-rail transfers and they need to determine if they are building the right amount of capacity in the right place, or if plans need to be scaled back, she said.
Transloading involves trucking containers to local warehouses for reloading into 53-foot containers and then trucking them to an intermodal rail yard, or using motor carriers for long-haul delivery. In either case, the containers do not require on-dock rail.
Five of six terminals at the Port of Long Beach have on-dock rail, although not all can handle long trains.
Long Beach is in the midst of a $4.5 billion, 10-year capital improvement program that includes a big rail terminal in the Middle Harbor Redevelopment project and modernization of Pier G, along with a new on-dock rail facility there.
BNSF Railway is awaiting state and local approval for an intermodal rail yard a few miles from the San Pedro Bay ports that would reduce truck traffic to downtown rail yards and possibly be used to haul transload cargo.
Hayes said local transportation officials also need to know where transloading is occurring, and if it's growing, so they can better plan road investments, such as truck-only lanes. - Eric Kulisch