USDOT drafts strategy for nation's freight movement

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) has released a draft of a National Freight Strategic Plan that offers policy proposals for and solutions to the nation’s growing challenges of moving freight, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced yesterday.

Now open for public comment, the draft addresses the need for the efficient movement of goods, while recognizing and responding to future infrastructure challenges.

In his "Fast Lane" blog post today, the secretary said those challenges will include a 40 percent increase in freight volume by 2040; ports that will see larger vessels carrying more containers; a tripling of air freight; a doubling of multimodal shipments; and double the volume of imports and exports.

"Unfortunately, if we stand still, we'll be meeting that set of challenges with a set of bottlenecks and economic chokepoints: outdated bridges, overburdened highways, underdeveloped first-and-last mile connections to our ports, and backed-up rail crossings," Foxx wrote.

The draft proposes strategies to address the infrastructure, institutional and financial bottlenecks that hinder the safe movement of goods, USDOT officials said.