Category: Uncategorized

Fall River Woes

Freight Notes Uncategorized

Low water levels on the Mississippi River are slowing barge movements. To add to the frustration of the delays, there is an industry wide work force shortage, and the tow’s cost of operation continue and multiple with the delays.  Read the article at: https://www.farmprogress.com/harvest/its-disastrous-barge-captain-explains-transportation-woes-shallow-mississippi

Kansas Creates Multimodal Transportation and Innovation Division

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Kansas DOT is responding to changes in travel and freight movement to ensure their agency supports the existing and expected changes in transportation, communications, and IT technologies. Secretary Lorenz of Kansas DOT recently announced they are establishing the Multimodal Transportation and Innovation Division at KDOT. She added, this division, led by Cory Davis, will contain the Bureau of […]

Can Home Delivery Help Pay the Bills?

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With the continued tension between infrastructure needs and available funding, Colorado’s Senate Bill 260 looks to a least partially remedy the situation through a unique tax that captures the infrastructure use by home delivery, courier and driver services.  For example, each Amazon or UPS delivery will cost an additional 27 cents.  For services like Uber […]

MAFC Annual Meeting Update

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Join MAFC in Des Moines, Iowa, at the MAASTO Annual meeting to talk freight! Session topics include freight vehicle electrification, freight corridor resiliency, soy and ag transport, FACs, and a MAFC working session.  After 3-years of virtual meetings, the group is looking forward to meeting face to face and we hope you will join us in De […]

 Will FLOW provide Better Supply Chain Data?

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The Biden-⁠Harris Administration announced a new initiative to improve supply chain data flow that could provide information to support freight corridor and multimodal planning. FLOW, the Freight Logistics Optimization Works (FLOW) is intended to speed up delivery times and reduce consumer cost through greater coordination and information sharing across key logistics and industry players.

California Authorizes Light-Duty Autonomous Delivery Vehicles

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This article was originally posted on January 2, 2020. California will allow the testing and commercialuse of light-duty autonomous delivery vehicles on the state’s public roads,and residents could soon receive deliveries from an autonomous vehicle. In developing and adopting this rule-making, the DMV followed the same approach used for past AV regulations packages, including a […]

National Freight Strategic Plan: Request for Information

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This article was originally posted on December 30th, 2019. Comments due February 10, 2020 on the NFSP. The request for comment includes specific questions about how the plan should address several industry and agency policy issues. Access the federal register request link here.

MAASTO partners with Wisconsin DOT to host CAV Summit

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This article was orginally posted on November 22, 2019. Collaboration in development of freight operations, policy, and infrastructure across the MAASTO states has proven beneficial for agencies and freight stakeholders. High levels of the multi-state collaboration exhibited by the MAASTO states is also imperative to support successful adoption of CAV across the region. The executive […]

Innovative Delivery: How far can we go with autonomous goods delivery?

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This article was originally posted on November 19th, 2019 Two recent articles demonstrate how autonomous vehicle technologies are beginning to penetrate goods delivery. Developments in the technologies and the potential for autonomous freight movement, introduce a host of possibilities and questions – What does adoption of new technologies mean to safety, jobs, customer satisfaction, equity […]