SoCal ports see smooth launch of truck program

We are concerned that there are a lot of trucking firms that have already been put out of business by this plan,?said Curtis Whalen, executive director of the Intermodal Motor Carrier Conference arm of the ATA.

Whalen noted that hundreds of trucking firms that were in the drayage business until this week are now prevented from servicing the two ports by the truck program.

We have to ask: what are the environmental returns on this plan compared to the loss of trucking firms, Whalen said.

Jeffery Standart, who runs drayage firm XRT Express Transport Express in Wilmington, said that 30 percent to 40 percent of his regular drivers are planning to leave the area because they do not wish to be employees, as the Los Angeles version of the truck program requires.

This is crippling to our business,?said Standart, whose trucking firm contracts with 30 to 100 truck drivers depending on the season. I think it is restraint of trade. The ports are cutting off their nose to spite their face -- they just don't realize that it is not just their face they are hurting. XRT, which handles mostly agricultural exports, has been operating at the two ports for more than 20 years. Like all trucking firms wishing to continue in the local drayage service after Wednesday, Standart has applied for access licenses with the two ports.

Standart said the requirements of the access licenses, including providing the ports with maintenance records of all trucks, are pointless.

The ports are not trucking experts, and even if I give them the information, they are not going to know what they are looking at, Standart said.

Another concern raised about the truck program, even by the ports, has been that no one seems to know where the more than 2,300 pre-1989 trucks identified in the local fleet last year and banned as of Wednesday have gone.

The ports originally intended to scrap these older trucks as drivers applied for replacement grants and subsidies from the ports.

However, the ports, as of last week, had signed up less than 200 such drivers.

Officials at both ports, while pleased that these older trucks are no longer in service at the ports, have said in the past that they are concerned about the possibility that the drivers have simply moved the trucks outside of the ports. This would mean that they could still be contributing to local pollution. A field survey conducted several weeks ago at the Port of Los Angeles found that less than 15 trucks out of 1,200 trucks sampled were 1988 model year or older.

Long Beach's Steinke said that while the port may never have exact numbers about how many pre-1989 trucks were actually taken out of service by the truck ban, I think we will have more information about six months from now than we currently do regarding the makeup of the trucks and the number of companies.  And while the Southern California ports celebrate the start of the truck program, port officials are aware that many other ports are looking at the truck program with the intention of copying it.

Steinke said that it is in the best interest of these other ports to do so.

I think that (other ports) recognize that trucks add to the pollution portfolio of the ports and that they are going to have to take a look at that and assess where they are. A lot of ports don't have as many trucks as L.A./L.B. but some of the characteristics are the same. So, I think they will take a look at what we are doing and model it to their circumstances at the individual ports, Steinke said.