PPPs for the Upper Mississippi?

Funding Maritime

With the Upper Mississippi River Infrastructure far past its intended life span, should the private sector invest?   https://www.wwno.org/coastal-desk/2023-05-18/mississippi-river-shipping-infrastructure-is-aging-who-should-pay-for-the-repairs

Fall River Woes

News

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

News

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?

News

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

Annual Meeting Events News

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?

News

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.

Ten tractor trailers parked in a row. View is from rear.

MAASTO’s Freight Focus Supports Faster Disaster Relief

MAASTO MAFC

A first in the nation, MAASTO states have collaborated to increase truck weights across the region for emergency divisible loads during declared disasters. See the AASHTO Journal article (at this link) for details on the regional agreement. The MAFC project report can be found under MAFC Research (here).

Truck Parking

News

What do current supply chain challenges mean for truck parking shortages? While the world of logistics is seeing new pressures exacerbated by an “…online shopping boom, lower inventories and federal mandates on driver rest…”, truck parking and related driver safety issues persist. A recent article from Bloomberg highlights continued truck parking issues in light of continued supply […]