1:56pm | For over three years, I’ve been convinced that what the Southern California region needs is a shared vision of the goods movement system of the future. Even as the “tsunami” of freight has receded along with the economy, we all know that the community impacts still need to be addressed. If we turn away, the concerns will only get louder when the economy recovers.
To be sure, there are substantial employment and economic benefits from the region’s international trade and goods movement. My personal preference is that we not eliminate or restrict this industry, but that we keep it and clean it up. We’ve made great strides in that direction already, with turnover of the huge fleet of port trucks proceeding ahead of schedule, to name one example. The Long Beach and Los Angeles 2008 port emissions inventories show reductions in emissions since 2005, a period that includes years when cargo throughput was growing.
But I’ve become discouraged lately as several port-related lawsuits take root. Last year the trucking industry sued both ports over aspects of the Clean Trucks Program. After Long Beach settled, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Sierra Club sued the port in early January. Also in 2009, the City of Riverside sued both ports over the inland impacts of port projects, particularly at rail crossings. I had been hoping that an effort to develop a shared vision for goods movement in our region could avert the need for legal action. Now I think the effort could be undertaken as a kind of “blanket” negotiation encompassing all the current and potential future objections raised about freight-related projects.
I have several ideas for how a visioning effort might work. I think it should involve all the stakeholders: the transportation and environmental agencies, the affected communities, and all the disparate parts of the freight transportation industry. This is sometimes referred to as “getting the whole system in the room.” If any one piece is missing, the vision won’t be valid. I can see the participants using live voting systems and high-tech tools to create literal visions or pictures of the goods movement system of the future. The exercise would result in the creation of a sort of specification for the system: how much cargo it should carry, where the system should be further developed, what areas it should avoid, how it should look and sound. I suspect that even in today’s litigious atmosphere, there’s still a lot of common vision about these kinds of characteristics.
At the very least, a goods movement visioning exercise would illuminate the areas where different stakeholders disagree, allowing for further focused dialogue and negotiation. At the very best, we could find we have a shared vision of the future: a prize to keep our eyes on, and a yardstick by which to measure progress or evaluate interim decisions.
In fact, there have been some efforts along these lines in the last few years. Probably the closest in sheer size was the evolution of the State Goods Movement Action Plan, which came up with the important concept of “simultaneous and continuous improvement” of both the freight transportation system and the environment. Closer to home, workshops along these lines have been convened by Cal State Long Beach (last October), Inland Empire agencies (last Spring), and by the Southern California Association of Governments (at various times). None of these efforts, valuable though they have been, quite got to the scale that I think is needed for this enormous problem. Both broad participation and a repeated commitment (more than half a day) are needed.
Here’s what I wrote about this idea when I first set it down in 2007: “The value of having a shared vision of the future cannot be overstated. When we get mired in the technical arguments about percentage of on-dock rail usage or the location of an inland port, we will always be able to turn to this vision to remind ourselves where we are headed. Shared principles, if they emerge, will also help keep us on track by giving us a way to evaluate new or shifting proposals or priorities. This is an extraordinarily complex field and undertaking, and we stand a better chance of reaching a good outcome if we take the time to imagine it first.”