Port Clean Truck Program: One Year Later

Sometimes you just have to admit when you are wrong.
  
Before coming to lbpost.com, I was the West Coast Editor for American Shipper Magazine, sort of the Economist of the shipping industry. By chance, I started with American Shipper around the time the neighboring ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles first announced their Clean Truck program in early 2007.
  
The multi-billion dollar plan sought to replace the nearly 17,000 container hauling trucks servicing the ports with cleaner-burning models within five years (later studies found the real number was over 19,000 trucks).
  
The goal of the plan was to cut emissions from this fleet of privately-held diesel trucks up to 80 percent by 2012.
  
Late last year, the ports began implementing the truck plan, with the first of several planned bans of certain model years trucks, with the oldest (pre-1988) being banned from entering the ports first.
     
The ports of LA/LB, together the busiest container port complex in the Western Hemisphere move the equivalent of about 15 million twenty-foot-long containers annually, representing about 40 percent of all goods coming into the United States and about 30 percent of all domestic exports.
  
To move these containers to and from the ports, the shipping industry utilized a fleet of about 16,800 trucks prior to the truck plan, which according to the ports, accounted for 80 percent of the annual truck calls into the San Pedro Bay complex. The remaining calls were made an additional 24,200 trucks that called infrequently—less than once per week.
  
The trucks, along with off-road equipment used in the port terminals and ocean going vessels calling there, have contributed to the complex being identified as the largest single point generator of diesel emissions in Southern California. These emissions, each with their own negative environmental and health impacts, fall into three types: diesel particulates, seen as soot; nitrogen oxides, or NOx, a precursor of smog and the respiratory irritant ozone; and sulfur dioxides, or SOx, another contributor to smog.
  
Prior to the truck plan going into effect, the trucks accounted for 10 percent of the ports’ diesel particulate emissions, 26 percent of the NOx emissions, and 1 percent of the SOx generated by port-generated activity. Though the trucks are the most numerous generators of emissions in the ports, these percentages did not rank the trucks as the leading polluters in any of the three categories.
  
In fact, trucks ranked fourth, second, and fourth in the diesel particulates, NOx, and SOx categories, respectively. By comparison, ocean going vessels led each category. These vessels accounted for nearly 60 percent of particulate emissions, 36 percent of NOx emissions, and 90 percent of SOx emissions from port-generated activity.
  
Now, as a journalist, I was neither for or against the program, however, I was very aggressive in exploring the many questions raised about the plan as it evolved. Questions that, as it turned out, it took both ports many many months to address.
  
I reported how according to the ports’ ever-evolving plan competition would be reduced in the trucking industry, would drive thousands of mostly poor independent truckers out of business and wind up costing the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
  
I also questioned the ability of the ports to actually pull it off, considering that the trucking and shipping industry planned to take legal action that at the time seemed more than likely to garner a ruling declaring the ports had overstepped their political and regulatory authority. Even the federal government eventually joined the fray last year, coming against portions of the plan.
  
So one year after the ports formally kicked off the Clean Truck plan, here am I am, admitting that I was wrong.
  
Not about the loss of competition, because today under the truck program there are fewer companies providing the work.
  
Prior to the truck plan there were more than 19,000 trucks in the ports-servicing fleet, with the vast majority working for truck companies than had less than five trucks. Today, many of these firms have fallen by the wayside and cash incentives offered by the Port of Los Angeles under their version of the plan have actually brought in large firms that previously did not involve themselves in the ports-servicing field.
  
Nor am I willing to say I was wrong about the truck plan driving thousands of independent drivers out of work, because today under the program there are about 6,000 less drivers servicing the ports, and those lost have been mainly small independent owner operators.
  
Ironically, I wrote a lengthy analysis piece of the plan in July of 2007 and using numbers from the ports and academic sources came up with an estimate of 4,400 drivers and 1,100 trucking industry support workers that would be lost if the plan was implemented as it was at that time. Not to toot my own horn, but 5,400 is pretty close to 6,000.
  
Nor was I wrong about the program costing hundreds of millions to the taxpayer, because the ports ultimately received hundreds of millions in state and federal funds (which we all know is otherwise known as taxpayer funds) to support the program.
  
And legal problems still remain. Though the federal government eventually dropped a case against the ports’ truck plan, a suit brought by a number of industry groups await trail in a U.S. District Court in December after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said the lower court erred in initially ruling in favor of the ports.
  
What I was wrong about was that the ports would be able to implement the plan at all.
  
Mea Culpa.
  
Now, a year after kicking off the program the ports claim that nearly 5,000 of the still working trucks now meet the cleaner 2007-or-later model year emissions guidelines set by the ports under the Clean Truck program. These nearly 5,000 trucks, according to the ports, now account for more than half of all container moves at the ports.
  
The ports, in a big pat on the back, are touting that the program is nearly two years ahead of its 2012 deadline meet its original goal of reducing 80 percent of the diesel truck emissions generated by the ports-servicing truck fleet.
  
It is worth mentioning, however, that because the ports in February imposed a $35-per-container fee (actually a $70 fee on most average sized containers) on all pre-2007 trucks servicing the ports, the ports-servicing trucking industry moved much more rapidly to upgrade its trucks than anyone expected. Having the new trucks allowed those trucking companies that could afford them to offer cheaper hauling rates because they were not having to pass along the cost of the ports fee.
  
Another point to note is that so far there are no actual air quality metrics to prove that the program is achieving the goal and it could be another year before measurement of the air quality in the ports environs record the impact of the Clean Truck program for its first full year. Certainly the ports can estimate that the x number of 2007 or older trucks moving x number of containers have eliminated x amount of pollution, but the proof is in the air quality measurement pudding–and for this we will have to wait.
  
A quick trip to the ports’ own websites reveal that an air measurement report on the ports has not been posted since late in 2008. And even upcoming Air Inventory reports that are due out soon will only include the first several months of the plan’s implementation.
  
Oddly enough, when you go the Port of Long Beach website and look at their real time air quality measuring tool, you can look back over the past year and see that the numbers for emissions such as particulate matter have decreased very little, and nowhere near the 50 percent reductions in pre-plan emissions that some proponents of the plan have claimed. 
  
Another irony here is that the ports, despite nearly a year of fighting with the trucking industry to implement the Clean Truck plan, have achieved the success they do claim mainly because the aforementioned trucking industry moved to replace their trucks to a large degree on their own dime.
  
And yet, however we have got to this point, we, as residents of Long Beach, can all breathe a little better for the plan being in place.
  
Did it cause the disaster in the transportation industry that opponents of the plan predicted? No.
  
Did it run many workers out of the industry? Yes.
  
Did the plan strengthen the lot of drivers servicing the ports like proponents claimed. No.
  
Have emissions been reduced? Yes.
  
However you look at it, 5,000 cleaner-burning trucks and a handful of alternative-powered trucks in the fleet are nothing to sneeze at.
  
In the end, it will be left to the historians and academics to write what the real impacts of the whole plan were on the ports, the truckers and the citizens.
  
But for now, if the ports’ estimations are correct, at least we can enjoy a bit less brown in the air.
   
And for that, I am willing to admit I am wrong on any day.           
            

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