Transport, Trade and Regulation News

Container lines, U.S. shippers and logistics providers are coming together to figure out the best way to prepare for the July 1 start of new global regulations requiring the weighing of containers before they are allowed to be loaded onto a ship.

U.S. infrastructure projects focused on improving freight movement got more backing from the federal government in the latest round of a popular grant program.

Too few shippers are ready to meet new global regulations requiring the weighing of containers before they are allowed to be loaded onto a ship, said Chris Welsh, secretary general of the Global Shippers’ Forum, the largest global shipper group. Welsh spoke with JOC.com Executive Editor Mark Szakonyi in late September about the risks of not complying with the rules set to take effect July 1, ways to meet the International Maritime Organization regulations and the complicated issue of who exactly is a “shipper.”

U.S. House legislators advocating the scanning all containers that come into the U.S. used a Tuesday congressional hearing on the threat of dirty bombs, or explosives using radioactive materials and conventional explosives, to reiterate their calls for the long-delayed federal mandate.

The U.S. House of Representatives Tuesday approved a three-year deadline extension for U.S. railroads to install new safety technology, avoiding a catastrophe that railroads have said would cripple the network fluidity intermodal shippers depend on.

China’s economic slowdown threatens container terminal operators and container-backed securities, according to two new financial advisory reports.

The U.S. Federal Maritime Commission has voted to seek comments on possible changes to rules covering contracts that govern most ocean container shipments to and from the United States.

The U.S. Federal Maritime Commission voted 4-1 to change licensing and financial responsibility requirements for ocean transportation intermediaries, despite objections from one commission member.

Frank Peake, former president and chief operating officer of Sea Star Line, has lost his appeal of his conviction and five-year prison sentence for participating in a price-fixing conspiracy in the U.S. mainland-Puerto Rico market.

Customs and Border Protection directors Friday urged West Coast brokers and forwarders that haven’t done so to begin filing trade documentation through the evolving “single window” initiative that CBP and several participating government agencies have established, even though mandatory electronic filing is still more than four months away.

The Mombasa County government is trying to extract more fees from users of the Port of Mombasa at two points in the supply chain, which would further drive up shipping costs in East Africa’s largest container gateway.

A second explosion rocked the city of Tianjin, home to the world’s 10th-busiest container port, nearly two months to the day after an explosion in the port area killed nearly 200 people and impacted port operations.

An arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said stronger action is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ships, and that a carbon tax on shipping would be a way to achieve it.

Shippers that operate truck fleets are urging U.S. lawmakers to give states more flexibility to determine whether to allow heavier trucks on their roads.

An increase in the annual subsidy for operation of U.S.-flag ships under the Maritime Security Program survived in a U.S. House-passed bill to end the United States’ 40-year-old ban on oil exports, but the bill’s chances of becoming law remain iffy.

Nearly a year after labor stoppages at U.S. West Coast ports burned scores of perishables shippers, the industry’s largest advocacy group refuses to relent in its push for greater transparency in how ports are operated and negotiations with unions are conducted.

U.S. lawmakers may have avoided a government shutdown last week, but the temporary funding bill that bought Congress 10 more weeks has left important port construction projects and ports’ access to federal grants in peril, according to the top U.S. port lobby.

The National Labor Relations Board determined that International Longshore and Warehouse Union Locals 8 and 40 in Portland violated federal laws prohibiting secondary boycotts by engaging in work stoppages and slowdowns, and on Wednesday ordered the ILWU to cease and desist from those activities.

After collecting thousands of days' worth of data from more than 220 truck drivers, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is starting the final analysis stage of its study of the safety impact of its new 34-hour restart rules, which were suspended in December. The agency hopes to complete its study this year.

The great swell in U.S. transportation, warehousing and utility jobs receded in July after hitting historic heights in April and May, but demand for workers remains strong in a complex employment market. Hiring numbers, and separations, continue to rise.

There is no “medium-term” prospect of the European Union expanding sulfur emission regulations for container lines to the Mediterranean, a Port of Barcelona executive said last week.

U.S.-flag requirements raised shipping costs of taxpayer-funded international food aid by 23 percent between 2011 and 2014, according to a government report that provides fresh ammunition to critics of U.S. cargo preference laws.

The Indian federal government is retreating from a controversial “corporatization” plan to transform ‘major’, or public, port trusts into independent companies following stiff opposition from labor unions and some political groups, dealing a big blow to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reform efforts to stimulate trade and economic growth.

India’s director general of shipping Deepak Shetty said that while the country is working to streamline its bureaucracy to facilitate maritime trade, the total removal of cabotage protections was out of the question.

A new rule protecting U.S. truck drivers from dispatchers and others who encourage them to violate federal regulations to meet unrealistic delivery deadlines may be on the books as soon as next month, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. But an FMCSA official and at least two shipping executives say it’s a resolution to what may never have been a significant problem in the industry to begin with.

As a concession to the owners of the established port terminals and to encourage them to invest more in their container terminals, Brazil’s Special Ports Ministry has been negotiating to extend the concession periods before the contracts require.

Controversial provisions of truck driver hours-of-service rules suspended by Congress last year are likely to stay suspended until Congress acts, a representative from the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration says.

A coalition of truckers, cargo interests and trade organizations is preparing to ask the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission to restrict charges for late pickup or delivery of containers

Procrastinating importers and exporters who cheered the latest delay in U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s mandatory use of the Automated Commercial Environment for filing documentation are only hurting themselves if they don’t start using ACE when it becomes voluntary on Nov. 1, Customs specialists say.

Proposed shipping legislation moving through Australia’s Parliament would upend the nation’s cabotage law and clear the way for non-Australian carriers to enter the nation’s coastal trade.

Household spending in the U.S. and European Union will revive flagging container shipping demand in the second half, a chief shipping analyst at BIMCO said.

The deadlines for federal rules requiring U.S. truck drivers to use electronic logging devices and prohibiting shippers, brokers and motor carriers to break safety rules have been pushed back a month until Oct. 30.

Low U.S. fuel prices give the trucking industry a window of opportunity to convince elected officials to increase the gasoline tax and dedicate the revenue to rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, trucking executives said this week.

The seven-year U.S. economic recovery is getting "long in the tooth," Chicago Federal Reserve Bank economist William Strauss said, but there's life in the "tortoise" yet.

The U.S. Congress would no longer require U.S.-flag vessels to move goods between the mainland and Puerto Rico under a five-year debt restructuring plan proposed Wednesday by Puerto Rican Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla.

Shippers moving good through the rapidly-growing port of Mombasa may soon have to pay steep new fees if the governor of the port’s county has his way, a move that could shift cargo to rival Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

New Delhi on Monday approved relaxing its cabotage law to allow foreign roll-on, roll-off ship operators to offer coastal services, another big step by the Narendra Modi-led government to reduce supply chain bottlenecks.

With both sides of the debate over heavier trucks readying for battle via the markup of the next federal highway bill, a U.S. House representative is proposing a middle road.

Stakeholders striving to keep Brazil’s government from integrating the Special Ports Ministry, or SEP, with the Ministry of Transport have gained a powerful ally in Murillo Barbosa, head of the Association of Private Terminals.

While opponents of U.S. legislation that would track port performance at the nation’s 25 busiest container ports argue about the feasibility, they’ll have hard time arguing it would be too costly for the ports and the federal government.