Shaping Future Transport Systems

SHAPING FUTURE TRANSPORT SYSTEMS
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City and State
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Shaping Future Transport Systems
Background Information
The need to build a resilient freight transportation system driven by climate anomalies and events that pose several adverse implications for freight systems. Extreme weather conditions impacting freight systems’ sustainability include heavy downpours or flooding, tropical cyclones, wildfires, winter storms, and extreme heat. Flooding leads to washouts, disrupts freight services, and increases the risks of hazardous cargo accidents. Tropical cyclones lead to hazardous conditions, infrastructure damage, create debris fields, and saltwater intrusion or equipment failure. Wildfires lead to service interruptions and damage the infrastructure. Winter storms culminate in freight services disruption and hazardous conditions. Accordingly, the impact of extreme heat on equipment failure and asphalt deterioration cannot be underestimated (Savonis, 2016, n.p). Freight communities should care about resilience given its cascading implications, including the significant economic impact on freight services as well as producer industries. These diversions could potentially overwhelm rail and highway systems and cause community effects. Lastly, freight disruptions lead to consumer impacts and economic losses throughout the nation.
The Need to Build Resilient Freight Transport Systems
Maritime transport drives global economic interdependency as well as global supply chain connections. Ports and shipping handle more than 80 percent of global merchandise trade by volume, as well as over 70 percent of its value. Resilient port and shipping systems prevent supply chain disruptions that are predominantly prompted by stressors, including political events, economic turmoil, cybersecurity incidents, natural calamities, the Covid-19 crisis, and, more lately, the feud within the Black Sea area. These underline the value of maritime transportation systems as a key transmission channel–potentiating shockwaves across global commerce and supply chain systems. Therefore, port and maritime systems resilience is imperative for solid supply chains and supports national economies (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2022a, p.2). In addition, building resilient maritime transport systems is imperative for sustainable development, mainly in developing economies that depend heavily on strongly maritime transport networks.
The Covid-19 disruptions also increased concerns about resilient freight transport systems. More specifically, Covid-19, as well as associated restrictions potentiated severe interruptions in ports – port-level risks could be bourgeoned across vast supply chains as well as across boundaries. Different sectors faced problems along their supply chains. These include but are not limited to lead time issues, raw materials shortages, port closures, ocean carriers’ blank sailings, labor shortages, equipment shortages, reduced working time, and transport or truck capacity constraints. These issues placed significant pressure on the global supply chain linkages’ integrity. They had the substantial potential to undermine the benefits...