Distributors are increasingly looking to highways instead of railroads for transportation to get around bottlenecks and avoid delays, The Wall Street Journal reported Feb. 21.
The Journal reported that U.S. intermodal transports were down nearly 12 percent in the first six weeks of this year compared to 2021, according to the Association of American Railroads. Lawrence Gross, president of Gross Transportation Consulting, told the Journal intermodal loads have lost a little over 1 percent of market share to long-distance trucking since the start of the pandemic. Intermodal transport is slower than trucking, but it is also cheaper and better for the environment, the Journal noted.
"If they're waiting for days and weeks to get product out of the port and into their warehouse, they're looking for the fastest way to do that, and ultimately that is almost exclusively by truck," Bob Biesterfeld, chief executive of freight broker C.H. Robinson Worldwide, told The Journal.