Ruling the Roost

For all its tongue-twisting jargon and impressive college curricula, billions of bytes of software and lickety-split communications, when all is said and done the transportation industry is, very simply, moving boxes of stuff from here to there.

Out of this rather mundane task have grown the trucking, railroad, aviation and steamship businesses. Today, the carriers are assisted by logistics specialists and third-party service providers who act as travel agents for some of those boxes loaded with goodies.

At the very core of what has become a $425 billion-a-year domestic bazaar of transportation services are the people who order the goods that the carriers move, the much-maligned and much-coveted shippers.

Some 2,600 shippers and executives from companies that pursue them are gathering this week in San Diego for the 91st annual meeting of the National Industrial Transportation League — the largest shippers’ group in the country — and Transcomp 98 — one of the freight industry’s largest trade shows.

Once again, railroad performance is at the center of the shipping community’s concern. The service meltdown that brought the Union Pacific to its knees for much of 1997 and 1998 and severely slowed the Burlington Northern Santa Fe has not been forgotten. Shippers are concerned that the improvements they’ve seen in recent months are temporary, a product of the nearly complete loss of agricultural shipments brought on by the economic slowdown in Asia and the sharp drop in domestic prices.

These service problems have caused some shippers to support moves in Congress to force more competition into the increasingly concentrated railroad industry. If Congress acts next year to spur competition, the railroads will have to accept the punishment as self-inflicted. For too long, the railroads denied there was a service problem, with Union Pacific’s top executives going so far as to tell regulators that the shippers who were complaining — their own customers — were lying.

hippers are the only reason transportation companies, including railroads, exist. Carriers can’t malign them and stay in business. Hail shippers.