GRID Logistic Incorporated » Transportation

Beyond Freeways: Commerce, Community, and Contention along Los Angeles’s 710 Corridor

gridadmin — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 16:24:38 +0000

How a freeway crushes communities, how residents are fighting back plans to make it even bigger, and what alternatives have been presented to yet more of the same….

Read the full article

UK’s Largest Container Railfreight Depot Just One Year From Opening

gridadmin — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 18:21:05 +0000

Dubai Port London Gateway is a £1.5bn development covering 560 acres on the north bank of The Thames on the site of the former Shellhaven refinery near Stanford Le Hope. It has, literally, the capacity to change the Railfreight container business and directly challenges Southampton and Felixstowe docks.

The new port is scheduled to open for business in Quarter 4 next year with trials commencing in as little as six months. From day 1, Carston Hinne DB Schenker MD said, DB Schenker will be operating four daily trains to the port which is just 25 miles from London. The message given out at an Industry preview day was that Rail services to and from London Gateway will offer regular, easy and efficient movement of goods to and from the major commercial and population centres across the UK.

Read the full article

To keep L.A. and Long Beach’s ports trucking

gridadmin — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 02:43:49 +0000

It takes 10,000 professional truck drivers to move all the goods that come into the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. And it’s no wonder. Our two ports handle 40% of all goods imported to the United States.

A lot of the jobs generated by the ports, including those of unionized longshoremen and railroad workers, pay good wages that contribute to a solid middle class in the region. But many of the truck drivers who serve the ports find themselves stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder because of the way their employers classify and exploit them.

Read the full article

The Golden Age of Arabian Rail

gridadmin — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 17:32:03 +0000

Until recently the Arabian Peninsula had long been a backwater for rail development.

Despite hosting the now-defunct Hejaz railway made famous by the exploits of Lawrence of Arabia, until 2009 the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (the GCC) – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia – between them had only operational railway, a 200 km single-track link between Riyadh and the oil hub of Dammam.

In the oil-rich region, where petrol costs are as low as $0.45 a gallon, it is no surprise that the car has been king. However, increasing congestion, especially in cities, and a growing environmental awareness have led the GCC states to start investing billions of dollars in new rail and metro networks, in one of the world’s most ambitious new state-funded rail-build programmes.

Read the full article

Megacities are the New Logistics Frontier

gridadmin — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 15:30:39 +0000

Delivering freight in a large, congested city such as Boston, U.S., with an estimated population of 636,000 people, is no easy task. But imagine the obstacle course that confronts drivers in São Paulo, Brazil, with a population of 20 million people. The central municipality of São Paulo alone has 11 million inhabitants, enough to qualify it as a megacity (cities with populations in excess of 10 million are generally defined as megacities).

More than 4.5 million buses, cars, and trucks clog São Paulo’s arteries. And the congestion is getting worse. Over the last five years, some 1.3 million new vehicles were registered in the municipality of São Paulo, a 21% increase in the size of the fleet.

Read the full article