Jack Healy on how improvements to regional rail service could benefit New England
This is certainly good news for the interconnected world of manufacturing. In Massachusetts as well as in the rest of New England, manufacturing has been dealing with all of the adversity of our collective infrastructure’s critical deficits such as ports, highways, railroads, airports, telecommunications links and power plants.
In the new era of global supply chains and lean manufacturing inventories, the New England manufacturing community is behind the Global Connectiveness curve. As stated by the New England Futures Group: “ New England seems frozen in time and space, unaware of how seriously isolated and inefficient it’s becoming with it’s overburdened interstates, poorly maintained bridges and local roads, shrunken and imperiled rail service, and lack of a modern deepwater port.”
These fears in addition to what obstacles New England manufacturers are already facing in the form of rising freight rates, higher fuel costs, and constrained transportation capacity create yet another area that they must concentrate on -- especially as it affects the service levels to their customers. Supply Chain management has become so sensitive to any disruptions with respect to the flow of goods that it is now forcing a number of manufacturers for the first time to focus on managing Risk rather than planning for continuous improvement. The penalty for late deliveries in today’s marketplace can be severe, as late deliveries today can often stop a customer’s production and are simply not tolerated. The world wide supply chain management disruption concerns of natural disasters, terrorists acts, and the like are compounded in New England by a series of constraints that cause New England to function like an island economy. Any one entering New England on Interstate 95 in Connecticut will recognize very shortly that they are sitting in the largest freight corridors into our community, and one of the most congested. Interstate 95 is the primary connection of the three major Interstate Highway connections feeding New England, and no solution yet exists for correcting such congestion.
As the New England Futures Organization points out, rail is not a viable solution as you may have thought. The Futures group stated, “We were amazed to discover a 2002 study showing railroads handle only 5 percent of the freight shipments in Maine, 2 percent in Connecticut and a minuscule 1 percent or less in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. One reason, thirty years ago a rail bridge across the Hudson at Poughkeepsie burned down. It’s never been replaced. So a rail shipment from New York to Stamford has to go north to Albany, then east and back down south, at substantial extra expense. Result: all of the freight goes to trucks instead.”
The New England Council has for several years worked diligently to promote resolution to a number of New England’s numerous transportation issues by promoting collaboration of both the states and the Federal Government. While the list still of needs still seems daunting, the opportunities for resolution abound as the New England Council feels that the elections of 2006 have brought some important changes including the new Governor elect Patrick as well as the increased clout for the New England Congressional delegation.
In the wake of these changes, the New England Council is seeking to restart discussions on regional transportation planning involving all six of the New England states. The Council played a large role in helping to facilitate the New England Transportation Initiative of the 1990’s that brought together transportation planners in each of the states. As an initial step of this new effort, the Council is producing a report with HNTB, the consulting firm, on some of the needed multi-state transportation projects and their importance to the New England economy.
The role model for cross-border collaboration is where the Midwestern governors recently reached agreement to invest $20 billion to clean up the Great Lakes and to work with the Canadian Government to control the export of water from the region. If the Great Lakes can do something like this, why can’t we collaborate on solving our transportation issues?
This is something to look forward to - to do otherwise will slowly kill the goose.
About the author
Jack Healy serves as the Director of Operations for both the Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MassMEP) which is a program supported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the Manufacturing Advancement Center which is a separate 501c organization dedicated to the promotion and development of the Massachusetts Manufacturing community.
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