Plan to ease port congestion gets mixed reviews

updated 6:26 p.m. ET Aug. 25, 2005

LOS ANGELES - Some days, Wilfredo Jimenez logs almost as much time sitting in his blue tractor-trailer watching TV as he does on the road hauling cargo from the busiest port complex in the United States.

But the longer he's forced to wait his turn to pass through the procedural gantlet at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the less money he stands to make.

The delays, which Jimenez says sometimes can drag on for several hours, cut into the port truckers' ability to earn money, because drivers get paid for every load they move, not for every hour they work, like other port employees.

A new program at the twin ports to expand the hours during which truck drivers can retrieve cargo was supposed to ease such delays, but Jimenez says he's seen little improvement.

"The day before last, I was delayed from 6 p.m. until 10 p.m. to take out one load," said Jimenez, 30, while waiting to make a pickup during an evening shift last week. "How is it possible that one has to wait so long when this new system was supposed to make the system better?"

The ports' expanded hours program, dubbed OffPeak, was designed to help lessen drivers' wait times inside the ports and ease traffic congestion on nearby highways by giving shippers a financial incentive to move their cargo during evening and weekend hours when there are fewer vehicles on the roads. The port complex now handles 40 percent of all the cargo shipped into the United States and 80 percent of U.S. imports from Asia.

In the first three weeks since its launch July 23, roughly 30 percent of the cargo containers hauled through the ports were moved during evening or weekend off-peak hours, according to data released by PierPASS Inc., which administers the program.

The ports already moved about 10 percent of their cargo in the evenings before the program and some terminals kept their gates open into the night to move cargo bound for rail.

Still, while the increase has been generally regarded as a sign the program is working, the persistent delays at some marine terminals could threaten the success of the ambitious initiative, said Robin Lanier, executive director of the Waterfront Coalition, a Washington D.C.-based trade group that represents retailers, manufacturers and other cargo importers and exporters.

Lanier said truck drivers have complained about delays during the evening shifts coinciding with whenever longshoremen take scheduled breaks.

"If they can't resolve the productivity issue within the terminals," Lanier said, "then the long-term success of the program could be in jeopardy."

The drivers who work the Los Angeles-area ports typically own their trucks but often lease them to the trucking companies they work for. They must pay for their own fuel costs, which have hit drivers particularly hard this year. The average price of diesel fuel at the pump in California last week was $3.04 a gallon, 92 cents higher than a year ago, according to U.S. Department of Energy.

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