The American Trucking Assns. (ATA) has offered a number of recommendations to resolve the container congestion and traffic jams currently plaguing West Coast ports.

William J. Canary, president of the ATA, outlined a list of possible solutions to the port logjam in a letter addressed to Capt. William G. Schubert, administrator of the Maritime Administration.
Canary presented a number of recommendations, including a suggestion that the Secretary of Transportation temporarily suspend the hours-of-service rules for truck drivers until the clogged ports are clear of containers. Other suggestions from the ATA include:
-- Port employees should work at standard productivity levels. Anything less than full productivity will result in truck traffic jams inside and outside the port areas.
-- Steamship lines should place orders for sufficient labor for each access gate to assure maximum port capacity.
-- A 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week terminal operation should be implemented so trucks can operate during off-peak traffic hours. Extended gate hours are needed even in normal conditions to achieve infrastructure efficiency, and to reduce traffic congestion on regional portions of the national highway system. Under the current emergency conditions, extended gate hours are imperative to a safe and effective recovery.
-- Ports should run "full gates" (a balance of in-gates and out-gates), otherwise ports will run out of chassis necessary to freight-system recovery. Sometimes a terminal operator will order only outgoing gates, or some other imbalance of in-and-out gates that are not proportional to the traffic waiting outside the gates. The right balance will provide for the return of chassis needed to haul containers inland and mitigate regional traffic congestion.
-- Particularly during the recovery period, consignees and retailers should be encouraged to do their part by receiving freight during off-hours. This will enable trucks to return to the ports. Without their cooperation, all other efforts would be mostly for naught.
-- Freight brokers and steamship lines are the parties dealing with the shippers and consignees -- their customers. Accordingly, they are the party that should be tasked to make all the arrangements necessary for each piece of the solution to be implemented. Unclogging the rest of the freight system (distribution centers and terminals other than ports) will be a natural consequent of the foregoing.
-- The objective at hand is to mitigate a national economic and security emergency.
In suggesting that hours of service be liberalized or temporarily suspended, Canary said, "This relief could apply to drivers in a regional area hauling an ISO container (whether loaded or empty, interstate or intrastate). The initial relief could be for a limited duration (one or two weeks) and the need for it reassessed on an ongoing basis. The ATA and the California Trucking Assn. concur with this recommendation, and that highway safety should remain a priority."
The letter also warned that the current conditions at the ports pose a security problem. "Harbors filled with cargo-laden containers constitute an extraordinarily target-rich opportunity for terrorists," Canary wrote. "Once the freight resumes movement, the United States Customs Service likely will have reduced opportunity to conduct targeted inspections of containers. As you know, the Department of Defense (DOD) relies heavily on commercial movement of containerized freight to supply forward-deployed military personnel. To the extent that these DOD containers are mingled among other containers, they are entangled and impeded in the present quagmire. Perhaps most importantly, given a heightened possibility of war with Iraq, the logistic impediment posed by port congestion could be sufficient to delay or frustrate the President's decision to engage in that national security option."
Canary said the ATA welcomes the opportunity to assist the government in resolving the logjam at the ports.