FTR: Future Transportation Will Require a Whole New Playbook

FTR’s Noël Perry and Larry Gross talk about the future of trucking and other freight transportation modes on the final day of the FTR Transportation Conference in Indiana. Photo: Evan Lockridge

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INDIANAPOLIS — If you intend to be in business 10 to 15 years from now, there are some big issues you’ll face, as trucking and the rest of the surface transportation industry will see big changes – and that will mean companies will have to rewrite their playbooks.

And the danger of ignoring what’s to come, according to Noël Perry, truck and transportation expert and economist for FTR, could be catastrophic. For example, speaking at the final session of the FTR Transportation Conference in Indianapolis on Thursday, he noted that trucking deregulation more than 35 years ago eliminated most of the carriers that were operating at the time.

In other words, they were not prepared for the sweeping changes that took place.

“This change are even larger,” he said. “This change is as big as the invention of the Interstate Highway System.”

So what are these possible changes that Perry, along with Larry Gross, FTR’s intermodal truck and bus expert, detailed as they peered into the future?

One is the possibility that there may be a bubble out there that is unsustainable. Think the dot-com bubble of the 1990s or the housing bubble of the early 2000s. The next one Perry fears is the federal government’s debt.

Perry presented one slide in which he forecasts federal interest payments as a percentage of the federal budget ballooning from an average of around 12% now to between 43% to 75% of the federal government’s revenue by the year 2030.

“It’s clear that over the next 30 years, the borrowing habits of us as a nation are unsustainable, and at some point we are going to have to fix this …Read the rest of this story

Source:: http://www.truckinginfo.com/channel/fleet-management/news/story/2016/09/ftr-future-transportation-will-require-a-whole-new-playbook1.aspx