The Role of Transportation in Supply Chains and Business

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and they're the very best you got you just shot yourself in the foot if you wind up putting somebody out of business. Because to a large extent in many cases they're your livelihood. Number four on the list is security. We didn't used to have to worry so much about this. Now all of a sudden everybody's concerned about security and they need to be. To a large degree if you try to secure a supply chain the weakest link is going to be in transportation because that's where most of the handoffs are. And there are a lot of places where there are blind spots in the supply chain a lot around transportation where you don't really know what's going on. So that's also part of choosing carriers just making sure you're making good security decisions. Number five on the list is congestion. All you have to do is look out that window. There's a ranking done every year of the interchanges that are the most congested in the United States. This is number five in the whole United States right outside that window. Every five years University of Texas Civil Engineering Department updates data about congestion in the United States. Basically they're showing average commute times. In Atlanta we have the second largest average commute time in the United States. Los Angeles is the only one I would say ahead of us but really we should say behind us. A friend of mine used to say that it takes him 20 minutes just to get out of his garage in Los Angeles. It's not getting any better. There's another phenomenon called a megapolis. It's a mega metropolis. There are eight megapolises in the United States between Seattle and Portland, South Florida, Southern California, Northern California, the I-85 corridor, the Northeast corridor. About 80% of the U.S. population now lives in one of those eight megapolises. It takes maybe twice as long to go the average mile in one of those areas that it does in some other location. So then what do you do from a transportation standpoint? We coined a term called an urban strike point where what you do is you set up outside one of those in a place that has good interstate access that's not in the middle of one of those. We did one recently in Redlands, California. Hayward is a little bit like that in Northern California. Scranton, Pennsylvania is an example of a place like that. And so if you watch this from a real estate standpoint what you'll find out is that the distribution real estate in those areas is growing rapidly because of this phenomenon called a megapolis. We're almost done with the depressing stuff. The American Society of Civil Engineers does a report card on the transportation infrastructure in the United States. This is the most recent report card. We got a D-plus on aviation infrastructure, a C on bridges, a D-minus on waterways, a C minus on railways, a D on roads. It's not very good. In general, the infrastructure in the United States relative to the activity level that we have, it means a lot of work.

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