Intermodal Freight Transportation

The 21st century will see a renewed focus on intermodal freight transportation driven by the changing requirements of global supply chains. Each of the transportation modes (air, inland water, ocean, pipeline, rail, and road) has gone through technological evolution and has functioned separately under a modally based regulatory structure for most of the 20th century. With the development of containerization in the mid-1900s, the reorientation toward deregulation near the end of the century, and a new focus on logistics and global supply chain requirements, the stage is set for continued intermodal transportation growth. The growth of intermodal freight transportation will be driven and challenged by four factors: (a) measuring, understanding, and responding to the role of intermodalism in the changing customer requirements and hypercompetition of supply chains in a global marketplace; (b) the need to reliably and flexibly respond to changing customer requirements with seamless and integrated coordination of freight and equipment flows through various modes; (c) knowledge of current and future intermodal operational options and alternatives, as well as the potential for improved information and communications technology and the challenges associated with their application; and (d) constraints on and coordination of infrastructure capacity, including policy and regulatory issues, as well as better management of existing infrastructure and broader considerations on future investment in new infrastructure.