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  April 11th, 2014 | Written by

Port of Los Angeles

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Gary Lee Moore,Interim Executive Director

FTZ No. 202 • 7,500 total acres

270 berths • 1.2 billion sq. ft. warehouse space

53-ft. channel • ICTC

Rail: BNSF, UP

Highways: 110, 710, 405

Top export destinations: China/Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea

Top export commodities: Recycle Materials, Cotton, Animal Feeds

 

Gary Lee Moore: The Port of Los Angeles has a fully integrated intermodal transportation network that includes two of the transcontinental rail carriers, Union Pacific and BNSF. I guess along with the truck routes, it makes the Port of Los Angeles second to none when it comes to connectivity and efficiency. We recently had the honor of having the Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx here, and he said, “This is where the world intersects.” That really describes well the ability for logistics of getting your cargo in and out of here. For instance, we have about 50 trains a day leaving the port. Those trains are not commuter trains. These are like three-quarters of a mile to a mile long. Also, when people talk about moving goods to the Midwest or even Atlanta, it is not unusual, when the cargo hits here in the morning and they’re offloading it here, that five days later it will be in the Midwest or seven days later it will be in Atlanta by going by train versus if you went all water through the Panama Canal. You’re saving seven to 10 days. So it’s seven to 10 days faster to come through the Port of Los Angeles than an all-water route. When I talk about that on-dock rail, we have eight major container terminals, seven which currently have on-dock rail. The eighth one is in construction right now, so we will have by the end of the year on-dock rail at all eight terminals. That is the most extensive on-dock rail or near dock rail to any port in North America.

I think anybody who has been to Los Angeles will know about our automobiles and our traffic. One of the things leading out of the port that we have is that it goes right past all that traffic, what’s called the Alameda Corridor. It’s a 20-mile-long rail cargo expressway that has all great separations. You’re not stopping for anything, so the ability to get container traffic on rail all the way to downtown without stopping, I think that’s very important. Another thing about that last on-dock rail project that we’re doing is we’re setting up our new West Basin rail yard. We’re spending $137 million on this and this is very important in that we’ll have another 2,300 trucks that will be removed from the road with that on-dock rail, adding the flexibility and that speed to market that everybody wants regarding their cargo.