I’ve come to expect it whenever I travel these days: the dreaded text from the airline informing me that my flight is delayed.
It happened yesterday during my ride to the airport from LLamasoft’s SummerCon 2017 conference (I’ll share my takeaways from the conference in a future post). My 7:18 pm flight was now leaving at 8:30 pm. By the time I reached the airport, another text had arrived: the flight was further delayed, now leaving at 9:13 pm.
With two extra hours to kill at the airport, I caught up on email for a bit and then walked around the terminal looking for the least-worst place to eat. Just as I was about to enter T.G.I Friday’s, the most unexpected thing happened: I received an “UNDELAY” text message from JetBlue informing me that my flight was now departing as originally scheduled at 7:18 pm, which was just 17 minutes away!
(Is “undelay” even a word? I don’t think so, but it sounds a lot like the Spanish word andale, which means “let’s go” or “hurry up,” so if I’m traveling and tired, undelay is music to my ears.)
We ended up taking off at 8:00 pm, so not exactly on time, but not too delayed either.
Okay, “Andale!“ I hear you say, so without further delay, here’s this week’s supply chain and logistics news:
- With Supreme Court blow to ELD legal challenge, mandate has no roadblocks remaining (CCJ)
- L.A. and Long Beach port truck drivers and warehouse workers plan to strike Monday (LA Times)
- FBI opens probe of false ‘dirty bomb’ threat at South Carolina port (Reuters)
- U.S. states could not set self-driving car rules under Republican plan (Reuters)
- Exclusive: GE begins testing drones to inspect refineries, factories (Reuters)
- ShipBob raises $17.5 million to help small businesses ship stuff faster (Chicago Tribune)
- The Wegmans grocery chain is introducing delivery in partnership with Instacart (recode)
- TuSimple Becomes First San Diego Company To Test Self-Driving Vehicles
- GrandCanals Introduces Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud for 3PLs
- Import Growth Slows at U.S. West Coast Container Ports (WSJ – sub. req’d)
- House lawmakers push for Highway Trust Fund fix (The Hill)
In the trucking realm, the big news this week was the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court not to hear a lawsuit challenging the Electronic Logging Devices (ELD) rule, which leaves in place a lower court ruling upholding the mandate and its Dec. 18 compliance deadline.
I think most people in the industry were expecting the mandate to be upheld one way or another, so this is not too surprising. The vast majority of large carriers are already ELD compliant; the big question now is what will small carriers do. According to a survey conducted last year by Transplace, only 33 percent of small carriers (those with fewer than 250 trucks) had fully integrated ELDs into their fleet, while another 29 percent had begun the implementation process and the remaining 38 percent had no immediate plans to begin implementation. Some of these small carriers were taking a “wait and see” approach as the legal challenges worked their way through the courts. Now that the Supreme Court has taken a pass on this case, will these small carriers start implementing ELDs or will they decide to leave the industry? They’ll have to decide soon because the compliance deadline is just six months away.
For related commentary, see The Impact of Electronic Logging Devices: Separating Hype from Reality.
And with that, I’m out of time this morning.
Have a happy weekend!
Song of the Week: “Everything Now” by Arcade Fire
