Rob Liss is Vice President at MAKA Logistics, one of the largest independent agencies in Armstrong Transport Group. He explains why a proposed Union Pacific–Norfolk Southern merger could shift freight from trucks to rail and reshape competition across North America, and more.<br><br>This week&#x27;s episode is sponsored by Epay Manager, Augment Technologies Inc, Goodship.<br>Interested in sponsoring our podcast? Send us an email at pbj@freightcaviar.com.

The Deal That Could Take Freight Off the Highway

The FreightCaviar Podcast

Truck Driving is not going to be a job in 20 years like it is now. I mean, we used to have like, what, 140 class one railroads. Now we're down to six. If you look at all the West Coast ports, if you look at all the East Coast ports of the U.S., you can really build a superhighway that runs international container traffic all the way through. The biggest opportunity is fraud. So if you had the load stolen, dull brokering, all those things, I guarantee you it was not done with an intermodal carrier.

So there's two things that need to happen for a railroad class one merger to happen? Yeah. So when the merger comes in, like there's two criteria that the Service Transportation Board looks at. So it's a regulatory board. The federal government has broad regulation over interstate commerce, and that matters in a few ways. So I think yesterday Secretary Duffy came out and was talking about cutting funding to New York State for $70 million. And it's sort of this nuclear option because

they can cut funding to the state, but states themselves issue CDLs. So there's states rights, states can control commerce within their own borders. As soon as it crosses borders, now it's an interstate rule. So the Interstate Commerce Commission, when you talk about deregulation in the industry, it started with the railroads, then went to trucking shortly thereafter. The ICC basically recommended that itself be disbanded. But before that, they were the governing

party that said, hey, you can move, you know, the example in the freight magazine is toothpicks from, you know, Maine to wherever. Like they were the governing party that did a lot of that stuff.

The Deal That Could Take Freight Off the Highway

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

The Deal That Could Take Freight Off the Highway

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.