The Pacific Merchant Shipping Association (PMSA) has written to the California Air Resources Board, asking it to rethink implementation of the proposed Advanced Clean Fleets Regulation for Drayage Trucks (ACF). The regulation would create a legacy drayage fleet providing drayage service to the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles on Jan. 1, 2024, and any trucks not part of a legacy fleet would have to be zero emissions (ZE) after this date.
The PMSA said that, according to historical data, the legacy fleet of 21,000 trucks would shrink by over 3,000 trucks in the first year of implementation of ACF, and that more than 4,500 ZE trucks would need to be added to the San Pedro drayage pool. The PMSA warned that not only would that be a significant number of new ZE trucks in a market that relies almost entirely on trucks procured in the secondary and tertiary markets, but there is a lack of infrastructure to serve them, requiring approximately 380 charging stations to be installed every month in the first year of implementation or 31 stations every single day.
“PMSA’s primary concern regarding the future implementation of ACF is that sufficient trucking capacity is maintained in order to move cargo,” said the letter, sent July 19. “As all have seen over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, small disruptions in one part of supply chain will reverberate throughout the entire system causing congestion and harm.”
PMSA proposes that CARB re-evaluate the impacts of ACF on the drayage fleet in light of these numbers and develop regulation modifications and other tools to ensure that a supply chain crisis is not precipitated by ACF implementation.
