The need to shore up the nation's aging transportation infrastructure can be a tough sell to people outside the logistics industry, so one freight advocacy group is bringing the message home with a simple example—bubble gum.
To highlight the importance of maintaining the nation's highways, bridges, and intermodal connectors, the Coalition for America's Gateways and Trade Corridors (CAGTC) recently unveiled an educational tool designed to help illustrate the importance of a seamless, efficient intermodal freight network to the nation's economy.
Timed to coincide with May's annual Infrastructure Week, the group released an educational brochure called Follow That Bubble Gum that illustrates the multimodal nature of the modern supply chain. The bubble gum's "multimodal adventure" begins when sugar cane is harvested at a farm in Florida and trucked to a refinery. The refined sugar then moves via train to a confectionary facility in Illinois, where it's mixed with other ingredients to produce bubble gum, packaged, and loaded onto a truck for transport to a gift shop in Cooperstown, N.Y. In the accompanying commentary, CAGTC notes that the best way to support the bubble gum supply chain—and the rest of the country's highways, seaports, airports, and intermodal terminals—is for Congress and the administration to authorize at least $12 billion annually to fund multimodal freight projects.
The group has also released the third edition of its Freight Can't Wait booklet, which highlights freight infrastructure projects across the country that stand to benefit national supply chains, and the economy as a whole, if they receive funding assistance.
