The Biden administration's selection of its first senior Cabinet official dedicated to shipping sets a high bar for the value his position will bring to the domestic shipping market.
Alison Dane Camden will lead the U.S. Department of Transportation's new Office of Intermodal Transportation Infrastructure and Policy as principal assistant secretary.
Camden brings to the office experience gained while serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Integrated Transportation Development and Delivery at the Washington State Department of Transportation.
U.S. Department of Transportation rates are even higher. Camden will coordinate freight policies for all 50 states and the nation, create the National Multimodal Freight Network (NMFN), and figure out how to convince freight owners and carriers to share freight data instead of digging deeper. He was tasked with overseeing the data portal. In each country's supply chain
In an interview with FreightWaves, Camden shared her thoughts on what government agencies and private companies can expect from her office and the Freight Logistics Optimization Works (FLOW) data portal launched by the Biden administration in March 2022. He outlined his vision.
Freight now has a permanent seat at the table. There’s been great work happening at U.S. DOT for a lot of years, but it has often been siloed, as departments can be. So this new office is housed within the office of the secretary and is really meant to lead on freight policy and knit together the good work that has already been happening.
So my goal for the freight office is to be a one-stop shop to tackle freight needs, collaborate with the other parts of DOT, with industry partners, and with state and local governments to strengthen the supply chain and ensure goods can move more efficiently. I think folks are going to start seeing that soon.
We’ve also got the National Multimodal Freight Network designation that’s part of the mission of this office. [Among the goals of the NMFN, required by Congress in 2015 but never finalized, is to prioritize investment in freight infrastructure.] We want to get that started in 2024.
And even before I got here the work of FLOW was underway. And we’re starting to see the fruits of that effort already, and that’s only going to grow with time.
CAMDEN: I see it as an innovative solution to a pretty pernicious problem that came up during the supply chain crisis.
Two years ago when some were saying Christmas was going to be canceled, the Biden administration and this department brought together the private sector partners of the supply chain and the public sector partners of the states and local governments and ports to solve that problem.
Christmas wasn’t canceled. People received 99% of their packages on time from major shippers. Part of what we saw and what we were consistently hearing at that time was that we didn’t just need better physical infrastructure, we also needed better data infrastructure. So that’s what FLOW is aiming to get at.
We’re seeing great results so far. We just had the first tranche of data go out to our private sector partners, and they’re starting to be able to put it to use, to add it to their own models to aid their decision-making, and we’re getting positive feedback from them.
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