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BORDER NEWS * USA / Mexico - Laredo basks in boom aided by NAFTA
Servicing international trade has become border city's growth industry
Laredo,TX,USA -San Antonio Express-news, by DAVID HENDRICKS/The Houston Chronicle (Houston,TX) -Oct. 3, 2008: -- Laredo certainly has prospered. Its 1990 population of 133,239 has zoomed to 237,396 in 2007. The city's retail, health care and security sectors are growing, all benefiting from the strong Mexico peso. The expanding manufacturing and logistics base, however, represents the strongest steel of Laredo's economy... Laredo is the nation's largest inland port, the biggest freight crossing point on the U.S.-Mexico border. It also ranks as the eighth-largest cargo hub in North America. More than $110 billion in freight crosses Laredo's bridges yearly in both directions. Laredo is preparing to handle increasing volumes of truck and train freight. U.S. Customs and Border Protection plans to expand the number of truck-processing lanes at the World Trade International Bridge to 15 from eight and to add cargo lots. A test program for 24-hour operation, instead of closing at midnight on weekdays, could start in six months. That would make the bridge the only around-the-clock freight crossing on the U.S.-Mexico border, an advantage the Laredo Development Foundation plans to exploit in its promotions... Laredo and its neighboring Nuevo Laredo thrive on another industry, called drayage. Truck tractors pick up truck freight arriving in one country and transport it across bridges to the other country, where a new carrier completes delivery... Laredo business leaders are not concerned, however, about the test program for cross-border trucking that started in September 2007, where the same driver and same truck can make the crossing and deliver freight in the interior of the other nation... So far, only about 10 to 20 trucks a day crossing in Laredo are participating in the test program... Cross-border trucking makes sense only when Mexican drivers can pick up another Mexican-bound load after making a U.S. delivery... FMCSA Administrator Hill said drayage will remain a strong Laredo industry as long as distribution warehouses operate there... "But for all the goods delivered away from the border, the border system is cumbersome, inefficient and unfriendly to the environment," Hill said. "We want to evaluate the cross-border program with a good sample of vehicles and go from there"...
Labels: border news
posted by Unknown @ 6:26 AM
1 Comments:
Thanks for sharing so many news about trucks.
David Hendricks
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