The Surface Transportation Board today, by a unanimous vote, issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in Reciprocal Switching for Inadequate Service, Docket No. EP 711 (Sub-No. 2), which focuses on providing rail customers with access to reciprocal switching as a remedy for poor service.
The newly proposed regulations would provide a streamlined path for the prescription of a reciprocal switching agreement when service to a terminal-area shipper fails to meet any of three performance standards. The proposed standards are intended to reflect a minimal level of rail service below which a shipper would be entitled to relief, and each standard would provide an independent path for a petitioner to obtain prescription of a reciprocal switching agreement. They are intended to be unambiguous, uniform standards that employ Board-defined terms and are consistently applied across Class I rail carriers and their affiliated companies.
The three standards the Board proposes are:
Service Reliability: The measure of a Class I rail carrier’s success in delivering a shipment by the original estimated time of arrival (OETA) that the rail carrier provided to the shipper. The OETA would be compared to when the car was delivered to the designated destination and would be based on all shipments over a given lane over 12 consecutive weeks. One proposed approach would be to set the success rate during the first year after the rule’s effective date at 60%, meaning that at least 60% of shipments arrive within 24 hours of the OETA, and increasing the success rate thereafter to 70%. The Board also seeks comment on other approaches, such as maintaining the required success rate at 60% permanently or raising it to higher than 70% after the second year. The Board notes that by phasing in a higher success rate over time it would be providing the Class I carriers with time to increase their work forces and other resources, or to modify their operations, as necessary, in order to meet the required performance standard.
Service Consistency: The measure of a rail carrier’s success in maintaining, over time, the carrier’s efficiency in moving a shipment through the rail system. The service consistency standard is based on the transit time for a shipment, i.e., the time between a shipper’s tender of the bill of lading and the rail carrier’s actual or constructive placement of the shipment at the agreed-upon destination. The NPRM proposes that, for loaded cars, unit trains, and empties, a petitioner would be eligible for relief if the average transit time for a shipment increased by a certain percentage—potentially 20% or 25%—as compared to the average transit time for the same 12-week period during the previous year.
Inadequate Local Service: The measure of a rail carrier’s success in performing local deliveries (“spots”) and pick-ups (“pulls”) of loaded railcars and unloaded private or shipper-leased railcars within the applicable service window, often referred to as “industry spot and pull” (ISP). The NPRM proposes that a rail carrier would fail the standard if the carrier had an ISP success rate of less than 80%, over a period of 12 consecutive weeks, in performing local deliveries and pick-ups within the applicable service window. The ISP success rate would measure whether the carrier provides the service within its customary operating window for the affected shipper, which in no case can exceed 12 hours. This service metric provides rail customers with the long sought-after information on all important first mile/last mile service.
-via Press Release