Transportation and Freight Logistics Infrastructure Investment

Question: Discuss about theTransportation and Freight Logistics for Infrastructure Investment. Answer: Introduction: Within the regulatory reform and infrastructure investment, the transport and infrastructure sector in Australia has been facing challenge. Need for effective regulation arose due to increase in the movement of goods and services in the dynamic international economy. The regulatory changes brought changes into the growing enables freight task and have come up with the environmental, security and safety challenges. One of the growing challenge for the implementation and design of regulation is balancing the public expectation of safety. The transport sector has remained a target of terrorism both nationally and internationally (Bhattacharya et al. 2014). Security threats are likely to remain in the foreseeable future. As the new cargo security regimes are introduced, security threat are expected to rise. With the increase in variances and volumes, maintenance of risk based regime focusing on higher risk becomes increasingly challenge. Environmental performance of the country would be seriously jeopardized due to increased regulatory reforms. Employment rates of the country is directly impacted by public infrastructure investment of the logistic industry (Crainic and Feillet 2015). Discussion: The regulatory change is becoming increasingly complex across all modes as technology and business models are changing rapidly in light of changing regulations and policies. The emergence of in car technologies has been a growing factor in road safety incidents. The Road safety remuneration tribunal established by road safety remuneration act can hand down orders of other laws. There are areas of inefficient regulation concerning safety standards that poses a restriction on importing of the standards freight (Dablanc and Rodrique 2013). There has been increasing challenge of work safety. There is emerging new environmental challenges with greater risk of extreme weather. With wide ranging socio and economic impact, the logistics industry has become a major contributor to the state and national economies. The changing competition resulting from globalization, information economy and rapid economic changes has caused the industry to respond to such changes. Changing regulatory framework resulting from global financial instability has provided new challenges to the industry. Australia is facing some of the important transport reform challenges. One of the biggest challenge would be in dealing with the emerging congestion. Movement of large numbers of vehicles through towns and cities carrying freight has an impact on amenity of residential areas and on environment. Increased road congestion is also resulting from increased economic activity and population growth. This is one of the safety impact that logistic industry has. This would hinder the movement of freight and w ould have substantial cost imposed on industry (del Castillo et al. 2015). Due to inadequate infrastructure, capacity constraints are experienced by the transport links and resulting in congestion. There is an accommodating difficult natural infrastructure and geographical gaps within and around Sydney. The policies of government designed to reduce the emissions would have the significant impact on the cost structure of industry. Associated attacks and rise of global tourism on western interest has increased the travel and freight risks. Logistic industry would be significantly impacted by the adopted policies and procedures dealing with the climatic change. The policy of shorting the direct calls from international shipping lines would contribute in the cost of goods when they have to be land bridged to and from Melbourne (Lindsey et al. 2014). Following the global financial crisis, the capacity was reduced and it also led to shutting down of some trade route entirely. In the recovery period, such capacity has not turned back and this leads to constraint i n capacity. It has resulted in slow and inefficient routing and has forced up the price. Some other policies concerning environmental and climatic change would have future impact on export of goods from Australia to Europe. This include discrimination against long-haul carriers, efficiency in food supply chain and taxes on European greenhouse gases. Security in the freight industry possess a major problem and some of the important concern is evasion of custom duty, drug smuggling and illegal immigrants. One of the factor that can be regarded as possessing vulnerability to security breaches greater international dimension and less or inefficient regulations. Vast fleet of global shipping, large number of ports and difficulty in detection has made security issue an extremely difficult task (Demir et al. 2015). Due to freight imbalance on goods coming to South Australia has resulted in increasing the cost of outgoing goods. There is a critical shortage of loading facilities, which results in delaying the process of decision-making and effect of mining tax on investment, and shipment in infrastructure affects the logistics infrastructure of the country. There are number of challenges faced by infrastructure of the industry and this would influence the supply chain and freight networks, which are subjected to number of links such as pint points, missing links, and operational restrictions (Marchet et al. 2014). Recommendations needed for eliminating the challenge that will help in increasing the benefits from freight transportation management are as follows: Quality investment decision making has become imperative and there are opportunities for productivity improvement and further reform across transport sector and infrastructure. The challenges of logistic industry concerning environmental, security and safety can be overcome by providing the following recommendations. Some of the problems relating the logistics and freight are related to safety and it is mainly concerning with traffic congestion. There is a need to have better planning of routes. Warehouse should be relocated to some areas that are away from congested areas. For certain vehicle, there needs to be special entry times and city lockouts. Public transport should be encouraged to reduce the number of road vehicles. Widening of exiting motorways can be done for allowing additional traffic (Gorman 2014). The environmental challenges resulting from the inefficient regulatory reforms can be done by showing more support to green technologies. This involves wind and solar power. Companies needs to be made aware of such technologies and waste should be minimized by considering different methods of delivering the products. This also involves material that will help in reducing the costs. For ensuring greater capacity per trip, there needs to have bigger loads and simultaneously minimizing the trips. In order to overcome the poor market conditions, there should be transport and alternative routes. Planning should incorporate monitoring the forecasting of weather. Transport companies should consider different types of weather and possible delays should be avoid by identification of alternative routes. On hot days, management of employees can be improved by installing cooling system and more breaks that would help in avoiding exhaustion of heat (SteadieSeifi et al. 2014). There is a need for freight industry to undertake security assessment and it should form a part of government policies. Assessment would involve identifying the assets, facilities and the impact of damages that can be caused. There should be an evaluation of risks after identification of weaknesses to the utilities, communication system and physical security. Government needs to introduce cargo-screening program. Nonetheless, it is certainly possible that it will incur in delay, disruptions and additional costs and undermine the operational capacity of such cargo. Supply chain security of the logistics industry should be formulated in such a way that it will help in preventing antagonistic threats that would affect the performance of supply chain. There are few areas as suggested by executives of supply chain and these includes visibility, efficiencies, mitigation, validation and performance. Companies needs to focus on addressing security resulting from the inefficient policies and regulatory reforms. A wide range of areas needs to be encompassed and this ranges from areas of border security and customs of material moving between crisis management and fleet security. Conclusion It can be concluded from above discussion that Australian companies are reaping the benefits of reforms that is leading to greater diversity in transportation options, productive and efficient freight sector. Although, there is a better infrastructure quality than ever before, there are various challenges faced by the logistics industry. The challenges discussed concerns mainly with the environmental, security and safety. All such challenges is attributable to inefficient reformatory and legislative policies concerning the logistic sector. Government in Australia is responsible for funding much of infrastructure and transport task. 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