Editor's note: This article is the second in a seven­part series that Agri­Pulse will publish to give readersperspective on the history and status of the many parts of America's infrastructure and improvements needed tohelp farmers and ranchers remain competitive and prosperous.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19, 2016 ­ Kip Tom, who produces a big acreage of soybeans, corn and seed corn innortheast Indiana, needs to get his corn to ethanol plants and soybeans to crushing facilities across a goodportion of his state. The ethanol, distillers' grains and oil from his crops go by truck, rail tanker or barge on theOhio River along the southern Indiana border.

In terms of infrastructure, he believes he is in a great location: “One of our advantages is our access here toabout 65 percent of the nation by truck within 24 hours,” he says.

But Tom says he has watched transportation dollars for his state and counties shrink for years while thedemands on the highways continues to increase with ever larger farm production.

“We see our country roads falling apart.” For him, “It's becoming more and more difficult. When we site a newgrain plant, we make sure we put it on a good road where we will be allowed to ship year round . . .”

But even then, his commodities eventually move down theOhio River and through locks and dams that are also longoverdue for repair. Earlier this month, Locks and Dam 52 ­part of the 1920 Ohio River Dam system ­ was shut down forrepair, halting nearby barge traffic both upstream anddownstream for several days.

Tom is one of thousands of farmers who move a whale of alot of stuff across, around, into and out of the country.Imports like fuel and fertilizer and exports like grain, ethanoland meat products move by truck, barge, ship, rail, aircraft,

pipeline and, surely, a few things by old­fashioned wagons.

All told: more than 20 billion tons a year, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) reports. Grains accountfor 8 percent of all the transport. The tally for agriculture overall is 22 percent, and it's 31 percent whenestimated by total ton­miles. But those estimates don't count local deliveries by farm trucks to markets or, in theother direction, local deliveries of fuel, seed, chemicals, fertilizer and other inputs to farms. Those are bigshares of what trucks do in America.

Clearly, a robust, efficient infrastructure for moving products to market is important to farmers andagribusinesses, since its strength can either enhance or limit their opportunities to make sales and deliverproducts on time and in good shape and, thus, their profits. That's true especially for heavily exportedcommodities.

Infrastructure dollars the big challenge in keeping US exports moving

By Ed Maixner

© Copyright Agri­Pulse Communications, Inc.

Economists estimate that U.S. producers send more than 30 percent of their corn crop abroad as grain, feedproducts, ethanol, syrup and oil, for example, and U.S. Grains Council President Tom Sleight points out theimportance for his producers to move their crop abroad.

“I just recalculated the figures,” he says, “and 95.7 percent of the population of the world lives outside theborders of the United States. If you are producing a feed product or a feed product or a fuel product . . . youhave to be producing for population . . . outside the United States.”

So, in what sort of shape is the nation's freight handling infrastructure and how well is it serving agriculture?

Discouraging stories of transporting troubles and encouraging accounts of progress both abound. The AmericanSociety of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in its nationwide, every­four­years assessment, doled out sorry Ds (on an A­to­F scale) in its 2013 national scoring of both overall infrastructure and roads. Both were up just a smidgeonfrom 2009's lowly D­ scores.

On the other hand, government and private industry dollars are, in fact, being invested big time. From 2000 to2013, ASCE reports, assets of total U.S. transport equipment swelled by 43 percent, to $1.2 trillion, whiletransportation structures (highways, streets, railroads, bridges, etc.) leapt 63 percent, to $739 billion.

In the water­borne sector, for example, asurvey by the American Association ofPort Authorities found that coastal portsand private port operations planned toinvest $150 billion from 2016 to 2020 incapital improvements, more than triplewhat the same respondents had plannedfor 2012­2016, though the spending isconcentrated on Gulf of Mexico ports.What's more, Congress has been annuallystepping up the civil works budget of theU.S. Army Corps of Engineers (COE),which deepens, widens and otherwisemaintains and improves harbor access forships.

Tracking all of the infrastructureinvestments and future needs across theU.S. transportation network these days is very complex. But it wasn't always that difficult.

Until the early 20th century, local governments and private property owners built local roads and bridges, butlong­distance cargo traveled on sea lanes, canals and railroads, not on roads. Near the end of the 19th century,pressed by bicyclists and others who wanted friendlier routes, Eastern states began establishing highwaydepartments, and Congress picked up the ball in 1905, upgrading the Department of Agriculture's little roadinformation office into the Bureau of Roads, the DOT's forerunner.

Since then, of course, that infrastructure has expanded mightily, especially since the mid­20th century, whenAmerica began feverishly building the national interstate highway system, installed locks and dams on theMississippi, Columbia and other rivers to service barges year­round, expanded and deepened harbors to receiveever larger ships, restructured and beefed up its freight rail network, and added and expanded airports to handleever more passengers and cargo.

To provide an overview of how America's infrastructure is performing for farmers, ranchers and agribusinesses,we talked to several experts who deal with transportation, engineering and logistics.

Highways & Bridges

Let's begin with the country's main mode of shipping: trucks on public roads and highways. At least 70 percentof U.S. cargo moves by truck, even when oil and gas pipelines are included in the mix. And, again, DOT cargonumbers don't include farmers' own hauling of commodities to market.

Look for the trucking industry to keep on trucking. After a 92 percent growth in tons hauled during the past twodecades, DOT projects a further 35 percent growth by 2040, to nearly 19 billion tons. Meanwhile, trendsreported by the American Trucking Association (ATA) show the country's fleet of 18 wheelers topped 3.6million in 2015, and ATA expects it will hit 4 million in a decade.

But the proliferating convoy of big trucks isn'tout there alone, of course. Since 1980, the totalmileage driven annually by all U.S. vehicles hasdoubled to 3 trillion (see chart). Meanwhile, themiles of public roads and streets have seriouslylagged: They're up just 9 percent, with total lanemiles, up just 11 percent.

For truckers, those numbers add up to a tangle ofcongestion along with wasted hours and fuel,says ATA spokesman Darrin Roth. For severalyears, most states had to settle for justmaintaining highways, he says, “and that meansthey don't have any money to add to capacitywhere it's needed.” Trucks move along steadily in

most of the country, though a lot of highways continue to deteriorate, he says.

Most of the congestion problems are in urban, not rural, areas, Roth notes, “but that is extremely expensive forthe industry.” The country's 3.4 million commercially licensed truck drivers sit in stalled traffic for about 728million hours a year, he says, while their meters run up costs of labor, fuel and equipment, and the downtimeerodes revenues.

ATA estimates traffic congestion costs American truckers $50 million a year. That estimate may be close to themark: a study in 2011 by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University estimated that congestionin 498 U.S. cities cost trucking companies $27 billion that year out of $121 billion in urban gridlock's total coststo the U.S. economy.

“Trouble is,” Roth says, referring to funds spent on highway improvement, “the money gets spread around to allthese different projects, but the traffic bottleneck that causes so much congestion and requires a billion­dollarfix doesn't get addressed.”

Further, he says, 67,000 bridges countrywide are either closed or posted for reduced truck loads, hamperingdelivery routes. What's more, spaces for semi­trucks to park at highway­side rest areas and commercial truckstops have not keep pace with the proliferation of trucks, so drivers are forced to stop in emergency lanes andcrowd highway on­ and off­ramps to sleep. That's stressful for truckers and sometimes unsafe for all motorists,he says.

ASCE largely echoes Roth's views in its 2016 report, called Failure to Act, which estimates that currentlyapproved federal and state transportation funding levels have risen enough for most states to basically maintain

roads, but are at least $11 billion a year short of what's needed for long­term solutions and responding toswelling demands on the system. Although many states have increased fuel taxes since 2010, and although thenational 2015 highway bill increased funding 7 percent nominally from previous levels, ASCE estimates federalsurface transportation funding remains 23 percent less than 2002 levels, when adjusted for inflation, and stateand local transportation funding is down 30 percent overall

Bridges are also a big problem for truckers, although there are signs of improvement.

DOT's annual tally of structurally deficient bridges shrank 25 percent from 2005 to 2015, to 58,800 spans, andthe count of all obsolete and unsound bridges fell by 15 percent in the same period.

Why the rally? “I think it's a combination of things,” says Patricia Bush, who monitors bridges for theAmerican Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). “Increased awareness hascertainly helped. Several states in the past several years have put in new transportation funding, with some of itspecifically for bridges,” she says.

Many states are not only boosting highway dollars, they are also making the construction of bridges as easy asABC. That's short for Accelerated Bridge Construction, in which big bridge components, or even the entirespans of small bridges, are mass produced and brought to the bridge site for assembly. “Some states have done(ABC) here and there but are now moving to do it more programmatically, looking at each project to see if it's acandidate for ABC. Utah is using it with just about every bridge project they do,” Bush said.

To the ABC concept, add “bridge bundling” for even more streamlining and cost savings. States select severalbridges for replacement and bid them all out in one or two contacts. Bush points out that Congress made thateasier to do with language in the 2015 highway bill.

Pennsylvania is a heavily bridge­endowed state with a plethora of old spans. PennDOT, its transportationagency, contracted last fall with a consortium, or partnership, called Plenary Walsh Keystone Partners to replace558 structurally deficient bridges on a priority bridge replacements list by August 2018.

PennDOT spokesman Rich Kirkpatrick says up to 200 of the bridges will be done by year's end, adding, “weare committed to making sure that [2018] goal is met.” The partnership is responsible for project design,construction, financing and 28 years of upkeep, but bridge ownership remains with the state, which will make28 annual payments of $65 million to the partnership.

Meanwhile, although states have managed to make some progress on road and bridge upkeep on principalroutes, Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition (STC), says, “it is the ruralsystem that really has had the significant underinvestment.” He says that he's often out on rural roads across thecountry, “and the closer you get to the farm, the more problematic the system is.”

Rivers and Ports Shipping

In a surge similar to the stepped­up bridge replacement pace, significant pieces of the infrastructure for shippingon inland rivers and from ports are also getting upgrades. After advocates for improving U.S. port and rivernavigation channels and shipping facilities ­ including many in the ag sector ­ continually pressed for action, therising pressure from swelling U.S.­Asia trade volumes and the approaching completion of the enlarged PanamaCanal (opened in May) has helped to spur a tide of new government and industry funding and action.

Jim Walker, director of navigation policy for the American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA), ticks off toAgri­Pulse the lineup of U.S. harbors and river channels already deepened and/or widened in recent years toaccommodate the colossal cargo vessels plying the seas nowadays. He also points to a new study to even furtherdeepen the Mississippi River channel to 50 feet, from its current 45 feet, for more than 200 miles north from itsmouth to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “It's still in the study phase,” but 50 feet would match the depth of the new

Panama Canal shipping channel, he says, and the depth at West Coast ports, which have long received theworld's largest ships.

Armed with increased navigation works funding in recent years, Walker reports, the Corps of Engineers hasdredged the harbor channels at Baltimore, Miami, Hampton Roads in Virginia and Freeport, Texas, to at least 50feet, and Boston's to nearly that depth. The COE is now deepening harbors at Canaveral in Florida andSavannah, Georgia, to similar depth and expects to dredge the Delaware River channel to 45 feet in 2017.

While the COE makes harbor and channel changes in the water, U.S. coastal port authorities and privatebusinesses in the ports have been expanding at the water's edge, improving facilities and jacking up their capitalinvestments. In a 2012 survey, the country's port authorities collectively told AAPA they planned to make $18.3billion in port improvements themselves through 2016, while private interests in their ports were planning tospend $27.6 billion.

Did the ports and harbor area businesses follow through? “We can say with a pretty high level of confidencethat those investments have either been made or are being carried forward into the next few years,” said AaronEllis, AAPA public affairs director.

Now, in a 2016 AAPA survey on investment plans to 2020, the members and private port companies jacked uptheir capital spending intentions overall from $46 billion in 2012 to $155 billion for next four years, with $22.6billion of that ponied up by port authorities themselves. The big leap reflects all regions, though most of it wasat Gulf Coast ports, where “energy exports have been key to the kind of explosion in infrastructure investmentin plans going forward,” Ellis said. That region would pour out $127 billion of the total investments, to a greatextent representing expansion for processing, storing and shipping oil, coal, and compressed and liquefiednatural gas, he said.

AAPA also estimated the likely capital contributions at ports by the COE and via Department of Transportationawards of so­called FASTLANE and TIGER grants that will benefit harbor areas and improve access to them.The federal agency dollars could come to nearly $25 billion by 2020, augmenting port enhancements, theorganization suggests.

Serving the breadth of the nation's navigable rivers and coastal harbors and waterways is an army of tugboats topull and push ships and perform other jobs and towboats to pull barges.

Operations generally known as waterways operators are now an integral part of transportation infrastructure.They direct about 5,000 of such vessels. About 3,600 of them, mostly towboats, move barges in the MississippiRiver System and Gulf of Mexico intracoastal waterway routes.

Towboats working in the Mississippi system, on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest and along otherrivers move the robust U.S. fleet of barges, which is has expanded modestly in recent years, largely to serve thespike in demand to ship oil and gas products to the Mississippi and then to Texas Gulf ports. The national bargefleet grew about 3 percent in both 2014 and 2015, with 928 barges added overall last year, while 376 wereretired, according to tallies by Informa Economics, which tracks the fleet size. Overall, the net number ofliquid­hauling barges swelled by 15 percent in three years, Informa says.

The relatively small number of barges haul a big slice of the nation's freight ­ about 14 percent of all intercityshipping ­ because their cargo bellies are huge. A typical inland barge has a capacity 15 times greater than onerail car and 60 times greater than a semi­truck. When a towboat pulls 15 barges on a river, its load is equivalentto that of 216 rail cars or 1,050 semi­trucks, say the American Waterway Operators. Thus, the annual traffic onAmerica's inland navigation routes carries the equivalent of 58 million semi­truck trips each year.

Steenhoek, speaking for soybean producers, points out that 58 percent of U.S. soybean exports exit the countryvia the Mississippi River's Gulf ports. “If soybeans are on a barge, they're overwhelmingly destined for theexport market,” he says, and that explains both his delight in the Panama Canal expansion and his passion forensuring that the U.S. inland waterways can be in step with the upsized Canal. He visited Panama in May towatch the first vessel traverse the new locks: a huge bulk carrier big enough to hold 4 million bushels ofsoybeans, or nearly twice the capacity of ships that have typically carried American beans abroad in recentyears.

Thus, it's no surprise that farm groups are celebrating a looming rally in renovating and replacing some of theoldest locks on the Mississippi River System, which includes the Ohio, Illinois and Tennessee rivers. Amajority exceed their designed life of 50 years: The LaGrange Lock on the Illinois River is 80 years old,crumbling and hard to maintain, and is the COE's top priority lock­replacement project.

Barge companies campaigned for and received a 45 percent hike in the federal tax paid for towboat fuel to boostrevenue for the Inland Waterways Trust Fund (IWTF). Congress also, starting with its 2014 water projects bill,beefed up the annual COE navigation project budget to more than $6 billion, up about $1 billion from previousyears.

Importantly, says Debra Calhoun, senior vice presidentof the Waterways Council Inc., Congress increased to 85percent, from 50 percent, its share of costs to finish theOlmsted Lock on the Ohio River, a project approved 28years ago. Project cost estimates have since more thanquadrupled, with the industry in hock for half the costs.The practical result has been that no other lockreplacements have gotten funded.

“We have 24 or 25 (navigation) projects on inlandwaterways that need funding. But every time money wasappropriated for capital costs and from the trust fund,” Calhoun says, “every dollar went to the Olmsteadproject and nothing else.” Now, however, work can finally start soon to replace the decrepit LaGrange Lock,build the new Chickamauga Lock on the Tennessee River, and other projects. “Our estimation,” she says, “isthat we could finish off the 24 inland waterways priority projects for about $8 billion ­ finish them off andreally modernize us for the next two decades going forward.”

While upkeep and repairs for Mississippi River System facilities are seriously in arrears, the Corps stays wellon track with its locks and dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Pacific Northwest. The Columbia andSnake Rivers System (CSRS) includes eight locks serving the barge industry on the two rivers, transportingabout half of Idaho's wheat and more than half of Montana's wheat, for example, plus lumber, soybeans, lentils,peas and other farm products to Portland at the mouth of the Columbia river for export. That port, which alsoreceives a lot of farm commodities by rail and truck, accounts for 40 percent of U.S. wheat exports and 25percent of soybean shipments.

Starting with the initial Bonneville Lock and Dam on the lower Columbia in 1938, the locks were builtintermittently into the 1970s with frequent renovations and replacements since. Management of the dams ismarkedly different from the Mississippi River, where most of attention is on navigation; in the CSRS, they arealso managed for hydropower generation, water storage and flood control, and to support fisheries.

The COE usually closes the CSRS locks annually for two to three weeks in March for intensive repair andmaintenance work. Tis very deliberate annual maintenance pace “is the most efficient way to get after theseprojects,” said Kristin Meira, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association, whichrepresents a spectrum of users of CSRS reservoir water and locks.

However, the Corps' 2017 work plan for Pacific Northwest dams features an unusually large agenda of repairsto and replacements of gates and other components at four of the system's navigation locks, running about $5million to $10 million per site. The closings in the coming winter, therefore, will begin in December and run for14 weeks. Meira says the CSRS users “are known out here for our collaboration with the Corps” in planningahead for such projects, and the work is expected to proceed smoothly.

Although upkeep has fallen behind over the decades at some the nation's 171 navigable locks, brisk waterwaysshipping continues most of the time. USDA tallies weekly the movement of barges with farm commodities, andthis year's pace through summer has been more than twice the three­year average as farmers and shippersemptied bins to prepare for big 2016 grain and soybeans harvests.

Freight Rail

For many years, American freight rail companieshave been making regular investments in their140,000 miles or so of tracks, bridges and relatedreal estate, and in just the past three years haveadded about 1,400 locomotives to respond tosurging demands to move commodities. All told,the American Association of Railroads (AAR)reports, the seven biggest U.S. rail companieshave been pumping more than $25 billionannually for many years into their infrastructureand equipment ­ including an estimated $26billion this year and $30 billion­plus in 2015.

Agri­Pulse asked Michael Trevino, BNSFRailway spokesman, to point to his company'sinvestments that have been especially beneficialto agribusiness. Trevino noted that the BNSFnetwork “is all connected and we are runningtrains for all customers.” Still, he said, theinvestments we've made to help our agricultural

customers along our northern corridor,” from the Chicago rail hub through Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakotaand across the Northwest, “have certainly improved the capacity to move agricultural products to the PacificNorthwest,” enabling BNSF customers to export products to Asia. BNSF has plugged $3.5 billion into thatcorridor's infrastructure in the past four years, he said, with much of the outlay devoted to doubling the singletrack in North Dakota and Montana.

Also, especially in the past two decades, Trevino said, BNSF has built in the very long sidings needed to loadunit trains (typically of more than 100 cars) with grain and soybeans at 236 locations nationally. That helpsfarmer cooperatives and private companies operating big commodity storage and handling facilities shipefficiently plus take advantage of low unit­train shipping rates.

Also, American railroad sector investment in the Chicago region, which hosts a fourth of U.S. average dailytrain movements, provides another regional snapshot of the infrastructure improvement. There, a bevy ofrailroad companies and AAR joined in 2003 with the state of Illinois, city of Chicago, Amtrak, and others in apublic­private partnership called the Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program(CREATE). It involves 70 projects estimated to cost $4.4 billion and designed to relieve the big tangle of freightand passenger train routes, streets and highways at six major junctions. At least 27 of the 70 planned CREATEprojects are completed so far and others are under way. The freight railroads have committed $366 million toCREATE projects plus $5.2 billion for their own Chicago­area infrastructure since 2003, AAR reports.

Meanwhile, shippers, not rail companies, own most of the cars out on the tracks, and some have markedlyadded to their fleets: a 10 percent expansion since 2013 in covered hopper cars (used for shipping grain,soybeans, etc.); a 25 percent run up for tanker cars, in response to oil companies' surge in crude oil productionand new and tougher federal safety rules that mandated tankers be replaced or retrofitted. The total count ofrailroad company and shipper­owned equipment is up 5 percent in three years.

Besides the progress by rail companies individually reinvesting in their infrastructure, the national profile itselfof freight rail companies has evolved since the federal government deregulated them with the 1980 StaggersAct, which, among other things, allowed big rail companies set their own rates and abandon unprofitable lines.The largest ones began consolidating into today's seven Class One firms, and new shorter lines began to findtheir footings.

There are now about 550 short line and regional rail companies, owning more than a third of U.S. trackage andforming a stable and profitable transportation sector. And it's not just Class Ones socking cash back into theirsystem. “Our biggest exposure is putting money back into our network,” says Doug Story, vice president ofagricultural marketing for Watco Companies, a network with 36 U.S. short lines coast­to­coast. “We're alwaysputting money back into our tracks, and always doing what we can with our cars and locomotives to make it assafe as possible, and obviously, taking care of our customers commodities and getting them wherever they needto go.”

Increasingly crucial to their infrastructure are rail companies' advancements in equipment, computer knowhow,and facilities to operate more smoothly and efficiently and prevent accidents with their terribly expensiveequipment. The investments are apparently paying off: Accidents stemming from faulty tracks are down bymore than half since 2000 nationally, AAR reports.

“Railroads are constantly incorporating new technologies to improve rail safety,” says AAR spokesman EdGreenberg, “including sophisticated detectors along tracks that monitor track and train integrity and specializedinspection cars that monitor track safety and identify track anomalies.”

In fact, railroad companies look to AAR's massive Transportation Technology Center (TTC) near Pueblo,Colorado, for all manner of improvements for track and train equipment stability, safety, endurance andreliability and improved communications. “When it comes to research and testing,” Greenberg said, “TTC has52 square miles of land with 48 miles of track to test rail cars and locomotives,” where research can be doneunder real freight rail operating conditions with testing machinery “not found anywhere else in the entireworld.”

Technology and equipment advances at TTC, for example, includes ground­penetrating radar and terrainconductivity sensors to help identify problems below the ground, such as excessive water penetration anddeteriorated ballast, that erode track stability. Another is the recently developed Rail Corridor Risk ManagementSystem, which is a statistical routing model enabling rail companies to analyze and identify the most secureroutes for transporting highly hazardous materials. It uses at least 27 risk factors (population density, hazmatvolume, available emergency response services, etc.) to pick the best route. U.S. railroads now use the program,for example, when moving a train with more than 20 carloads of crude oil. Check out more TTC advances here.

Rail companies conduct research independently, too, of course. They are also served by Railinc, for decades anarm of AAR, but since 1999 an independent go­to source for internet technology, and communications solutionsdesigned for railroad companies and rail shippers. Railinc, headquartered at Cary, North Carolina, also operatesa spectrum of data collection services for rail firms and other rail­related businesses.

Air Freight

The U.S. air cargo infrastructure is either expanding or steady, depending on the time window. It has grownimmeasurably since the fledgling Federal Express leapt out in 1973 with overnight deliveries to 25 Americancities. U.S. DOT statistics now list FedEx, UPS and 27 other U.S.­based air cargo operators. Plus U.S.passenger airlines, whose passenger volumes are breaking records, add about 2 percent to their revenue streamswith their imbedded air freight deliveries.

Cargo volume by U.S. carriers in 2015, at 65.2 million ton miles, for example, was four times that of 1991, anddouble that in 2000. But tonnage on board dropped off in 2008 and 2009 with the world recession, and hasreturned only slowly, still short of its 2006 peak (see chart). Although international deliveries may be down asmuch as 10 percent for 2016, domestic air freight deliveries have grown steadily since 2012, and VaughnJennings, spokesman for Airlines for America, reports value of merchandise imported and exported by aircarrier to and from the U.S. was a record $996 billion in 2015.

Look at air freight infrastructure as having three principal players: the airlines, the air traffic controllers to directall cargo and passenger aircraft movements, and the airports with their terminals, airstrips, hangars, as well asstorage, security and other facilities.

Vaughn says U.S. airlines are investing in their own fleets at the highest pace overall in more than 15 years:$1.4 billion a month, which meant buying 388 new passenger and cargo aircraft in 2015, with 366 moreanticipated for 2016 ­ one big jetliner per day.

There is far less news of improvements, however, to report for air traffic control (ATC), run by the FederalAviation Administration. The agency has been directed by Congress and funded for years to upgrade itsantiquated, radar­based, World War II­era ATC operation and communications systems with moderntechnology, broadly referred to as NextGen. That hasn't happened, immensely frustrating many in the airlines,airport management and in FAA itself as the projected $20 billion cost of ATC modernization is expected tokeep mounting as long as FAA fails to proceed.

In its 1993 conclusions, a group empaneled by Congress called The National Commission to Ensure a Strong,Competitive Airline Industry, for example, declared: “ . . . a new ATC technology is available that would reducedelays and increase efficiency. New technology lies within our grasp but has been thwarted by a federal fundingand procurement process that is the antithesis of a rapidly changing, high technology­driven air transportationsystem.”

Things haven't changed much since then, as Vaughn declares, “The GPS in your car is more advanced than thetechnology the FAA has approved for use in aircraft.”

The airlines want to see ATC modernized as soon as possible, and they want Congress to retain FAA as aircraftand air travel regulator, but put ATC under management of an independent, non­profit, quasi­government entitythat could much more quickly utilize satellite­based communications and other technology that ATC needs.That, Vaughn says, would “enable carriers . . . as 50 other countries around the world have done . . . to[modernize and] reduce flight times for customers through more direct routes and ensure that . . . high valuegoods continue to get to their destination in a timely and safe manner.”

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor and an author on national infrastructure, says theU.S. is terribly behind on its air traffic control. She insists the sector's priority must be to use the besttechnology for operating aircraft, communications, tracking the weather and more. “In the air, the biggest storyis technology," she writes in her book, Move. “New technology will make the ride smoother, burn less fuel,reduce delays, and reduce noise. We can't change the weather, but we can have information about it and copewith it much better."

Back on the ground, meanwhile, the story for improving airport infrastructure is mixed. An airlines' summary ofairport funding nationally points out that their revenues are up by half since 2000, including about $10 billion ayear from the airlines in landing fees and other collections. Plus FAA doles out $3.35 billion a year through itsAirport Improvement Program (AIP) for airport capital improvements, at a generous 75­95 percent or higherfederal share.

However, Adam Snider, public affairs director for the American Association of Airport Executives, saysairports are hardly flush with cash and many are in serious need of capital improvements. Last year, the NorthAmerican chapter of Airports Council International completed a study of U.S. airports capital needs through2019. The tab: $62 billion at commercial airports, including $40 billion at large hub airports and $17 billion atsmall and medium hub airports.

Continuing increases in airline passengers and air cargo, which runs about 1 percent a year, require expansionof airport facilities, Snider says, but so has the Transportation Security Administration, which has requiredterminal renovations and expansions to accommodate tightened passenger and cargo security rules. Airportscollect the “passenger facility charge” in air fares, now about $2.9 billion a year, and that revenue rises as airtravel increases. But Congress did cap that fee at $4.50 per trip leg in 2000, and it has not been increased.Meanwhile, federal budget cuts have trimmed AIP by $150 million a year.

Perhaps as great a disadvantage for the sector as the limited dollars, Snider says, is Congress' failure to passmultiyear legislation for FAA operations and grants, making it difficult for the agency and airports to proceedwith infrastructure projects. When FAA's authorizations ended in 2007, for example, the agency had to operateunder a series of 23 short­term extensions until February 2012. The 2012 legislation was to expire this summer,so Congress has approved a 14­month extension to September 2017, again putting most improvementsinvolving AIP dollars on hold.

Pipelines

It's important to remember that oil and fuel pipelines serve farmers and other agribusinesses both coming andgoing.

First the coming: farm inputs, whether drying corn or heating livestock barns. “Our big contribution toagribusiness is through delivery of natural gas liquids such as propane,” says John Stoody, vice president of theAssociation of Oil Pipe Lines. He notes that much of the country's 67,500 miles of such fuel conduits areavailable to agribusiness, though some of them carry ethane for industrial manufacturing use.

Also going. Agribusiness has an interest in the transport of ethanol and biodiesel fuel by pipe because that modeis particularly efficient when moving big volumes. Since biodiesel fuel poses no threat to the integrity ofpipelines that transport it, that biofuel in its usual format ­ B5, which is 5 percent biodiesel and 95 percent dieselfuel ­ is commonly moved in pipelines throughout the country.

For years, the main restraint to that, says Scott Fenwick, technical director for the National Biodiesel Board, hasbeen a safety concern about biodiesel fuel mixing with jet fuel in pipelines that alternatively transport jet fuel.But that limitation will ease further very soon, he expects, when international fuel standards allow for 100 partsper million (currently 50 ppm) of biodiesel fuel in jet fuel, making it quite easy for pipeline operators to avoid aproblem contaminating jet fuel.

Biodiesel fuel is commonly carried by truck, rail tanker, barge, ship and pipelines, Fenwick says, but movinglarge­scale batches in pipelines to the biggest U.S. markets spells a highly efficient and cheap mode of fueltransportation. And biodiesel shipping is getting aligned in that direction. “Traditionally, a majority of thebiodiesel production facilities have been located within the Midwest and near to their feedstocks,” he says. But

more recently, biodiesel producers are siting their new plants nearer ports, diesel storage terminals and otherstrategic pipeline shipping locations, he says.

Transporting ethanol via pipeline, meanwhile, has developed slowly, inpart because the conduits, in order to tolerate ethanol's chemicalproperties, have had to be designed differently than those for petroleumproducts. Even blending ethanol at 10 percent with gasoline requireslengthy testing and approval of safety standards. So, explains Kelly Davis,regulatory affairs director for the Renewable Fuels Association, instead ofvia pipeline, virtually all ethanol moves by railroad and truck in the U.S.,and ethanol producers are heavily invested in upgrading the national fleetof 29,000 rail tanker cars used for ethanol, especially owing to new federalsafety rules requiring the ethanol tankers meet new collision­hardystandards by 2023.

However, one huge pipeline company, Kinder Morgan,which has 9,000 miles of pipelines moving petroleumproducts in the Southeast and far West regions, operatesa 110­mile, 16­inch­diameter conduit in central Floridathat transports gasoline­ethanol blended fuel. Plus, in thepast five years or so, the company has operated pipelinesjust a few miles in length near the major ports of Tampa,Florida, and New York City, to transport ethanol fromunit­train unloading sites to its big ethanol terminalsnearby and/or to barge loading docks for export.

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