Drayage from the Port of Anchorage: A vital piece of Alaska's transportation logistics.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

Anyone wandering through a retail establishment piling a shopping cart high with Doritos, peaches, pilot bread, and peanut butter should take a minute to thank a trucker.

"They're a very vital link in the supply chain," says Aves Thompson, executive director of the Alaska Trucking Association. "You go to the store and you ask someone, 'How do you suppose that got here?' 'I don't know, I'm glad it's here?'"

"We say, if you got it, a truck brought it."

Nearly all of the items on Alaska's retail shelves were likely touched by one particular type of transportation: drayage. Simply put, drayage is a specialized type of transport in which a trucking company moves containerized cargo from a port over a short distance--in this case to a business or warehouse. It can be a link in an intermodal transportation system or a direct line between the port and a retail store in south Anchorage.

The two main drayage companies in Anchorage are Weaver Brothers and United Freight & Transport, Thompson says. Companies such as Lynden and Carlile, as well as others that specialize in moving household goods, will often pick up cargo at the port, but Weaver Brothers and United Freight are the only two companies with dedicated drayage operations. "We call them drayage because typically they deliver locally," he says. "They pick up trailers and/or containers off the ships and deliver them either to their destination, which may be local, or to a consolidator or to a trucking terminal and from there be delivered. For example, United Freight might pick up a container that's going to Span Alaska. Span Alaska might deliver that to Fairbanks or to Kenai or to the Valley."

Frank Monfrey, general manager of United Freight & Transport, says the term dray-age is today used to encompass any direct, short-haul freight deliveries. "Drayage is one of those terms that evolved over time," Monfrey says. "That can mean simply taking it from Van Horn Road to the University of [Alaska] Fairbanks. Just across town. It's a dray movement, it's not a line-haul movement that would go from Anchorage to Fairbanks. Over-the-road trucking is another of the terms for that, none of which we do. I just do local. I work from Anchorage to Wasilla; occasionally I go to Kenai, but it's very rare. I don't go to Fairbanks. I'm not even equipped for it. Mine is all local, small-tractor stuff."

Historically, a dray was a horse-drawn cart with no fixed sides that moved cargo short distances, typically from a...