Our economy is increasingly complex, due in part to our increasingly complex transportation system. A wise investor in industrial land development, therefore, will take full advantage of multimodal transportation: water, air, road, and rail. With good planning, industries you lease land to will be able to use the very latest transportation innovations in order to sell goods worldwide and locally with the same ease.

Tracing Multimodal Transportation

Perhaps the single most innovative development in multimodal transportation is the humble cargo container. The idea of shipping cargo in standardized, stackable containers is not original; it started back in the 1700s when items were shipped by crate. But over the last few decades, the shipping industry worldwide has embraced a 20-foot isotainer standard, enabling containers to be packed at a factory, loaded onto ships or flatbed trucks or flatbed train cars or even cargo planes and then transferred off to any of these, all without unloading the contents. Containers today carry about 90% of the world's cargo, and are increasing in popularity.

This is the first thing you need to consider when looking at industrial land development: can you ship your raw goods or finished goods easily using these standardized containers? This entails having appropriate roads to carry semi trucks, easy access to rail and water transit, and the capability of loading onto as many different forms of transportation as possible right at the factory. With the interchange in transportation industry shipping so efficiently standardized, the biggest efficiency loss for your goods transportation - and probably for any factory overall - is how the product is loaded to go to market.

Taking Advantage of Multimodal Transportation In Industrial Land Development

Location is just as important as capacity in choosing a perfect parcel or building for industrial land development. Look for properties that are as close as possible to interstate highway on-ramps headed away from metropolitan areas; this ensures that products hit the fast traffic stream as quickly as possible.

You should also anticipate a rapid change in how products are shipped in response to the new high gas prices. Though trucks will still be critical to ship anything close, more long-range shipping is going to switch to rail and water. If you can build a property with its own navigable dock, you're going to have a huge advantage when it comes to reducing shipping costs. The same is true for rail; if you can build close to a rail terminal, you'll find that shipping costs will be significantly decreased, a value added to the industrial land development.

The last thing to consider is where your air traffic is in relation to the industrial land development. For bulk shipments, air is not a real concern. However, if you're worried about shipping overnight products of any sort, close access to an airport will ensure that orders will get out with maximum speed.

The Last Transit Link: Storage and Distribution Facilities

A slightly different way of looking at industrial land development is by considering what other businesses will need in the future with multimodal transportation. More and more businesses will be migrating to using ports and rail to ship long-distance, non-critical items. But if you have industrial land for development in a very convenient location for ports and rail, it might be more profitable in the long term to build storage and distribution facilities that other industries can use. A facility like this can be a central feature in a larger industrial park, or it can be a standalone site where shipments come in and are expedited to the appropriate destinations.