This Guardian article highlights deregulation as a root cause of the current problems:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/01/americ...
A quote:
Another example is railroads. Since deregulation in 1980, Wall Street consolidated 33 firms into just seven. And because the Surface Transportation Board lacks authority, Wall Street-owned railroads cut their workforce by 33% over the last six years, degrading our public shipping capacity. The Union Pacific closed a giant Chicago sorting facility in 2019; it now has so much backed up traffic that it suspended traffic from west coast ports.
Ocean shipping is the same. The 1997 Ocean Shipping Reform Act legalized secret rebates and led to a merger wave. The entire industry has now consolidated globally into three giant alliances that occasionally crash their too-big-to-sail ships into the side of the Suez canal.
Then there’s trucking. Talk to most businesspeople who make or move things and they will complain about the driver shortage. This too is a story of deregulation. In the 1970s, the end of public rate-setting forced trucking firms to compete against each other to offer lower shipping prices. The way they did this was by lowering pay to their drivers. Trucking on a firm-level became unpredictable and financially fragile, so for drivers schedules became unsustainable, even if the pay during boom times could be high. Today, even though pay is going up, the scheduling is crushing drivers. The result is a shortage of truckers.
end quote.
These problems have been building for some time. There was no spare capacity left and the sudden rise in demand overwhelmed the system, and it takes years to increase capacity. After deregulation hedge funds bought up railroads, gutted common carrier regulations, and forced railroads to only carry the most profitable cargo, while _closing_ rail terminals! This also forced more cargo onto trucks.