Why the future of intermodal logistics isn’t about seeing more. It’s about understanding more.
By Darren Palfrey, CEO, The Fargo Group
For more than two decades, the logistics industry has pursued a single ambition.
Visibility.
We wanted to know where our containers were. Where our trailers were. Where delays had occurred. When trains would arrive, when containers would clear terminals, when the first mile became the middle mile, when the last mile would finally begin.
So, we invested. Tracking systems got smarter. Telematics got cheaper. Platforms became connected. Dashboards multiplied. APIs stitched together fragmented systems. Every year, we became better at seeing our networks.
And yet, despite all of this progress, one feeling continues to define modern logistics.
Uncertainty.
Not because we can’t see what’s happening. But because seeing something and understanding it are two very different things.
Recently, the Alliance for Logistics Innovation through Collaboration (ALICE) published one of the more interesting pieces of research we’ve read in years: Intermodal Transport Survey 2025: Unlocking Rail’s Competitive Potential.
Its objective was simple. Understand why intermodal transport continues to struggle against road. What it found should make every logistics leader pause. The biggest barriers aren’t infrastructure. They aren’t rail performance. They aren’t capability. They’re perception and transparency.
That sounds like another argument for better visibility. I don’t think it is. I think it’s pointing to something much bigger.
One statistic stood out immediately.
Sixty per cent of respondents said intermodal transit times can equal, and sometimes outperform, road transport on established corridors. Nearly half of logistics service providers, the group closest to daily execution, agreed.
Sixty per cent of respondents said intermodal transit times can equal, and sometimes outperform, road transport on established corridors. Nearly half of logistics service providers, the group closest to daily execution, agreed.
If that’s true, and this research suggests it is, then we’ve been asking the wrong question. We’ve spent years asking how to make intermodal perform better. Perhaps we should have been asking why people don’t already believe it does.
Those are very different problems. One is operational. The other is informational.
The report keeps returning to one idea: complexity. It concludes that high complexity, combined with low transparency, is a combination that scares many shippers off.
Most people stop reading there and arrive at the obvious conclusion: we need more transparency. But transparency isn’t the opposite of complexity, and information isn’t the opposite of uncertainty. The more complex a network becomes, the more information it generates. More milestones, more exceptions, more alerts, more dashboards, more systems. Eventually, visibility stops reducing complexity. It simply documents it.
That’s the trap we’ve fallen into.
Think about the decisions logistics professionals make every day. Should I reroute this container? Can I promise this delivery? Do I need to notify the customer? Will this delay affect another service tomorrow? Am I exposing myself to a potential fine? Which exception actually matters?
None of those questions are answered by visibility alone. Knowing where something is doesn’t tell you what it means. Knowing something is late doesn’t tell you whether you should intervene. Visibility tells you what happened. Understanding tells you what to do next. Those are not the same thing.
The report uncovers another misconception worth sitting with. When delays occur, they’re usually assumed to be rail failures. Yet the survey found that around 40% of delays originate outside the rail segment altogether, and more than 40% of logistics service providers say poor last-mile pickup planning is a frequent cause on its own.
That’s a profound shift in thinking. The challenge isn’t any single operator, terminal, rail leg, or road leg. It’s the network itself, and how well it works together. The report puts it plainly: every stakeholder controls part of the solution. If every organisation only sees its own part of the picture, nobody can truly understand the whole.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of this sits in a number most readers will skim past.
Across the industry, 82% of respondents expect road transport to hit an on-time performance of 80% or better. For intermodal, that figure drops to 57%. People aren’t holding rail to a lower standard because it deserves one. They’re holding it to a lower standard because they’ve stopped trusting the information they get about it, and quietly adjusted their expectations to match.
That’s not a performance gap. That’s a trust gap, built out of years of partial, inconsistent updates.
This is why we believe the industry is reaching the limits of visibility as a concept. Visibility was exactly what logistics needed when information was scarce. Today, information isn’t scarce. Interpretation is. Context is. Shared understanding is. Decision confidence is.
The next generation of logistics platforms won’t win because they collect more data. They’ll win because they make sense of it, connecting events across organisations, revealing relationships rather than isolated updates, explaining consequences rather than just status.
In other words, they provide intelligence. Not artificial intelligence. Network Intelligence: the ability to understand the behaviour of an entire logistics network as one connected system. Not just where something is, but why it matters. Not just what happened, but what happens next. Not just today’s disruption, but tomorrow’s consequence.
Most importantly, it lets organisations replace assumptions with evidence, blame with collaboration, and reaction with anticipation.
Perhaps that’s the real lesson hidden inside this research. The industry doesn’t have a visibility problem anymore. It has an understanding problem. We’ve become exceptionally good at collecting information. The next competitive advantage won’t come from collecting more of it. It will come from helping people make better decisions with what they already have.
Because the future of intermodal logistics won’t belong to the organisations that can see the most. It will belong to those that understand the most.