“Five or 10 years ago, a project like the
Arc would not have had legs” because
Savannah then didn’t have the volumes
to justify the need, Lynch said in a recent
interview.
Lynch says the Arc is less about capturing market share from East and West
Coast ports than it is about minimizing
supply chain friction amid growing freight
volumes nationwide. “We want to insert
ourselves into the supply chain—not as a
chokepoint but as an accelerant,” he said.
WEST COAST’S ENDURING STRENGTH
GPA is not the only port authority inserting itself into the 21st century transport
mosaic. This summer, the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey completed
a $1.6 billion project to raise the Bayonne
Bridge—which spans the two states—to
215 feet from 151 feet; the rise provides
clearance for ships with 18,000-TEU capacities, doubling the maximum vessel size
that could be handled before. The Virginia
Ports Authority, which runs the Port of
Norfolk among other facilities, has been
involved for seven years with Norfolk-based NS’s “Heartland Corridor” project
that expedites double-stack intermodal
traffic moving between Norfolk, Chicago,
and Columbus, Ohio. In September, the
port announced that CSX would link
Norfolk and Pittsburgh in what would be
the last step in the Jacksonville, Fla.-based
railroad’s decade-old “National Gateway”
double-stack initiative.
Out west, Omaha, Neb.-based Union
Pacific Corp. and Fort Worth, Texas-based
BNSF Railway operate double-stack services on double-tracked infrastructure
from the Southern California ports into the
Midwest. Today, 16 unit trains, some two
miles in length, run daily from Los Angeles
to Long Beach and from there to Dallas, St.
Louis, and Chicago.
Joshua Brogan, vice president at con-
volumes. As a result, the landside
infrastructure will face greater pro-
ductivity pressure as more boxes
hit the docks; GPA expects Garden
City to annually handle 1 million
rail lifts (each container moving on
or off a railcar constitutes one lift)
by the time the Arc is completed.
Meanwhile, there will be challenges making timely deliveries off the
ports by truck amid increased road
congestion and a growing shortage
of qualified commercial truck drivers. Overarching all of this is the
task of providing efficient and timely freight movement to a U.S. population inexorably headed toward the
400 million mark.
The confluence of these trends
will force massive change on the
transport ecosystem, says Walter
work will morph into what
will resemble a power grid
composed of gateway and
inland ports, railroads, and
intermodal truckers, all tied
together by advanced IT
(information technology)
systems that maritime users
today can’t begin to fathom,
Kemmsies says. The ports, he adds,
will serve as the “generating plants.”
The Arc represents an opportu-
nity for GPA to attract more Asian
import business transiting the canal
and to capture traffic that histor-
ically flows to Chicago, St. Louis,
and other Midwest points from
the Ports of Los Angeles and Long
Beach, which remains the nation’s
busiest port complex but which
is plagued by persistent conges-
tion and delays. As GPA Executive
Director Griff Lynch sees it, the
canal is the catalyst for much that is
yet to come.
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