Massachusetts in short sea shipping pact

Massachusetts in short sea shipping pact The Massachusetts Seaport Advisory Council has signed a memorandum of understanding with Port Canaveral, Fla. to explore short sea shipping.
   Richard Armstrong, executive secretary of the council, explained that the two organizations will exchange information and data to better understand the benefits and costs of moving domestic cargo by water rather than by road.
   'The New England economy is increasingly being strangled by congestion on I-95 and choke points like the Hudson River crossings,' he said. 'We have had a loss of manufacturing jobs and an increase in cost of living.'
   Noting projections that freight volumes could double. 'We need to find some alternatives,' he said.
   The council has appropriated $125,000 to develop a freight diversion model to look at the effect of moving domestic cargo from road to sea that it hopes to complete later this year.
   The research, he said, has already uncovered some encouraging information including the fact that in lower Massachusetts there are 1.9 million inbound truck trailer loads and 1.6 million outbound loads from the region, which excludes Boston.
   That's good news, he said, because it means that a short sea service would have a good opportunity to develop two-way cargo flows. Freight out of New England includes large amounts of fish, forest products, textiles, even cranberries.
   A vessel carrying just 140 trailers could potentially be viable in a short sea service, Armstrong said, and a slower vessel such as an articulated tug-barge-unit traveling 8-10 knots could be competitive with a truck.
   Armstrong said that's because average speeds along the I-95 corridor are now about 37 miles per hour and expected to slow even more as congestion increases. He explained that a tug-barge operating 24 hours a day would be able to offer competitive transit times for some shippers.
The authority believes ports such as Fall River or New Bedford might be logical ports in Massachusetts from which to offer short sea service.
   While the agreement with Port Canaveral is for exchanging information, not to establish a service between Florida and Massachusetts, Armstrong said longer distance coastal services might have a better chance of being viable because there would be longer distances over which to distribute the cost of handling cargo in ports that he said some believe could amount to half the cost of a short sea service.
   'The wild card is the cost of vessels, the cost of manning. The capital cost has an enormous impact on these services. That's where the Maritime Administration may be able to step in' by taking actions such as allowing use of Capital Construction Funds to build ships for contiguous trades, Armstrong said.