N.Y.-N.J. port funds Bayonne Bridge study

N.Y.-N.J. port funds Bayonne Bridge study    The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey took another step Thursday in addressing the obstacle that a bridge crossing a waterway leading to its major container terminals may pose to its future.
   The agency’s board of commissioners authorized spending up to $10 million on planning and engineering services to help determine the best options “to address navigational issues posed by new larger ships coming in 2014 that may have difficulty fitting under the Bayonne Bridge.”
   2014 is when new locks and other improvements at the Panama Canal are to be completed, allowing a near tripling in the size of ships moving cargo from Asia to the U.S. East Coast via the Panama Canal.
   The money will be used to develop options to deal with the bridge’s low clearance, which may prevent new larger ships from passing under it to reach the ports container terminals on Staten Island and in Newark and Elizabeth. The planning and engineering efforts will take up to one and a half years.
   The port authority’s evaluation will establish conceptual cost estimates and schedules for each option and will undertake a regional cost-benefit analysis of the alternatives.
   The planning efforts will supplement a port authority-commissioned study by the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Coast Guard that is looking at the impacts of the bridge’s 151-foot clearance on future port trade and the national economic development benefit that would accrue by eliminating the Bayonne Bridge’s navigational obstruction.
   The port authority said the Corps of Engineers’ work and port authority planning efforts would provide a clearer picture of how the height restriction should be addressed.
   “What we did today will build on the Army Corp study. Their study talks about the need to do something, our study will look at specific options,” a spokesman for the agency explained.