Coming up in April is one of the biggest events on our calendar: the 2010 North American Marine Highways and Logistics Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Not only will U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and other key legislative and industry leaders be speaking, HML CEO Stephen Pepper will be part of a panel on sustainable shipping.


“This conference is filled with some fantastic sessions about the future of America’s transportation system,” Pepper says. “I feel lucky that I’ve been asked to speak about one of the biggest passions in my life: how the Marine Highway can benefit shippers, customers and the environment.” [...]

The International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics had an interesting piece last month on how managing empty containers is an integral part of creating a short sea shipping and regional ports infrastructure.


“Short sea shipping represents a viable tactic in the implementation of a regional port system development strategy on the West Coast of the USA and should be considered as a possible method for alleviating landside congestion stemming from commercial traffic in major urban corridors.”[...]

It’s quite a list: Port Manatee. The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority. The New Haven Port Authority. The Port of Providence. Quonset Business Park. The Port of New Bedford. And it goes on and on.

Nearly 100 ports across the United States applied for federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grants this summer. In all they asked for $3.38 billion — which is more than twice the amount of money in the entire funding program. [Read the full story to download an applicant analysis.] That type of competition can’t be good for the emerging Marine Highway program, right?

Not so fast, says Stephen Pepper, president of Humboldt Maritime Logistics. “All of these separate projects are in different regions, but they provide the mechanism for communities to define their own Marine Highway goals,” he says. [...]

Jeff Berman at Logistics Management has a great story on American Association of Port Authorities President and Chief Executive Officer Kurt Nagle and his push to keep improved freight mobility, including port access, a top legislative priority next year.
In a letter to House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James L. Oberstar, Nagle wrote that, “AAPA urges you to prioritize policies and programs to improve the facilitation of goods movement in our transportation system. U.S. public port authorities provide a critical linkage in the freight network – connecting international shipping lanes with the U.S. highway system and providing intermodal connectors between water, rail and trucks. On average, each of our 50 states relies on 13 to 15 ports to handle its imports and exports, which total more than $1.3 billion worth of goods moving in and out of U.S. ports every day.” [...]

Think you have headaches? It could be worse. You could be stuck in the middle of three-state battle over infrastructure and shipping problems with the Bayonne Bridge (pictured), which spans part of Newark Bay in New York state.
“Sitting in the front row at Port Industry Day, held in New York in the auditorium aboard Intrepid, my head began to ache from the sheer complexity of solving infrastructure problems, on a grand scale. Indeed, Surface Transport funding, now expired, has been extended on a month-to-month basis.”[...]