Some readers may remember Sean Connaughton, former chairman of the Prince William County board of supervisors. Grappling with transportation and land use issues was one of his biggest challenges until he resigned to take a job as chief of the Maritime Adminstration for the Bush administration. Well, you take take the boy out of Prince William, but you can’t take Prince William out of the boy. It turns out that traffic congestion is still one of Connaughton’s obsessions.
Connaughton’s signature initiative is the “Maritime Highway,” a program to divert shipping containers from trucks to barges on inland waterways. Removing thousands of trucks from the Interstates, he hopes, will help alleviate traffic congestion. To test the viability of the concept, he’s proposing two pilot projects, one of which would move cargo between the ocean ports of Hampton Roads up the James River to the riverine Port of Richmond. Peter Galuszka has the story here.
There are practical reasons why shippers prefer trucks — they’re faster, and they fit better in just-in-time manufacturing supply chains. But there are circumstances in which barges make more economic sense. Connaughton hopes to shift the odds in favor of barges by tinkering with a federal dredging tax that punishes containers loaded with value-added products. He’s also trying to raise seed money to demonstrate the viability of the concept along the James River — something the private sector hasn’t been willing yet to undertake. With gasoline prices rising, the value proposition for barges over trucks is looking better all the time.
There is no silver bullet for solving Virginia’s traffic congestion. The best we can hope for is to identify dozens of solutions, some of which, like land use reform or congestion tolls, can address big chunks of the problem, and some of which, like maritime highways, take small slices out of the problem. It’s nice to know that Connaughton has been thinking creatively about problems back home during his tenure in Washington, D.C.
Photo credit: Columbia Coastal Transport. The New Jersey firm’s busiest barge route is between Norfolk and Baltimore.)
