Page 6: of Marine News Magazine (January 2, 2010)

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6 MN January 2010 editorial

This month MarineNews takes a close look at short-sea shipping in North America and the obstacles that are keeping this transport concept from gaining a foothold.

The U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD), which established the Marine Highways program to promote short-sea shipping, will release its “Report to Congress on

America’s Marine Highways” early in 2010. Following this, the hope is that legislators will see fit to assign a rea- sonable budget in order to move this well-researched ini- tiative off paper and onto an actual waterway near you.

Well-researched may be an understatement. The avail- able studies on short-sea shipping are enough to get any

Ph.D. candidate started. MARAD lists nearly 30 links to related studies on its America’s Marine Highway Program site and the Marine Transportation System National

Advisory Council’s on-line library links to 50 or so more.

In this month’s feature I focused mainly on the obstacles to short-sea shipping because I wanted to look at why an idea that seems to have so much promise isn’t being acted on more quickly. Dr. Rockford Weitz, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Maritime Studies and co-author of the study “America's Deep Blue Highway: How Coastal

Shipping Could Reduce Traffic Congestion, Lower

Pollution, and Bolster National Security,” was especially helpful and I share in his study’s frustration that “accurate and precise freight data along America’s coastlines simply do not exist.” Potential benefits of short-sea shipping may be well-documented, but this hard and reliable data to move policy makers and business people to action is lack- ing.

In any case, I can only echo the sentiment in Weitz’s study that “Coastal shipping has become more than just a fringe issue. It has become a topic deserving of wide atten- tion. Thus we hope that our study will not gather dust on a forgotten bookshelf, but instead offer a turning point in the coastal shipping debate and become a blueprint for action.”

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Raina Clark

Managing Editor [email protected]

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