The same Mr Crane is also serving on a 54-member panel assembled by New Jersey’s Governor John Corzine (an ex-Goldman Sachs banker) to liaise with the voters about Governor Corzine’s plans for raising motorway tolls and paying down debt. His involvement, along with other business leaders, underscores the serious pickle that New Jersey (and the rest of the US) has gotten in, when it comes to funding the infrastructure. Governor Corzine met stiff resistance last year to ideas of privatising major highway arteries in “The Garden State”.

Though there is never a good time for raising public finance, the first quarter 2008 seems to be particularly inauspicious, with most pundits (though not President Bush) using the “R” word (recession) to describe the perilous economic straits that the US finds itself in. Democrat candidate Barack Obama, borrowed an idea from a bill sponsored by a group including his rival, Hillary Clinton. Obama proposed an infrastructure bank, to be funded by the Government, that could finance highway projects and other public works. A more expansive version of the concept, sponsored by a group of New York and New Jersey area Democratic representatives, envisions a quasi-Governmental corporation that would fund a wider ranging group of investments- including port projects.

The fine print in both pieces of legislation (the bank is a Senate bill, the corporation is a House effort) both mention the "P" word (public-private partnership) - an explicit realisation by the Democrats that the Treasury would need to be repaid through tolling or similar activity based charges. Port planners, in New Jersey (where Maher’s facility is located) and elsewhere around the States, should closely watch how Governor Corzine’s efforts at hefty toll increases fare. And likewise, if the Democrats gain traction at a national level, infrastructure funding issues may attract more attention at a time of sluggish throughputs all around.