Give cargo a vote
Give cargo a vote
There is a cliché to the effect that "...cargo does not vote - but people do". Usually the context is the funding of infrastructure.
In New York, where I grew up (and saw real deepsea ships, back in the day) the waterfront is being re-discovered. Neighbourhoods that had gone industrial are now making a come-back, and the people, affluent and politically influential (unlike the cargo that once moved across their mainly abandoned docks), are returning. Around New York, Vision 2020, a comprehensive waterfront redevelopment plan was unveiled several months ago.
This is not a port authority exercise by any means, but if consciousness is raised among the voters whose opinions actually matter, port planners might be able to leverage such support to meet their seemingly disparate (but maybe not real) objectives. The politicians who announce such things offer some juicy factoids - $3bn to be spent over 10 years, and 130 core projects to get rolling within 3 years… the list goes on.
One group that offered some ideas that were subsequently taken on-board, including the tag line of the waterfront as “The Sixth Borough”, is PortSide New York, a group based on the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Spearheaded by one-time photojournalist Carolina Salguero, this highly influential organisation is headquartered aboard an old fuel tanker tied up near the old Atlantic Basin terminal.
The insights of PortSide should be noted by port planners, in New York, and other urban centres in the States and beyond. In a comments submission, addressing a section of Vision2020 on the interface of maritime business with the people side of the equation, Ms Salguero offered a few suggestions worth repeating: combination passenger and cargo ferries, and short sea shipping that is specifically tied to “big box” retailers and to the food distribution business.
One noteworthy quote from the PortSide submission is a suggestion that: “This implies adding small intermodal ports around the city. One way to do this is to include them in waterfront parks and find ways to have them also serve the immediate neighborhood...” Is this antithetical to conventional logistics? I am not so sure. Rampant congestion, which drives activity to other ports, is also not in the logistics text books.
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