This huge financing success comes in the teeth of a financial crisis that stopped movements of money and shipments, evoking comparisons with the Great Depression. Panama’s timing coincides with great progress in Washington DC by the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) in securing funding avenues for Short Sea Shipping (SSS), and for elevating related aspects of maritime funding comparable with surface transportation. MARAD also continues to push for a significant private component to financing SSS and maritime infrastructure.<\/p>\n
Panama and SSS are not random sound-bytes juxtaposed in a paragraph – to the contrary, they are highly related, particularly in the resource constrained financial environment that we all face. Some of the ports along the East Coast have been engaged in varying levels of deepening, in advance of direct Asian port calls by mega-ships. Others are working smarter (rather than simply deeper), attracting regional distribution centers that are near to the burgeoning markets.<\/p>\n
But the financial crisis and looming recession should give port planners pause for other reasons. Maybe, new funding avenues will actually emerge. It is true that port investment requires a long term horizon, which means that a dip in 2008-2009 will be offset by an upward growth thrust in the next decade. However, with the potential for real SSS, and for landside interfaces with surface transport likely to gain traction, strategic plans might be fine tuned. SSS (hopefully taking the form of powerful tugs and capacious barges rather than purpose-built fast vessels that will derail any SSS program), can serve as a feeder for standard boxes, and also unclog the highways of the bigger 53′ trailers.<\/p>\n
There is a competitive element to port expansion and dredging along the East Coast. With coastal shipping now a real possibility, and funding avenues possibly expanding, planners might re-examine all their assumptions. Instead of simply emphasising the deepest drafts, might there be efficiencies gained from linking ports using SSS to enable co-operation, as well?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Infrastructure is a good investment: if there is any doubt about that, look to reports of the Panama Canal Authority securing multi-lateral bank funding of $2.3bn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":7027,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-7026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-new-yorker"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7026"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7028,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7026\/revisions\/7028"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7026"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=7026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}