Maritime industry looks to ease traffic burden on highways
a hurry. We have an alternative … water. It’s there. We’re blessed with it. In so many parts of the country, it’s underutilized. It’s very simple: Let’s go back to the water. Time is running out on us.”
Highways are expensive to maintain. The cost of wear and tear on U.S. roads and bridges from heavy truck traffic is exorbitant. The New York State Thruway Authority, for example, is in the midst of its most expensive repair on the Tappan Zee Bridge: a $147 million tab to replace the bridge deck on 40 percent of the bridge in the lanes used by trucks. This is a bridge that now has a rating of 2.96 and is considered structurally deficient, but which the Thruway Authority assures us is safe for motorists. River traffic has its costs and side-effects, too. Sunday sailors, yacht owners, swimmers, and and those using personal watercraft will likely be reluctant to share their navigable waters with a lot of large, lumbering workhorse vessels. This is an issue in Chicago now: The Chicago River was used for decades by barges ferrying industrial and agricultural products from facilities in the city’s south west areas to Lake Michigan. Over the years these industries mostly disappeared and the industrial red-brick buildings on the river’s banks (now called “River North” and “River West”) were converted to pricy lofts and fashibnable boutiques. Up-scale resdidents of these newly developed neighborhood do want their pleasure sailing to be disrupted, or threatened, by bulky barges.
“Commerce on the river lends a lot of vitality to the river,” said John Cronin, the former riverkeeper, who is now managing director of the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, headquartered on the Hudson River in the City of Beacon, in Dutchess County, New York. “One of the questions that come up is what kind of commerce? Will it be only long-distance commerce, in that the Hudson is only a highway and the communities here don’t get any benefit? Another thing is that the river serves some larger purposes than it ever did before. A lot more people now use it for drinking water in the Mid-Hudson region. We also have a lot more recreation on the river - kayakers, boaters and fishermen. It would be a balancing act unprecedented in the history of commerce.” Cronin said environmentalists would want to explore such concerns as keeping ships from dumping ballast water that could contain invasive species and requiring that they have clean engines, but he said he thought the idea was worth exploring. Some other things to think about are the effects of marine diesel fuel and sewage dumping on water quality and the delicate ecosystems of the Hudson River, the Long Island Sound, and other bodies of water. Will hazardous, toxic or radioactive materials be transported by water? What if such vessels collide? Who will bear the cost of keeping the waters safe for all who use them, and who will pay the price when accidents happen?
