By Benny Lim      Photo：Mochammad  Algi    

Legislated in 2007 and its first grants issued in 2010, a Marine Highway scheme aims to eliminate truck traffic on the highway and move goods onto the river system or for intra-port trade. The most notable projects to date involved containers on the lower Mississippi River and on the James River barge route linking Norfolk and Portsmouth with Richmond, Virginia. This will help improve the marine highway system across the United States, ease congestion, modernize port operations, and ultimately lower the cost of cargo and make businesses more profitable.

On the East Coast, early containers for barge service around New York Harbor, where highways were severely degraded by truck traffic, and funding was awarded to build six landside docking facilities to enable ships to switch to landside vehicles to perform "last leg" miles” to deliver to densely populated areas. New York to implement congestion pricing as overland moves away from trucking.

Richmond, Virginia, already served by a successful container barge, has received $3.7 million to expand barge handling capacity at its terminal, which dates back to the 1940s. MARAD pegged throughput at 43,000 containers in 2021 and said it aimed to double container throughput by 2026.

Elsewhere on the Great Lakes, Fincantieri Group, the region's leading yard operator, was awarded $3.3 million to "acquire three types of equipment that will help move project cargo from shore to Transfer to ship and return to shore."

The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, like Guam, has received $2.8 million for a barge that will be used on a route linking Ceiba on the eastern tip of the main island with the smaller islands of Vieques and Culebra. The system will move commercial trucks, wheeled construction equipment, fuel and water tank trucks between the main island of Puerto Rico and [the two islands]

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