When the City of Portland decided to move the Nova Scotia ferry from the International Marine Terminal to Ocean Gateway, it was supposed to help the entire waterfront: the cruise ship terminal would get a regular client and the marine terminal was supposed to double its freight once it no longer had the ferry in the way.
It didn’t quite work out that way. The city spent $21 million on a cruise ship terminal that doesn’t even have a deepwater port, at a time when the cruise ship industry is moving to bigger, longer ships.
And Bay Ferries, which runs The Cat, the ferry from Portland to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, is struggling with high fuel costs and lower passenger counts. In late August, Bay Ferries unexpectedly announced it was cutting back its trips from seven to five per week after Labor Day. This comes just after the Nova Scotia service received a $4.4 million bailout (in Canadian dollars) from the Canadian Industrial Expansion Fund.
The International Marine Terminal isn’t doing much better. The city-owned facility shut down June 29 after its largest customer, Red Shield Environmental in Old Town, went into bankruptcy negotiations, writes Colin Woodard in his column for the September issue, “The idling of Maine’s container port.”
The marine terminal has not achieved anywhere near the success that the city hoped. But one factor cited for lackluster season at the Nova Scotia-high fuel prices-gives hope for the marine terminal.
High fuel prices have renewed interest in short sea shipping, that is, commercial transportation that uses inland and coastal waterways to move freight from a domestic port to its destination. Short sea shipping is a lot less more expensive than sending goods by truck or train, even before this summer’s spike in fuel prices is taken into consideration. Short sea shipping is 41 percent cheaper than carrying freight by truck, according to a web presentation by John Reeve of Reeve & Associates, in June 2007. And rail costs have increased recently by 25 to 35 percent, Reeve said.
The other advantage of moving goods via ship is it reduces congestion on highways and reduces pollution. A 2006 study by a public-private partnership called the I-95 Corridor Coalition predicts that truck traffic on the I-95 corridor will increase from 32,000 semi-trailers daily in 2004 to 58,000 trucks daily by 2020.
Short sea shipping is a transportation solution whose time has come. Some of the many challenges to this new form of freight transportation are building the ships to take the extra cargo, getting rid of a tax on port maintenance and building new port and cargo facilities.
Yet, despite the advantages of short sea shipping, Portland’s container port sits idle, to the surprise of Kevin Mack, vice president of business development for Colombia Coastal Transport, the New Jersey firm that runs the cargo service out of Portland. “Even with the mill working, we have been unable to get people in Maine to support the thing. I’m shocked nobody wants to try it,” Mack said, in Woodard’s column.
The problem right now is the service to Portland is still more expensive than trucking freight. But the state needs to change its priorities away from relying on highways to move goods. And with all the press Ocean Gateway receives, more attention should be paid statewide to the marine terminal, which could be on the cutting edge of freight transport.