Century-old law contributes to Connecticut traffic
A federal law signed more than 100 years ago could be blocking a strategy that could significantly ease traffic along the Interstate 95 corridor.
Large trucks account for 10 percent of all vehicle miles driven, and while making up only 4 percent of all registered vehicles, account for 9 percent of all vehicles involved in fatal crashes, according to the National Safety Council.
If you reduce the number of large trucks on the road, you reduce traffic, advocates say.
Short-shipping — sending large container vessels up and down the coast — could bear much of the burden now held by long-haul trucks, but the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, often called the Jones Act, makes that difficult.
Signed after World War I, the measure was intended to support the nation’s Merchant Marine and shipbuilding industry by restricting foreign vessels, as Bob Curt, a former Merchant Marine and Exxon employee working in shipping, said.
“It has three major facets to it,” he said. Under the Jones Act, ships traveling between U.S. ports must be U.S.-owned, U.S.crewed and U.S.-built. “Now, in 1921, the United States could compete. We could build ships as good or as cheaply as anybody in the world. In World War II, our shipbuilding industry did a great deal to help us win the war. But that’s over.”
The effect increased short-shipping would have on traffic has been long discussed. In 2008, the I-95 Corridor Coalition, advocated “aggressive short-sea shipping and seamless intermodal connections,” in a report titled “A 2040 Vision for the I-95 Coalition Region.”
“People have been fighting the Jones Act in the ’90s, in the ’80s, in the ’70s, in the’ 60s,” said shipping industry owner and investor Per Heidenreich, of Greenwich. “This has been going on for 60 years.”
A recent report from transportation data company INRIX, said the stretch of I-95 south between the Sherwood Island Connector in Westport and Indian Field Road in Greenwich was the most congested corridor in the United States.
Heidenreich along with Bob Kunkel designed what they called a “compact RO-RO,” a low-emission ship that could carry 80 trailers at a time. The plan was to build four of them together carrying about 400 trailers or more a week up and down the coast.
“It would make a significant impact on the traffic and congestion that was on I-95,” Kunkel said.
The Jones Act made that plan moot. The compact row would have cost $65 million to build in Europe at the time, but double that in the United States. Because of the Jones Act, Kunkel and Heidenriech could not use foreign-built boats, and the increased cost made the plan cost-prohibitive.
“So that killed the whole project completely,” Heidenriech said. “If you allow for import of ships today, over the next 15 years, you will see 500 foreign ships owned by Americans under a U.S. flag with U.S. crews going up and down all the coasts of the United States. There’s no more economical way of transporting goods containers than ships.”
Kunkel’s company has designed and built “a hybrid catamaran” that is “moving farm products across Long Island Sound.” He said that project “more or less proved that the marine highway can take trucks off the highway and reduce congestion and emissions.”
The problem, Kunkel said, is that ships are being built in the United States, albeit usually smaller ones like tugs and ferries. The companies that build those ships have been doing so for a century under the Jones Act.
“How do you turn to them and say, ‘Well, we’re going to look to do a waiver or we’re going to look to do some kind of modification?’ ” he said. “It’s just this argument and debate that’s gone on for years and decades.”
Europe, Kunkel said, is able to build ships cheaper because they have not invested in a highway system as has the United States.
“One of the reasons it’s not as prevalent here is because we do have the Eisenhower interstate system since 1956, which is one of the best built interstate systems in the world. The roads are not readily available in Europe,” he said. “Coastal shipping is used quite a bit on inland waterways, rivers, bays, sounds, and on the coasts, both in the Far East and Europe.”
That, he said, shows that the idea is not theoretical.
“It works. It’s just making the numbers work right now, which has been our problem in trying to get it up and running,” he said. “It’s not that we blame the Jones Act, we just sit there and look at it and say, ‘How do we make the numbers work in order to solve the problem?’ Normally it comes to the cost of building the ship.”