In March, the Port Authority reduced rates on the Hudson River container barge service it offers between the NY/NJ port and Albany. The service was started about a year ago, but found few takers.

The barge operation now moves 60-80 containers per week thanks to lower prices and additional incentives offered by the Port of Albany. The Albany service is an initial piece of the NY/NJ Port Authority’s "inland distribution" strategy to efficiently move large numbers of containers away from the port by rail or water to distribution sub-centers. More barge services to smaller East Coast ports may be in the works.

Meanwhile, the freight industry and some federal officials are increasingly debating how to foster larger increases in coastal freight movement.

Some say the construction of ever-larger container ships and the prospect of U.S. ocean container trade doubling by 2014 creates the strong possibility that systems of hub-and-spoke container ports will emerge along U.S. coasts, with a few ports serving the huge ships and then distributing freight to smaller ones with smaller ships operating along the coasts. Others point to the increasing delays along coastal routes like I-95, and the difficulty of developing sufficient rail connections to growing ports.

Possible hurdles to such a system’s emergence are opposition by truckers and port labor, federal legislation mandating that vessels engaged in coast-wise shipping be U.S. built, owned and operated (the 1920 Jones Act) and the investment costs for a system of vessels and ports that would allow coast-wise shipping to compete with trucking and railroads (such as "roll-on, roll-off" ships and ports that provide for quick and easy loading and unloading of truck-trailers). The U.S. DOT’s Maritime Administration is working on a "short-sea shipping" policy, but some think that is bureaucratic make-work and that repealing provisions of the Jones Act is the best thing the federal government can do to promote domestic water-borne freight transport.v