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Something To Think About …. ™

Houston Tries to Become the Front Door for U.S.
By Tim Brady
©2008 Write Up the Road Publishing &Media
All Rights Reserved


It’s   huge now, and may grow to be thousand-pound gorilla size within fifteen or so years. What is it? The port of Houston, which has ambitions to replace the west coast as    the main door for all the consumer goods coming in daily from Asia.

With the Panama Canal having tripled its portion of container shipments from Asia to nearly forty percent of its annual total, Houston is betting there’s steady growth  possible for its supply chain, too. The Texas port already increased its depth by five feet, which means it can take deeper-draft ships.

Of course, projections estimate the largest ships coming out of panama will be so big they’ll have to dock at a new facility, still to be built, in the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean. Smaller ships would then ferry cargo from the enormous ships to the contracted ports, which would include other ports along the gulf coast, Florida and of     course Houston.

Another projection features an alternate route through the Panama Canal, leading to the Gulf of Mexico. It would provide container ships steaming from the Far East to bypass Los Angeles or Long Beach. Panama expects to complete this ambitious expansion of its canal in 2015. Houston figures an immediate result of tremendously increased shipping demand on the port terminals, trucking companies, railroads and all other transportation agencies, whether water or land based.

Houston also anticipates distribution centers being built at a fast pace in and around Houston.

So what does all this mean to the trucking industry? Well, it will have a significant    impact on the I-69 trade corridor, slated to be taking goods from Mexico, which is the    port of Houston’s largest trading partner, all the way north to Canada. That planning  has had to increase its scope too, combining car, truck and rail lanes, and running alongside or above corridors for pipelines and broadband.

In short, there are going to be so many trucks transporting containers out of Houston, truckers aren’t going to be obsolete any time soon. And you’ll be able to enjoy that familiar West Coast gridlock in the Southern heart of Texas.

That’s something to think about …. ™

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