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5/31/2023
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) is "well positioned" to increase the amount of goods moving from the port to the St. Louis region, Deputy Port Director Mike Bozza said last week at the FreightWeeksSTL 2023 conference.
PANYNJ handled about 700,000 rail lifts in 2022, about 30,000 of those destined for St. Louis, Bozza said at a summit hosted by the St. Louis Regional Freightway May 24 as part of freight industry conference FreightWeekSTL 2023, according to a Freightway press release.
Freightway is an enterprise of Bi-State Development (BSD), an economic development organization in St. Louis. BSD oversees operations of the Gateway Arch trams and riverboats, St. Louis Downtown Airport and Metro Transit-St. Louis.
St. Louis-based shippers can take advantage of PANYNJ being the first port of call for many ocean carriers and accommodating increasingly larger ships capable of carrying up to 16,000 20-foot equivalent units, Bozza said. Some ships do double calls, where it will travel further down the U.S. East Coast and then return to the port before the end of rotation.
A shipment can arrive in St. Louis via three- or four-day rail transit "before the ship even leaves New York and goes on to Norfolk, Savannah or other destinations," he said. "If speed is a concern, we're well positioned with the infrastructure, with the time and with the scheduled service to get goods there quickly."
The port authority has invested more than $600 million in building and maintaining rail facilities to accommodate more containers, Bozza said.
"Every one of our marine terminals has on- or near-dock rail, and we have capacity for [more than 1.5] million lifts of rail cargo alone. It's our view and our vision that rail cargo and intermodal cargo to places like St. Louis is what's going to help us grow and continue to grow and be a major port gateway," Bozza said.