One of the logistical miracles that hides in plain sight is the staggering volume of maritime traffic processed through the Port of New York and New Jersey each day, almost always without incident or accident. Although the harbor shared by New York and New Jersey is the largest port complex on the eastern seaboard (and the third largest in America), it is also one of the most compact, cramming into a relatively small geographic footprint a density of traffic and multiplicity of uses unseen anywhere else.

“Managing congestion in the Port of New York and New Jersey is one of our highest strategic priorities,” acknowledges Captain Zeita Merchant, the U.S. Coast Guard’s Commander for Sector New York. “While other ports are known for ferries or cargo or petrochemicals or cruise ships, New York is top tier in each of these areas, all combined in one place. At the end of 2022 and for parts of this year, we have been number one in volume of cargo, cruise ship volume, and volume of refined petroleum products for vehicles and aircraft.”

“At the same time, ships are getting larger, and there are so many ways in which waterways are being used that we are seeing more and more demand for marine transportation,” Captain Merchant continues. “We have to facilitate commerce, while still making sure our waterways are being shared.”

“Perhaps our biggest challenge is balancing the management of congestion with the strategic threats that we know are out there,” she adds, “because it wouldn’t take much to paralyze the harbor, whether by a drone attack or a cyber-attack.”

In 2017, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey commissioned a master plan to forecast cargo traffic levels several decades in advance. But then, the pandemic intervened and sent demand for shipping services skyrocketing.

“We had five- or six-years’ worth of advancement overnight,” says Beth Rooney, the Authority’s Port Director. “We’re now seeing the cargo volume we didn’t expect until 2026 or 2027, but we’re going to continue to grow from there. We’re doing about 750,000 lifts per year now, but we have the capacity to handle 1.5 million lifts a year.”

“Thankfully, we’ve been able to meet that demand because of investments we’ve made,” she continues, “not only in deepening our channels and raising the level of the Bayonne Bridge, but also in our on-dock rail facilities, our Express Rail network, which is able to service the Midwest, eastern Canada, and New England. And our terminal operators have made considerable investment in expanding the footprint of their terminals, new cargo-handling equipment, new ship-to-shore cranes, and new software that helps optimize all of the activity within the container terminals.”

“Even with a softening in the demand, we can’t let our foot off the pedal,” Ms. Rooney reflects. “We are focused exclusively on fluidity and capacity, and how do we collectively make sure that we can continue to meet the demand. That means further investment in the terminals, and our operators are all committed to making additional investments in their terminals, with additional land, with additional cargo-handling equipment, with upgrades to computer systems.” As an example, she notes, “we have new ship-to-shore cranes that have been delivered to the port.”

“We are operating a 21st-century port, but we’re doing it using practices that are 20th century, maybe even 19th century,” she observes. “So, we need to be able to advance the entire operation into the 21st century.”

“We need to do things differently,” reflects John Nardi, president of the Shipping Association of New York and New Jersey. “When you look at the future of the port, there are challenges that we’re going to face here. The increased volume has been great but handling it has been difficult with warehouse restrictions and the freight backing up onto the terminals. We are not going to be able to continue to operate the same way that we have during the past 50 years of containerization.”

“We’re sharing the infrastructure with all of the local communities,” he notes. “Compared to other ports, we’re restricted, land-wise. With all the growth we’ve had, we’ve gone beyond the usual eight-to-five job operations. We need to shift freight operations to off-hours and nighttime, and not share that infrastructure with all the other commuters. Maybe there are incentives to do that, whether it’s for the Port Authority with tolls, or somehow to make it more attractive for truckers and for warehouses to work at night.”

“The road infrastructure we have today was not designed for trucks of the length we now have,” Ms. Rooney agrees. “It becomes a bottleneck as we’re trying to move trucks in and out of the facilities.” As a case in point for how to address this dilemma, she cites the Authority’s Port Street Corridor Improvement Project (now under way and slated for completion in 2028), which will improve road access to the Port Newark and Elizabeth Port Authority Marine Terminal.

More broadly, she notes, “if we’re going to double that cargo volume by 2050, we need to be developing a pathway now toward 24-7 operations. We’re not going right to 24-7, but we have to figure out how are we going to do two full shifts, Monday through Friday, plus maybe a single shift on Saturday. Every one of those supply chain sectors has to be able to adjust the way they operate, make behavioral changes, and make investments so that we’re able to do it. Because if we don’t, all of the partners in the supply chain are going to suffer.”

Another paradigm shift that the Port of New York and New Jersey has come to embrace is, “the change from just-in-time inventory to a just-in-case inventory,” Ms. Rooney says. In the wake of the pandemic, “shippers and cargo owners don’t have a lot of confidence in the shipping system or in manufacturing. What if there’s another global shutdown in production? Separately, we have seen supply chain impacts across the globe. So, we have gone from a very minimal level of inventory in warehouses to much higher levels, ‘just in case’ production shuts down. They want to make sure they have product in the warehouses to meet customers’ needs for various selling seasons.”

A third transition that has challenged (but ultimately benefitted) the Port of New York and New Jersey,” she recalls, “is that the more the manufacturing shifts out of China and into southeast Asia, places like Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, and the subcontinent, the more opportunity there is for that cargo to come through the Suez Canal and arrive in New York and New Jersey. We can compete, quite frankly, very well, with the West Coast ports, particularly for cargo that’s going into the Midwest of America.”

Mr. Nardi predicts that, “we’re going to be operating at or near record levels for the foreseeable future.”

Ultimately, increased volume and the congestion that it brings, “are resiliency problems,” Ms. Rooney concludes. “The Port of New York and New Jersey needs to be able to withstand any disruption to the supply chain, in order to be able to serve our customers reliably, efficiently, and effectively. We are committed to keeping our status as the premier port in America.”

 

 

Datapoints: A Quantitative Snapshot of the Port of New York and New Jersey

 

563,700

The number of regional jobs that support or rely upon cargo operations at the Port of New York and New Jersey.

 

90.4 percent

The percentage by which this figure has grown in the past decade.

 

11.4 percent

The percentage by which this figure has grown since 2019.

 

5,000

The number of longshoremen working at the Port of New York and New Jersey.

 

$10 million

Amount spent annually training longshoremen in the Port of New York and New Jersey.

 

$47.2 billion

The amount of personal income derived from business activity in the Port of New York and New Jersey in 2022.

 

$135.3 billion

The amount of business income derived from the Port of New York and New Jersey in 2022.

 

$15.7 billion

The amount of federal, state, and local tax revenues derived from business activity in the Port of New York and New Jersey in 2022.

 

9.4 million TEUs

Number of twenty-foot equivalent container units (TEUs) processed by the Port of New York and New Jersey in 2022.

 

20.2 percent

The percentage by which this figure has grown since 2019.

 

126,000 TEUs

Combined simultaneous capacity of the six modern container terminals in the Port of New York and New Jersey.

 

420,000 units

The number of vehicles imported via the Port of New York and New Jersey in 2022.

 

9,000 trucks

The size of the “frequent-caller” fleet the hauls cargo out of the Port of New York and New Jersey.

 

220,000 tons

The weight of breakbulk cargo (individual pieces or palletized commodities, such as forest products, fresh fruit, steel, or cocoa beans) imported via the Port of New York and New Jersey in 2022.

 

1 billion square feet

Capacity of warehouses and distribution centers within 50 miles of the Port of New York and New Jersey.

 

270 vessels

The number of larger capacity cruise ships that sailed into and out of the Port of New York and New Jersey in 2022.

 

1.5 million TEUs

The combined processing capacity of the Port Authority’s intermodal ExpressRail network, which replaces truck traffic with train shipments.

 

2.4 million

The number of truck trips that can be made unnecessary by the TEU capacity of the ExpressRail network.

 

 

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Matthew Fenton is a reporter and editor who lives in New York. His work has appeared in Time Magazine, Esquire, New York Magazine, and the Daily News, among many other media brands and platforms.