Water ‘highway’ could take trucks off Metro’s roads

The Port of Vancouver thinks that it could relieve the region of a lot of truck traffic, by shipping containers up the Fraser River on barges. This was discussed on March 5 at one of Metro Vancouver’s “Sustainability Dialogues“. This one was held in Surrey and most of those who attended were very much opposed to idea like the South Fraser Perimeter Road, which is being justified largely on the grounds of “need” due to the expansion of Deltaport. Of course, what the provincial government seems to be ignoring is that most of the containers that go out of this region move by train. It is only local traffic that goes byt truck, and most of that is for resorting into other containers, for shipping to retailers. The port thinks that if this activity could be carried out at an inland terminal served by water and rail, a lot of emoty truck trips could be saved.

The meeting was covered by both the Vancouver Sun and The Province.

What people were saying was that if the containers were moved by barge instead of
truck, then we would not need the South Fraser Perimeter Road.

The plan to load containers on to barges is not of course new and has been discussed on my own blog
– though the mention of Hope is new. Up until now I had expected that
the ecological significance of the gravel reach would have been a block
to navigation by large barges this far upstream.

“Most of what we need to make this happen is there already,” Badger
told The Sun. The highway — in this case the Fraser River — and the
railroad tracks run side by side all the way to Hope.

What isn’t there of course are the terminal facilities. And
proposals by the port to buy up land along the river front for
terminals are already a cause for concern among the local communities.

The cost of transferring containers more than once —
from deep-sea vessels to short-haul vessels and then to trucks or rail
— in their trip from port to market has been prohibitive until now.

As the cost of transport goes up “it makes this kind of operation much more viable,” Badger said.

But it still does not make any sense at all. The container terminals
all have rail access. And the plan for the expansion of Deltaport is to
add even more rail. So for long distance shipments across North
America, most of the containers taken off ships go onto trains at the
marine terminal. This can also happen at Surrey Fraser Docks where the
container cranes have now been standing idle for some time. In fact at
Deltaport I have never seen all the cranes in use at once. This is not,
of course, a scientific study but casual observation suggests that at
the moment there is a lot of spare capacity. The Burrard inlet
terminals are all rail connected too, of course – though a sneaky
suspicion lurks in my mind that they could be very desirable
redevelopment sites.

Now I have heard it said that CN Intermodal does operate trucks between
Deltaport, Vanterm and its Thornton yard. Quite why that would be
cheaper than running trains I have no idea. Perhaps it is something to
do with the CN/CP agreements on track use.

The big deal that generates truck movement is the volume of traffic
that gets resorted here. Imported containers are stripped of their
contents, and the goods reloaded onto other containers or trailers for
onward transmission by companies like Hudson’s Bay and Canadian Tire.
Very few stores need an entire container full of rubber duckies, so the
trailers carry a variety of goods from various sources. It is this
activity that generates so many truck movements as it is very poorly
co-ordinated, with a lot of movement of empty equipment. If that could
be combined at one site with packing containers for export there is a
real potential for savings. But double handling full containers, to
load them onto trains up the valley just adds cost and delay to what
can be done now – putting them on to trains at the port.

(Another version of this post has also appeared on my own blog.)