Older Ports

Older Ports Competing with Newer Larger Ports

Anton Wyatt

TLMT331

John Wade

July 17, 2012

Older Ports Competing with Newer Larger Ports

Older ports are having to really work at their competition level in order to keep up with the new age and larger ports doing things such as upping their investments. These older ports must keep up their competition in order to keep up with ports such as Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Tacoma, reason being that these ports help fund a variety of commercial real estate development projects. The older ports, in several cases, have been responsible for urban growth so they were located in the nearby central areas. The city and ports are often competing for the same land, which can create prioritization problems (Rodrigue, J., 2013). With this competition ports are becoming increasingly regional in their dynamics, which represent a new development from their traditional local function, such as industrial complexes (Rodrigue, J., 2013).

Port advocates may further contend that because of intense competition among ports, it is impossible for a single port to use the funding mechanisms. Carriers would respond by moving their operations to ports that still were using funding strategies that have the public sector and not the private firms the bearing of the bulk of project risks (Luberoff, D., 2000). In the recent years ports have been aggressively expanding their infrastructure, yet given the high rate of traffic growth, even these investments have not been enough to eliminate congestion at the major west coast ports (The Challenge of the Future, 2007). Some of the older and well established ports have run into difficulties because of an insufficient supply of suitable industrial land (The Challenge of the Future, 2007). A good example of something like this would be Baltimore, Maryland was a traditional port for the upper Midwest region of the United States but more recently its port lands have been...