A report from the National Research Council's Transportation Research Board says that there needs to be more concerted effort in maintaining inland waterways in the U.S.

“The system needs a sustainable and well-executed plan for maintaining system reliability and performance to ensure that its limited resources are directed where they are most essential,” the report says.

More targeted operations and maintenance (O&M) investments would prioritize locks and facilities for areas that are most in need of maintenance.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) funds the federal inland waterways infrastructure, which moves nearly 7% of all ton-miles of domestic cargo, primarily coal, petroleum, food and farm products, chemicals and crude materials.

The waterways are made up of more than 36,000 miles of commercially navigable channels and about 240 working lock sites. The chief and most expensive component is the installation and maintenance of lock and dam infrastructure to enable the upstream and downstream movement of cargo, the report says.

Navigation could be improved by allocating O&M resources toward major facilities with high volumes of traffic, and where shipping delays are higher than the river average.

About 50% of barge cargo moves on six major corridors—such as the Mississippi River, Illinois River, and the Ohio River—which represent 16% of the total waterway miles. Many inland waterway segments have little or no freight traffic. The distribution of funding toward more essential facilities already occurs in USACE's budgeting process, but a standard asset management approach to O&M spending is not fully developed or deployed across all USACE districts, the report says.

Commercial navigation users pay a share of the system's construction costs through a fuel tax. However, those users pay none of the roughly $650 million annual cost of O&M, which is funded through general tax revenues. A system more reliant on user payments would provide needed revenue for maintenance and promote economic efficiency while being more consistent with the federal posture toward other freight transportation modes that are more dependent on user fees, the report says.

"Debates about funding for the inland waterways system and the roles of the federal government and users in paying for the system deserve renewed attention in light of shrinking federal budgets, declining appropriations, and increasing maintenance needs for its infrastructure," says committee chair Chris Hendrickson, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "Without a funding strategy that emphasizes system preservation, maintenance projects may continue to be deferred, which would result in further deterioration and in a less cost-effective and less reliable system."

To contact the author of this article, email GlobalSpeceditors@globalspec.com