The American Marine Highway is an underutilized sector of the U.S.A’s Infrastructure.

It consists of 250,000 miles of navigable waterways that operate–as the name suggest–a highway for vessels to transport goods domestically.

The American Marine Highway and its ports and terminals already exist. Our water network, that costs nothing to create and little to maintain, exists. We believe the American Marine Highway system is the 21^st century solution that will help alleviate our infrastructure crisis, our growing gridlock, and help reduce transportation pollution.

The unlimited transportation capacity of the American Marine Highway is being rediscovered. Our natural resources of navigable rivers, lakes, and coasts lines dictated the pattern of the nation’s development and were the highways of choice to move people and goods from colonial times until the middle of the 20^th century.  Today, there is a growing interest in harnessing the unlimited capacity of the American Marine Highway and its elaborate port networks to move more goods for our growing nation and its ever changing dynamic 21^st century economy.

To give our readers an order of magnitude of the existing systems, per the U.S. Coast Guard, there are 360 commercial ports, of which 150 are deep water draft ports.  There is over two billion square feet of terminal storage capacity. And according to the “The Local and Regional Impacts of U.S. Deepwater Ports System, 2007 study, commissioned by the American Association of Port Authorities, our ports and their terminals employ more than 1.3 million direct, indirect, and induced American jobs. That’s a lot of American jobs!!!! And the more we use the American Marine Highway to transport our growing population and goods, the more Americans will be employed to keep the system moving. In fact, we estimate that over the next three decades, employment will double in the marine sector.

The American Marine Highway is populated with extensive port and terminal networks which are the essential on and off ramps that are the foundation for trade on our waters. Our gateway ports and their terminals date back to colonial times and predate the vibrant cities that grew up around them. Today the ports and terminals are still the marshalling points and storage facilities that support successful marine transportation.  Said simply, the infrastructure already exists – we just need to use it.