Planning for Container Growth Along the Houston Ship Channel and Other Texas Seaports, Project Summary

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Planning for Container Growth Along the Houston Ship Channel and Other Texas Seaports, Project Summary

R. Harrison / N. Hutson / P. Siegesmund / J. West / M. Bomba

This project assessed whether Texas transportation entities can continue to rely on traditional highway and rail planning to accommodate the projected growth of intermodal containers entering Gulf ports. Port of Houston Authority (POHA) container volumes have expanded to 1.5 million twenty foot equivalent units (TEU) in 2005. POHA will commission a new container terminal at Bayport in late 2006 which will handle more than 3 million TEU at full build-out around 2012. Some U.S. port terminals are now served by distinct corridors, most notably at Los Angeles and Long Beach where the Alameda corridor now carries around 65 container unit trains a day. Research objectives were to: forecast container growth at Texas ports, identify port container needs, evaluate highway links to those ports, and finally analyze current rail-port connections to identify intermodal transportation investment opportunities. Corridors take time to plan, fund, and implement, so a fundamental question was: does Texas need any Alameda-type railway corridors.