United States Marine Highway Program

Waterborne transport has been important to Americans since the settling of Jamestown, when travel between plantation was as likely to be by boat as by road. Until World War II, Texas oil was transported to the East Coast by tanker, when it was replaced by the Big Inch pipeline. Coastwise transport on the first container ship, the in 1958, from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas, ignited an industry. The United States Marine Highway Program is MARAD's effort to stimulate low cost, green barges in places where they have not been employed. ==Approach to funding==

The United States studied Europe's model of Short Sea Shipping, and has taken a different approach to how it will encourage business and shipping lines to return to the nation's intracoastal waterways. These grants are not intended to 'subsidize' shipping industries, but to purchase equipment needed to expand existing marine highway services, or to create new services. This is intended to offset start-up or expansion costs for marine highway services. Since 2010, Congress has appropriated $76.6 million for the US Marine Highway Grant Program. In addition, the Bi-Partisan Infrastructure Law Public Law 117-58 added an additional $25 million in appropriated funding. These funds have been used primarily to purchase material handling equipment and to purchase or build barges along the inland waterways. With the expansion into Canada and Mexico, Congress ensured the funds would not be spent in those countries. With intermodal transit standardized in the U.S., transferring goods with different modes of transport does not require longshoremen or terminal workers to re-pack material. This leads to a lower chance of product loss or damage. Many ports have refined the transferring of a container off a truck and onto a container barge or ship into an art form and can accomplish it in under a minute. ==Potential drawbacks==

Environmental For years the United States has had regulations concerning the handling of ballast water for transcontinental shipping. The goal was to minimize the cross contamination of invasive marine species into virgin waters. Major shipping hubs such as the Port of Long Beach, Port of New York and New Jersey, and the Port of Houston have already been contaminated for generations. Short Sea shipping will use these ports like spokes of a wheel to smaller, easier to access ports, and there are concerns of 'secondary contamination' to these smaller estuaries. Trucking companies The Teamsters Union, as of May 2013 has yet to publish a stance on federal backing of this third contender to many shipping markets, MARAD and maritime shipping leaders believe they are helping the Teamsters by moving freight out of areas with low Teamster-to-Cargo Ratios, and into ports where the ratio is closer to 1:1 or better. They also believe that the Marine Highway can better handle the nation's north-south transit, though there are no east-west sailing corridors and those will always be land-side transits. Cabotage laws The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, prohibits foreign ships from carrying cargo or passengers between U.S. ports, a practice called cabotage. Ships that wish to trade between U.S. ports must be built and flagged in the U.S. and have at least three-fourths of their crew-members U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Large container ships that already stop at several ports along the U.S. coasts could move containers between those ports at low cost but for the Jones Act. ==Expanding into the future==

The United States Navy is considering the United States Marine Highway as an opportunity to breathe life into their aging Military Sealift Command (MSC) Fleet. Currently, if a national crisis were to take place, the U.S. government would need to rely heavily on foreign support to transport its Armed Forces, much like during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The US Navy entered into a Memorandum of Agreement with MARAD to develop a U.S. built and U.S. crewed dual-use vessel to sail in peacetime in trade and to provide a sealift capability during times of National Emergency. ==List of routes==

Most routes along The United States Marine Highway are numbered after a landside highway that it runs parallel to, typically an Interstate Highway. ==See also==