By Peter A. Buxbaum, AJOTUnited Liquors is an importer of alcoholic beverages headquartered in West Bridgewater, MA, distributing its products largely in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The port of Boston is the closest and arguably most convenient port from which to distribute United Liquors’ products. And yet, for the last several years, the vast majority of the company’s imports have been offloaded in the port of New York and New Jersey and trucked, barged, or railed to the Boston area. To be fair, the choice of port is not United Liquors’ call in most cases: shipping is normally controlled by its sellers. But these facts underscore a larger point: that fewer imports destined for New England move through the port of Boston and more are moving through the port of New York and New Jersey. It’s gotten to the point that New England might be viewed as a major portion of NYNJ’s trade catchment. This fact, in turn, raises yet more issues, such as the abuse the roadway’s are taking form the increase in truck traffic between New York and New England and the scarcity of rail and barge services and infrastructure to service these important commercial routes. The deployment by the big steamship steamship lines of larger vessels means that larger offloading volumes, more extensive landside infrastructures, and deeper channel depths are required to justify a call at Boston. In recent years, the number of liner carriers calling on Boston has been whittled down to three: the CKYH (Cosco, K Line, Yang Ming, Hanjin) alliance, Mediterranean Shipping Company, and CMA-CGM. Barge services accounted for 6 percent of the tonnage moving through Boston’s Conley terminal in 2009, 8 percent in 2008. “Part of the problem is that only a few steamship lines call on the port of Boston,” said Arthur Zikos, United Liquors’ purchasing manager. “For wine and spirits, MSC is only line with a direct call. “We’d like to see more lines calling Boston,” he added, “but there are still restrictions. They need to dredge to accommodate bigger vessels. That is one of the big limitations.” Vessels scheduled for Boston will sometimes bypass the port if there is insufficient volume to be offloaded. “A Cosco ship recently bypassed Boston,” noted Kevin Mack, vice president for business development at Columbia Coastal Transport, a provider of barge services between New York and New England. “Presumably the Boston cargo was offloaded in New Jersey and transferred to Boston.” The same phenomenon has its flip side for trucking services that link the two regions. “One-third of our volume covers Connecticut, Vermont, Maine and upstate New York,” said Jeffrey Alan Bader, president of Golden Carriers, a Newark-based trucking company who also heads up the Association of Bi-State Motor Carriers. While trucks provide the lion’s share of connecting services between the port of New York and New Jersey and the New England region, rail and trucking services are also attempting to carve out their own market share. The current economic situation is working to their detriment. CSX provides a daily service between the ExpressRail terminal in Port Elizabeth, N.J., and the facilities of Intransit Container in Worcester, MA. “This service competes against trucks going to the region,” said Steve Cotrone, the president of Intransit Container, a terminal operator and intermodal service provider. When times were good Intransit Container handled around 300 containers per week inbound from New Jersey. Now that trade volumes have dropped off generally, that number is down to only 100 per week. “One thing that has happened is that because of the economy truck are plentiful and trucking rates are low,” said Cotrone, explaining the falloff in his company’s business. “Improving the infrastructure will make our service more competitive.” CSX is improving tunnels in New Jersey and is performing high-cube clearance work in Massachusetts, Cotrone noted. “When that work is done in a year or so, and with the huge expansion of Expres