Container terminals are complex places with machines whose purpose is to load and unload ocean containers for onward delivery. While the concentration of effort and investment is rightly on the “components” within the terminal’s perimeter, many of the challenges and chokepoints facing container terminals are beyond the gates.
A Heimlich Maneuver for a Box Terminal
On September 26th, 2025, dignitaries gathered to celebrate the re-opening of Baltimore’s Howard Street Tunnel. Mark Schmidt, President of Ports America Chesapeake, whose Seagirt Marine Terminal is Baltimore’s principal container terminal noted, “For years, the lack of double-stack rail capability created a bottleneck that limited the port’s full potential. With this transformative project, freight will move faster and farther—connecting Baltimore to the Midwest and strengthening our position in the global supply chain.”
The over $450 million project essentially unblocked the hitherto restricted access of double-stack trains to and from the CSX system and is a game changer for Seagirt and the Port of Baltimore. Although there is still work to be done, the project opens the door for higher TEU volumes. The Port of Baltimore throughput was a record 1.26 million TEUs in 2023 — the year before the Francis Scott Key Bridge allision and collapse blocked full access to the Port for 74 days — with around 97% of the total moving through the Seagirt terminal. Seagirt has a reported throughput capacity of 1.5 million TEUs and can handle linehaul 14,000 TEU class vessels which gives the terminal plenty of room for a “higher volume” of freight.
And now there is a new bridge to be built — a new Francis Scott Key Bridge – which according to the Maryland Transportation Authority (MTA) – the cost will be between $4.3 billion to $5.2 billion with an estimated opening date of 2030. The new costs are considerably higher than the $1.7 billion and $1.9 billion estimated in 2024, but while that might be a sticker price shock, it isn’t surprising for a project of this magnitude. And beyond the normal design parameters of any bridge, in the case of the new Francis Scott Key span, designers must evaluate how to protect the bridge’s supports (the dolphins around the bridge didn’t prevent the Dali strike) with robust collision prevention structures (larger dolphins and island-like defensive structures for example) from collisions not only ships of today’s size but of those from ships well into the future.
A typical 14,000 TEU containership’s air draft is around 197 feet to 230 feet, while the length is about 1,200-feet and the breath is 167 feet with a gross tonnage of approximately 145,000 tons. And the specs on these ships is small in comparison to the over 20,000 TEU containerships operating on routes from Asia to Europe.
The new bridge is in theory to be designed to last a century. So, while a century might be a stretch for designers to estimate, the question is just how big containerships will be sailing under the bridge heading for Seagirt over the next 10-to-20 years? Failure to get the numbers right might lead to the expensive creation of another terminal chokepoint.
Bridges and Boxes
The Francis Scott Key Bridge is just one of a number of spans over waterways that impact the future of box terminals.
In August, Eugene Seroka, Executive Director, Port of Los Angeles said in an interview with the AJOT [AJOT.com, August 7, Port of LA’s Thomas Bridge shut down…By Stas Margaronis] the Vincent Thomas Bridge, a major artery for trucking at the Port of Los Angeles, would be shut down for an “estimate is 16 to 24 months” so that the California Department of Transportation (CDOT) could repave the bridge’s roadbed. Although the repaving is necessary to keep the bridge safe “for the 54,000 vehicles that transit it every day,” Seroka said, “I would advocate that while we have this opportunity, and the spotlight is on the bridge; a time has already been designated for that resurfacing. Let’s take a deeper look at what it would require to raise the bridge or have a bigger bridge in place …. we’ve already got a project out there that allows us to take a pause and see what we would need to do to have a higher bridge in place…” Seroka makes the point that this presents an “opportunity” to address an issue, that as he says possibly “Those terminals will be obsolete if we don’t address the height of this bridge.”
Seroka is right. The terminals could be rendered “obsolete” if the bridge doesn’t have sufficient air draft (clearance) for the next generation of containerships. Conversely, raising the bridge’s clearance could give the terminals an advantage over competitors, just look at what happened in the Port of New York/New Jersey.
Back in 2016, the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey (PANYNJ) and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) completed a project that began in 1999 to deepen the harbor channels to 50-feet. And in 2019, PANYNJ coupled the project with the raising of the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge to a navigational height clearance of 215-feet. With the added bridge clearance and deepening, the port began seeing calls of larger box ships — a number of them over 16,000 TEUs. And as Beth Ann Rooney, Port Director for PANYNJ noted at the annual State of the Port presentation, “Nearly 70% of the containerized cargo that’s coming into the Port of New York and New Jersey today is coming in on a ship that could not fit under the Bayonne Bridge six years ago.”
And without the added bridge clearance, would APM Terminals have this year inked a 33-year lease extension and agreed to invest $500 million in their 350-acre terminal in the Port of NY/NJ? Maybe. But with the raised bridge clearance the decision was much easier — a potentiality that Seroka is pondering right now.
US Terminal Trends
Although the San Pedro Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and other West Coast Ports still remain the primary gateways for containerships into North America, an incremental shift in container volumes to the East Coast and Gulf ports has been underway for nearly a decade… and may be accelerating as tariffs, geo-economic trends and geo-political issues are greasing the skids.
Among those analysts that have confidence in veracity of this trend is John McCown, who publishes a monthly report called the US Top 10 Ports, that tracks in great detail US port performance. When asked during the recent annual CONECT Transportation & Trade Conference, the question “is there a long-term trend of [US] container volumes gravitating to one coast versus another — West Coast versus the East Coast,” McCown quickly replied “Yes, and the driving factor there is really just cost economics.” McCown points out, “There are many reasons why a higher percentage of container volumes are gradually shifting to the East Coast but undoubtedly the shifting of sourcing to Southeast Asia and India, which has accelerated with the de-coupling from China.”
And while the numbers favor the West Coast ports — the Port of Los Angeles is the largest in North America and even with the tariffs has a chance to eclipse the 10 million TEU mark, not too much off the 2021 highwater throughput of 10.7 million TEUs — the cost-centric logic behind the shift in TEUs volumes is clear. “If you look at the mainland of the US, 75% of the population is closer to the East or Gulf coast. And so that translates into water miles [that] are geometrically less costly than land miles, whether it’s rail or truck… Certainly, California has massive population centers, but for the freight that’s going to go all the way, or most of the way across the country, even with the very cost-efficient double stack, that cost can’t compare to moving it all water.”
A Deeper Dive into the US-China Trade War
Another related trend impacting terminals not only in North America but around the world is the US-China decoupling in trade. US-China trade, prior to the heating up of the trade war with the tariff blitz and other Trump administration actions, was the wellspring of TEU growth. Alan Murphy, the founder and CEO of Singapore-based Sea-Intelligence, a container shipping analysis and data firm, pointed out just how important the US-China trade was to not only the box business but the overall economic well-being of the world. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck it looked like container shipping would dive even deeper than it did during the Great Recession [in 2008-2009 around 9% of the global TEU volume disappeared], but it didn’t happen. For reasons as Murphy explained at the CONECT conference, “…Something happened. God bless the American consumer. You saved the rest of us, because for some reason you refuse to save your money, you spent it.” According to Murphy, American consumers usually spend 68% of their disposable income on services but with the lockdown this number dropped to 61% and the other seven percent shifted into goods, which kept the global supply chain afloat. However, the impact of the tariffs has slowed the flow of North American imports and exports while globally the world is still moving greater numbers of TEUs. One expression of this sea-change is for the first time-ever, China had a larger trade surplus with Europe than with the US.
As Murphy explains of the changing global trade patterns, “We are living now in a bifurcated world. Where the rest of the world is actually growing quite strong. Growth rates of six to 8% [which] is as I said… strong growth in container shipping, and it’s at the expense of North America.”
