Making a Road Less Traveled

Hampton Boulevard offers a winding, often scenic path from Norfolk, Va., to Portsmouth, taking just six miles to go from one port terminal to another through bustling neighborhoods that include a hospital, a large university and intersections with tree-lined residential streets.

On a day with light traffic, and some breaks for the stop lights, it may take 15 minutes to get from the Norfolk International Terminal to the Portsmouth Marine Terminal, a trip quick enough to allow local harbor truckers several turns a day.
But those six miles may be the toughest the Virginia Port Authority faces as it looks to expand Norfolk’s efficiency and its reach.

Local officials have imposed limits on truck traffic on the four-lane urban street, seeking to push trucks to interstate highways as the drayage operators haul sea containers to and from warehouses and rail terminals.

That can turn the transit between terminals in the busy Hampton Roads Bay area at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay into a half-day trip, a trip that can be as frustrating for truckers as it is for the port authority.

That’s because although the Port of Norfolk has a deep channel and some of the clearest, fastest access to open water among ports on the East Coast, VPA officials are among the growing legion of port operators who believe the most important path to a greater share of freight traffic is over land.

Although most national attention on port trucking has been on the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and the environmental efforts in California, ports nationwide are paying greater attention to the problems and the potential in drayage operations.

The focus of the VPA is case in point.

The Port of Norfolk expects a big boost when work is completed next year on the Heartland Corridor, the project that will allow Norfolk Southern to carry double-stack trains the 1,000 miles from Norfolk to Columbus, Ohio, in just a day. But the VPA also hopes for big gains from CSX’s $700 million National Gateway project, which will connect with a CSX line at Portsmouth linked to the railroad’s expanding corridor in the Northeast.

Port officials have looked at several alternatives to Hampton Boulevard and the region’s congested maze of highways, including a barge operation that would haul boxes the short distance on the Elizabeth River between Norfolk and Portsmouth. The heavy investment required made more sense when diesel fuel was closer to $5 a gallon, VPA spokesman Joe Harris said.
In the meantime, the VPA is trying to keep containers moving smoothly with its port-run Hampton Road Chassis Pool, an operation that makes some 9,500 chassis available for a fee of $6.50 a day to about 600 truckers that work the ports.

Harris said the truckers can keep the chassis for several days, and renew the checkout of the same equipment every week, the sort of longer-term use truckers are more interested in as local regulations make each trip longer.