“Nothing is made in any one place any more. Things are made everywhere today. The pieces and parts move through the world transportation grid, and as they move they get assembled in what’s called subassemblies, shipped on to other subassemblies, finally getting to the point of the final factory and the final product.” ~Michael Gallis The benefits of concentrating the connected modes of transportation in one place, so obvious in hindsight, were not under consideration in the haphazard development of cities in the United States. Ties among the different kinds of infrastructure are so little recognized that they are not even all overseen by the same congressional committees. But in Charlotte, the collaboration of public and private civic leaders seized the opportunity years before the Panama Canal expansion was planned and maintained the effort as part of a broader economic strategy ready to remake the city after the recession. “There is an intermodal yard being built at the airport, but it’s not about an intermodal yard at the airport,” says Gallis, whose remembers the airport’s dreary resemblance to a bus station when he first arrived in the early 1970s. “There has been an incredible transformation.
“Now we see it not as an airport any more, but we call it a multimodal hub. It’s going to become something different, something we’re not used to seeing.” The intermodal facility offers new opportunities for export as well as import and distribution. Emptied containers need to be returned for refill, and local goods, including farm, forest and factory products, could fill them. “The backhaul business will provide an opportunity,” Saunders says. “The ship’s here. It’s got to go back. Things you could not otherwise send cost effectively become cost-efficient because you’ve got the containers. There’s a new big market to open up.” Gallis points out that the intermodal center also will make Charlotte attractive to the international supply chain.
PANAMAX AND POST-PANAMAX VESSELS The “Panamax” size limit for ships has been in effect since the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 and describes the maximum size of vessel that is able to pass through the canal’s lock chambers. Ships larger than the Panamax sizes are called post-Panamax or super-Panamax. The canal now accepts vessels that draft to 39.5 feet, but it will take vessels that draft to 50 feet. Ships now can be no larger than 965 feet long and 106 feet wide, but the new lane will take ships up to 1,200 feet long and 160 feet wide. With the completion of the Panama Canal Expansion Project, canal management has published the “New Panamax” sizes that will be in effect when the third lane of locks, larger than the current two, are operational in 2014. Post-Panamax vessels move approximately 27 percent of the world’s containerized maritime shipments.
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greatercharlottebiz.com | october 2012