That's one small step for boats.
The city's "blue highway" dreams of maritime freight transportation took another step forward on Tuesday with the news that a floating freight facility will open at the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center in a matter of weeks.
Bronx-based company Con Agg Global will open the new dock with a focus on distributing food from the massive south Bronx market to elsewhere in the five boroughs via the city's many waterways, the company said in a joint announcement with the city's Economic Development Corporation.
Replacing truck trips with boat trips — and cargo bikes — is a key feature of the city's urgent push to shift cargo trips out of big trucks. The new freight dock at Hunts Point will take one thousand trucks per month off the road in the south Bronx once it's operational, EDC officials said.
The initial structure will be a temporary piece of infrastructure while EDC and Council Member Rafael Salamanca sort out an underwater lease for a larger pair of modular barges, one for food and one for construction materials. In the mean time, boats with construction materials will drop off loads at the temporary barge.
"We're going to bring in a big behemoth of a temporary barge with a massive crane on it that will allow us to come in, offload our products, put them on land without touching anything because the arm is so long," said Con Agg CEO Paul Granito.
Some 25 percent of the city's produce passes through Hunts Point. City officials expect the new dock to take on "more and more" of that produce.
"The goal is, over time, to move more and more of this food out of Hunts Point not by truck, but by water with e-cargo trikes rolling on to either barges that are pulled by tug boats, or fast boats that might look more like an NYC Ferry, but without the seats," said EDC President and CEO Andrew Kimball.
Ramping up food distribution out of Hunts Point will also require building out more places elsewhere for ships to dock, Kimball said.
"In terms of creating the marketplace where do they land? And that really goes to the other real estate equation," Kimball told reporters at Tuesday's announcement.
"To receive those goods in Lower Manhattan it means over time investing in places like Pier 92 on the west side of Manhattan," he said. "It means the massive project at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal. It means converting our ferry stops for not just passengers, but also landings, particularly of fast boats with e-cargo bikes on them. There are multiple components to this."
Those projects are a long time in the offing, as Streetsblog has reported. As demand for delivery grows, experts warn that the larger effort to shift some of the city's freight from trucks to waterways is still moving entirely too slowly.
The Downtown Skyport freight dock, for example, is not supposed to be in business until 2029 for instance.
Trucks move nearly 90 percent of all goods in New York City — well above the national average of 70 percent, according to EDC.
