Waterways: Overbuilt, Fragile, and Misunderstood in the Infrastructure Landscape
(Source: Unsplash/Justin Wilkens.)
Waterways are misunderstood, but probably not for the reason you’re thinking. The system serves a niche in a niche of the economy, is expensive and overbuilt, is fundamentally fragile, has done tremendous damage to some of the most biologically productive habitats in the U.S., and the people who benefit from it pay little of its cost. Waterways are seen as cost-efficient and environmentally friendly transportation that is central to our nation’s economy. They are none of those. Instead, they are another example of our inability to distinguish worthwhile infrastructure investments from boondoggles. Our rivers provide value far beyond the space they offer to move bulk goods. They support diverse and abundant life; offer mental, physical, and spiritual benefits; provide space for recreation; and inspire wonder. We need to overhaul the way we manage rivers so we maximize all the value they provide, and the residents of river towns can take the lead.
Who Waterways Serve
A public survey a few years ago found that the most common image respondents had of the Mississippi River wasn’t kids on rafts or bald eagles, but barges. Barges have an outsized role in modern perceptions of the Mississippi, a byproduct more of persistent marketing than the actual importance of barges in our economy.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, nearly 2 trillion tons of freight moved around the U.S. in 2020. About 4% of that moved primarily on a waterway (a navigable river, canal, or intracoastal channel), which represented 1.3% of the total value of freight moved. Pipelines, in contrast, moved 19.3% of total tons, or 5.5% of the total value.
In 2021, barges carried upwards of 300 million tons of cargo on the Mississippi River, but nearly 80% of the total cargo shipped on the Mississippi moved below St. Louis only. Upriver of St. Louis, corn and soybeans destined for export markets accounted for nearly half of the 63 million tons of cargo moved on barges. Petroleum products accounted for another quarter of tons shipped on the Mississippi, but again, most of that moved on the lower river. Coal accounted for a third of the 159 million tons of cargo shipped on the Ohio River, and 5% of the cargo on the Mississippi. Gravel, sand, concrete, and chemicals (many for fertilizers) accounted for most of the rest of goods shipped on the Mississippi.
While we often hear about how important waterways are to farmers, they primarily serve farmers who grow corn and soybeans for export. None of the vendors at my farmers market rely on waterways to get their products to me. Moreover, trucks and trains, not barges, bring oranges from Florida, almonds from California, and avocados from Mexico to my local grocery store.
And not all grain for export gets shipped on public waterways. The further afield a farm is from a major waterway, the more likely a farmer is to rely on private railroads. Public waterways not only serve the niche of farmers who grow corn and soybeans for export, they serve a subset of those farmers who live close enough to a waterway to take advantage of them.
An Overbuilt System
Congress authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—the Congressionally designated river managers—to maintain a nine-foot-deep channel on waterways, which is the minimum barges need to float. Before the dams were built, some rivers, including the upper Mississippi, were often too shallow for barges by late summer.
Still, even with the dams in place, March through June are the busiest months for shipping grains on the Mississippi. Shipments peak again from October into January, but barges move a lot less grain during those months than they do in spring. We’ve built a system geared to minimize the risks of low water, but even with the stable water levels impounded by the dams, the busiest periods are still when rivers would be high enough for barges without dams.
The Corps has greatly altered over 20 rivers for navigation using a mix of locks and dams, dredging, and stabilizing riverbanks. Still, the overwhelming majority of goods shipped on waterways goes down just four of them: the Mississippi, Illinois, and Ohio Rivers and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. The other waterways, despite optimistic projections and a lot of public money, range from merely underperforming to money pits.
Flawed Projections
The Corps is required to conduct cost-benefit analyses for navigation projects, and like their counterparts in the highway construction world, these analyses are often founded on fantastical assumptions about growth in demand. In the late 1960s, for example, the Corps justified replacing Lock and Dam 26 at Alton, Illinois, based on cost-benefit models that assumed steady growth in demand. Since opening in 1989, actual use of the nearly $1 billion lock has lagged far below those projections. In 2017, 63 million tons of cargo passed through the lock, not the 140-ish million tons predicted. Had the Corps’ projections been more accurate, though, the project’s costs would have exceeded its benefits. The Alton lock project is more the rule than the exception.
The Corps built the Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway, for example, to provide a navigation channel linking the Tennessee River to the Gulf of Mexico. The Corps justified the $2 billion project by projecting 27 million tons of cargo would move on the waterway in its first year. Instead, the waterway attracted just 1.7 million tons of traffic in 1984, the year it opened. Twenty-seven years later, just 6.1 million tons of cargo moved on the Tennessee–Tombigbee.
The Corps’ projections for the Missouri River have been even farther off. In the 1940s, the Corps predicted that a navigation-friendly Missouri River would attract 12 million tons of cargo annually. After decades of managing the Missouri for navigation, just 5 million tons of cargo moved on the Missouri River in 2021 (a typical year). About all we move on the Missouri River is sand and gravel, and half of that, journalist Michael Grunwald wrote in 2001, travels a mile or less.
On the upper Mississippi today, tows can push up to 15 barges, but they must split them up to get through a standard 600-foot lock, slowing the process of continuing downriver. Congress authorized expansion of these locks but never allocated money. The momentum for lock expansion took a big hit in the late 1990s when the Corps’ own analyses determined that expanding the locks didn’t pass their cost-benefit tests. A whistleblower later revealed that leadership in the Corps, unhappy with the report, pressured him to change the numbers so that lock expansion would look more beneficial.
We continue to dump public money into waterways even as the volume of goods shipped on waterways has been unchanged since the 1980s on some waterways and has declined on others, including the Mississippi. I suspect the decline is one reason why waterway advocates have been talking lately about moving containers on barges. A few years back, I attended a session at a conference in which advocates for container-on-barge shipping said it could make economic sense as long as—and I’m paraphrasing here—the federal government continued to pay for maintaining waterways, paid for adapting port infrastructure to handle containers, and prevented railroads from undercutting barge rates. Maybe conditions have improved since then.
As our economy continues to shift away from fossil fuels, the volume of goods shipped on waterways is likely to decline even more. We won’t, after all, need barges to move wind or sunshine. And if there’s a drop in demand for the corn and soybeans we export to feed livestock in other countries, we’ll have a lot of empty barges sitting around. We built waterways on precarious assumptions. And the system itself is fundamentally fragile.
Ice, Floods, Drought, and Geography
Shipping by river has always had inherent disadvantages, which is why cargo shipments on rivers essentially dried up after the Civil War. Just try to get a barge from Kansas City to Denver, for example. Shipping on a river is also far more efficient when a boat moves with the current rather than against it. At the Port of St. Louis, about three-quarters of the 31 million tons that touched the port in 2019 went downriver. Coal, road salt, chemical fertilizers, and empty barges were the most common goods going upriver.
In spite of our engineering, ice still shuts down parts of the system in winter (including much of the Upper Mississippi), and periods of high or low water can slow or stop barges altogether. On waterways with locks, the failure of a single lock strands all the traffic above it. Trains and trucks can usually find alternate routes to take when faced with a closure, but a loaded barge can’t jump over land to detour to another waterway.
Shipping on waterways is also slow—very slow—which means it’s not an option for moving most products. This is a disadvantage in an era when we can order a digital recorder from Amazon and have it at our door the same day.
A System Heavily Dependent on Public Money
The niche of businesses that use waterways have a good deal, though. The federal government collects a diesel fuel tax from shipping companies that goes into the Inland Waterways Trust Fund (IWTF). Money in the IWTF only funds half the cost of new construction or rehabilitation that exceeds $100 million. In 2020, the tax generated $112 million, of which $50 million was allocated for construction projects in that fiscal year. Many projects, though, get exempted from cost sharing.
When, for example, construction costs for the Olmsted Lock on the Ohio River more than tripled—the original budget of $775 million ballooned to $3 billion—Congress removed the cost sharing requirement, so it wouldn’t drain the whole IWTF. The recently announced $732 million expansion of Lock 25 at Winfield, Missouri, and a planned $97 million fish ladder upriver at Lock and Dam 22 are being paid for entirely with money from the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
The IWTF therefore only funds a portion of major construction projects. Public money covers everything else—the entire cost of annual operations, maintenance of waterways (the Corps spends about $1.5 billion a year just on dredging), and the other half of those big construction projects.
Public subsidies of waterways sometimes seem boundless. In 2021, the Iowa Transportation Commission allocated $2 million to build a place for barges to park while they wait to pass through a lock near Davenport. In 2018, when siltation at the end of the river reduced the depth of the 45-foot channel to 42 feet, the Corps found $205 million in emergency funds to dredge three feet of sediment.
Advocates for this model of shipping on waterways argue that it is a cheap way to move goods, but the cost of shipping on waterways is artificially cheap because someone else is paying for the basic structures that make it possible. And this publicly subsidized system competes directly with privately owned railroads for the same business.
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Dean Klinkenberg, the Mississippi Valley Traveler, is a freelance writer who has an incurable obsession with the Mississippi River. He is the author of the Mississippi Valley Traveler guides and the Frank Dodge mystery series. His work has appeared in publications such as Smithsonian Magazine, The National, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His next book The Wild Mississippi: A State-By-State Guide to the River's Natural Wonders will be published in 2024.
