Assessment of Short-Sea Shipping Options for Domestic Applications

This report has been prepared for Dr. Paul Rispin, Office of Naval Research (ONR), as part of the research conducted by the Volpe Center in collaboration with the Center for Commercial Deployment of Transportation Technologies (CCDoTT). The report, originally submitted in a Draft form on June 30, 2009, was intended to build on the multi-year research conducted at the Volpe Center and the CCDoTT on Agile Port Systems and High-Speed Ship technologies to assess the feasibility of dual-use deployment of the vessels. The project activities included the demonstration of the feasibility of domestic container feeder ports for a transportation and logistics system based on a generic short sea vessel focusing on the West Coast operations for both domestic and international traffic.