Tampa’s cruise business has been permanently damaged because the bridge spanning the entrance of the Tampa Bay lacks the adequate height for the new mega-cruise ships popular with tourists. Baltimore is in a similar situation with a local tunnel, as reported by the Washington Post.
Nobody in 1895 would have thought that a difference of just two feet might one day influence more than 40,000 jobs in the 21st century.
The final spike in the transcontinental railroad had been hammered down just 26 years earlier, and with railroad companies in hot competition, a tunnel was built under the heart of Baltimore to serve one of them.
Now, 117 years later, the tunnel’s too short for the taller modern freight trains. Like the throat of an hourglass, it chokes commerce along the East Coast and to Midwest markets…
The Howard Street Tunnel was an inadequate solution to a 19th-century problem. It became a serious impediment to 20th-century progress but seemed too expensive to fix. Now it demands a multimillion-dollar Band-Aid if the Port of Baltimore is to keep pace with the demands of the 21st-century global economy.
Without that quick fix, the city could suffer a devastating blow to one of the few vibrant engines that keep its economy afloat.