Every four years the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) produces Infrastructure Report to assess the nation’s competitiveness, budget needed to maintain it, the hidden costs of deterioration, how much the current renovation costs and how much it would cost to do it in ten years and the risks incurred if no action is taken.
The aspects they take into account are: the capacity to meet demand, current status, available funds or financing, future needs, maintenance and operations, security, resilience and innovation.
The committee examined different kinds of infrastructure such as air, bridges, coastal state, dams, drinking water, energy, levees, ports, roads, schools, solid waste, protection from natural disasters, public transport and liquid waste. The good news is that in the 2021 report, Florida has good ratings in the different aspects, excelling especially in bridges, ports and solid waste management (the state is a pioneer in waste management in the union).
Florida currently has fifteen ports generating 900,000 direct jobs and revenues of $117.6 billion in 2021. The report highlights the fact that ports do not have serious financing problems and have made efforts to keep up to date in capacity to receive new ships, improving efficiency between the intermodal transport connection.
Although the Port of Miami, known as the cruise capital of the world, already offers one of the best experiences for tourists, in 2018 Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd in partnership with Miami-Dade Country opened Terminal A, the largest in the USA. But the projects don’t just stop there. During the last five years, the port has been dredged by 16 meters as well as maintenance to the connection they have with the rail network and the PortMiami Tunnel, which serves as a connection for cars.
One of the nicknames that the city of Miami has is the door of the Americas, and its port proves it. In the United States it ranks tenth among the ten most important. It is the fastest growing, with more than 1,300,000 TEUS handled (load capacity of a twenty-foot container); Holder of the deepest canal and the only one in the American Union equipped to receive Neo-Panamax ships (the new width of the Panama Canal).
The goods that the port receives the most are fruits, vegetables, textiles, clothing, food, paper, metals, stones, clay tiles, construction material, industrial equipment, electronic equipment, computers, cars, trucks and buses.
The port handles five types of cargo operations:
1. Roll-on/roll-off (Ro/Ro), for container operations.
2. Lift-in/take-off (Lo/Lo), for container operations
3. Mixed-use bulk cargo operations
4. Exports/Imports of vehicles
5. Super Post-Panamax, which handle ships with twenty-two containers wide, nine on deck and eleven containers below.
The most outstanding aspect of the port is the reception of passengers, being the most important and busiest in the world. With the new terminal inaugurated, around five million passengers are expected each year, after the pandemic has been completely overcome.
If you compare the cargo figures handled by the Port of Miami with the rest of the US ports, they are very low. Los Angeles exceeds nine million TEUS annually, thanks to trade relations with China and the entire Pacific or New York that handles about five. But large investments have been made to bring the port up to world standards.
Not surprisingly, logistics services are, along with financial services, the fastest growing line within Florida’s economy. Time demonstrates the financial strength of the state, as well as the possibility of diversifying its assets and renting in dollars.
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