United States Inland Waterways Infrastructure Assessment

Political Context

The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)50% of funding is allocated through the U.S. General Fund and 50% is made through the Inland Waterways trust fund.

Build a Better Act of 2021

Provisions were made in March of 2022 to allocate 2.7 billion dollars from this legislation to modernize port and river infrastructure.

Our Project

Considering the modern political environment, we thought it would be useful to develop a basic means of analyzing the system to determine suitability for investment in locks, throughput of port infrastructure, measurement of potential blockages along the system of locks, and where major metropolitan regions along waterway corridors are.

Data

The data that was required was river location data, lock location, port data, and data relating to cities. The first dataset that we worked with was from the USACE navigation and civil works dataset (NDC dataset). This data set contained information pertaining to the infrastructure in the U.S. waterway system as well as waterway corridors. For the purposes of our project we collected data for locks ports and some waterway network locations. The rest of the waterways data which we required was taken from the National Oceanic and Atmostpheric Administration and Natural Earth. And finally the point location of cities was taken from Esri Maps and Data.

Cities

We identified a total of 51 cities along the waterways which we analyzed. These cities were classified as cities with populations of 100,000 or greater withing 10 miles of a waterway. The ten biggest cities include Chicago, Houston, Nashville, Memphis, Portland, Sacramento, Kansas City, Omaha, Tulsa, and Minneapolis.

The average size of all these cities by population is 330,729. The smallest city is the City of Davenport, Iowa. And the total population of these major metropolitan regions is 16,867,185.

Locks Assessment Data

The first thing that we identified in our analysis were the gaps in lock data. The Army Corps of Engineers manages a total of 236 locks. Of those 236 locks, we started with 234 from the USACE dataset. After manually entering vessel traffic, scheduled and unscheduled service hours, we realized 184 out of the 234 locks in the dataset had enough data to model properly with our weighted sum model. Essentially, there were 50 locks that did not have enough data to be analyzed properly. The right side of this map's swipe with the black point feature visualizes the locks lacking data to properly model and vice versa.

Lock Assessment Investment Suitability

We developed a weighted sum model to attempt to model suitability for lock investment. The results from that model were rather interesting. The regions most densely populated with lock infrastructure are along the northern section of the Mississippi River; the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway; the Lower Mississippi and Red Rivers in the State of Louisiana; The Northern Mississippi; The Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers; the Arkansas River, Alleghany River, Ohio River, Kentucky Rivers, and the Fox River in Wisconsin.

Most of the systems are maintained pretty well. The locks most suitable for investment mostly occur along the Southern Mississippi and Red Rivers in Louisiana. Next would be the locks along the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers. Finally, according to our model, many of the locks along the Columbia and Snake Rivers in the Pacific Northwest appeared to be highly suitable for investment.

Lock Function

We attempted to measure the lock function using regression analysis. Interestingly, blockages did not seem to correlate with large population centers. Most of the potential blockages along the system seem to be along the Lower Mississippi River in the State of Louisiana as well as parts of the Snake River in the Pacific Northwest.