Le port de Baltimore dans la compétition interportuaire aux États-Unis : entre déclin et stratégie de niche

The port of Baltimore, which used to be one of most active in the United States, has seen his relative importance shrink in the last decades. Even if his location has the advantage of a closer proximity with inland markets of the industrial Middle West, its position upstream in Cheapeake Bay appears quite disadvantageous in comparison with Norfolk/Hampton News, a port complex which, on the contrary, has immediate access to oceanic waters. The decline of Baltimore can be explained by the strategies of shipping companies, which tend to concentrate traffic on major load centers, and the difficult access to a port far from the Atlantic, but also by the effects of American railroad and trucking deregulations in the early 1980s. Access from the West is limited by tunnels, hindering the development in Baltimore of continental double-stack container landbridge traffic from West coast ports. In view of the high growth of Western and Southeastern ports, Baltimore has specialized on two main markets : Appalachian coal exports, and international ro-ro for the export/import of automobiles. Abandoned port facilities have been converted into touristic areas with an emphasis on the heritage of an industrial port. But the image projected is more and more disconnected from the realities of the Maryland harbor. This case study illustrates the general phenomenon of the increasing port hierarchy within maritime ranges.