A boat built more than five decades ago, one that used to ferry people and cars across Long Island Sound, pulled up to a dock in the Bronx on October 7 and loaded 800 pounds of produce bound for Manhattan. It was running on its original diesel engines and old radar, but it was carrying something new: New York City’s latest attempt to get freight off trucks and onto the water.
The vessel, operated by U.S. Coastal Service, is part of a pilot effort that officials hope will eventually move thousands of freight deliveries away from city streets and onto the city’s waterways, according to Gothamist. The crew loaded a pallet of squash, bananas, bell peppers, cucumbers and eggplants into a 20-foot refrigerated container on deck before the ship cruised down the East River, according to the same report. It had just a 35-minute docking window at the East 34th Street docks before the pallet was transferred onto electric cargo bikes, which completed the delivery.
The October 7 run was the latest demonstration of the model, with food-rescue group Sharing Excess moving rescued produce from the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center to a Manhattan food pantry using both water transport and electric cargo vehicles, according to a release describing the pilot. That shipment traveled aboard U.S. Coastal Service’s Blue Highway 1 to the E. 34th Street ferry terminal, where it was transferred to two Fulpra pedal-assist quad bikes, the release states. The same account describes Blue Highway 1 as running on renewable diesel, which it says cuts greenhouse-gas emissions by roughly 70% compared to conventional diesel.
A Bigger Plan Behind the Boat
The demonstration run is a small piece of a much larger push. The New York City Economic Development Corporation and city Department of Transportation announced the launch of the Blue Highways Action Plan, aiming to move a significant portion of freight deliveries off crowded streets and onto the city’s navigable waterways, according to NYCEDC. The plan covers three service lines — microfreight, containerized freight and bulk freight — and has mapped more than 25 potential activation sites across the city, including old piers, ferry landings and container terminals, per the same agency.
NYCEDC frames the stakes in terms of the city’s 520 miles of waterfront and freight volumes projected to grow 67% through 2045, with the maritime sector expected to support 117,000 jobs citywide by 2035, the agency says. Each maritime trip is expected to replace dozens of truck trips, according to NYCEDC, which also says the initiative is meant to reduce the city’s overreliance on trucks, ease traffic congestion and improve air quality.
Ilana Mayid-Dennis, president of U.S. Coastal Service, said marine freight is a historic part of New York City and that reclaiming the waterfront matters. She said removing diesel-burning trucks from the roads will help reduce harm to South Bronx residents, pointing to a neighborhood already dealing with high levels of asthma, air pollution and road wear, with the goal of cutting vehicle time on roads. Mayid-Dennis envisions waterfront shipping hubs and dozens of electric cargo vessels eventually operating across the city’s waterways, and she said the system could connect with a Blue Highway site to move containerized international produce through New York Harbor to Hunts Point, where it could be transloaded and distributed citywide.
Hunts Point's Former Jail Barge Becomes a Freight Site
Much of this is converging on Hunts Point, where the city plans to turn the site of a former prison barge into a marine freight terminal. The Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center, a decommissioned jail barge, was towed away in 2025, and the city intends to permanently remove it and build a freight hub in its place, according to WorkBoat. A neighboring Con Agg Global facility is expected to divert 1,000 truck trips per month by shipping construction materials like sand, gravel and stone via barge instead of trucks, the outlet reports. WorkBoat also reports that the planned Hunts Point Marine Terminal could remove up to 9,000 truck trips per month from South Bronx streets.
Timelines for the Hunts Point Marine Terminal itself are murkier. WorkBoat has reported the terminal is in a design and planning stage with completion expected by 2027, but a separate WorkBoat account describes the roughly 8-acre terminal as slated to open in the second quarter of 2030, with barge service expected to begin around the same time. Those two timelines have not been reconciled in available reporting.
Separately, NYCEDC is seeking operators and technology partners to launch an all-electric or zero-emissions container-on-barge and tug service connecting the Brooklyn Marine Terminal with the planned Hunts Point terminal, per WorkBoat. The proposed service could carry at least 100 containers per trip, with service potentially beginning around 2030. U.S. Coastal Service hopes hundreds of shipping containers could eventually travel through the city’s waterways as the network scales up.
Conflicting Truck Counts, Shared Goal
Just how many trucks the city is trying to divert depends on which account you read. NYCEDC’s Blue Highways materials state that more than 44,000 trucks cross critical chokepoints like the George Washington and Verrazzano-Narrows bridges each day, while a separate WorkBoat report on the barge-service search cites more than 25,000 trucks per day crossing those same two bridges. The discrepancy hasn’t been explained in available materials, but both figures point to the same underlying congestion problem officials say the waterway plan is meant to ease.
The broader approach isn’t without precedent. The planned system draws partly on European freight models that have already been used locally at construction projects including Governors Island and JFK Airport, according to Norwood News. For now, though, the proof of concept remains a weathered ferry boat threading the East River on a tight dock schedule, carrying a few hundred pounds of vegetables toward a much bigger ambition.
