Traffic Generation on the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Waterway

TRAFFIC GENERATION ON THE APALACHICOLACHATTAHOOCHEE -FLINT WATERWAY Burke G. Vanderhill" Rarge transport on American inland waterways has experienced an 80 percent increase in tonnage since World War II, despite a certain tendency to "write off" water transportation in this country. (1) While valued mainly for its low cost service, waterborne traffic is increasingly credited with the introduction of new marketing patterns and facilities and with industrial growth in interior locales. Waterfront development in turn has a multiplier effect, albeit a variable one, upon job opportunities in trade and service activities. (2) Impact of waterway use is particularly significant in rural or lightly urbanized areas. Along many waterways , however, traffic is not responding as expected to improvements introduced to facilitate navigation. (3) Although waterways have been the subject of varied and sophisticated analysis, there is to date no fully satisfactory method for projecting demand for water transportation in an ever-changing economic milieu. (4) Further, waterway improvement is often the result of demand on the part of private interests with political clout. Such work tends to be funded on a project-by-project basis and while it may be integrated into regional transport or development plans, it is rarely cast within a national frame of reference. (5) The Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Waterway is among those developed in recent years. The river system within which the waterway was created drains an area of 19,800 square miles in the states of Alabama , Florida, and Georgia, and stretches from headwaters in the Blue Ridge to the Gulf of Mexico (Figure 1). Columbus, Georgia, and Phénix City, Alabama, at the Fall Line, are twin heads of navigation on the Chattahoochee, 273 river miles from the mouth of the Apalachicola, while Bainbridge, Georgia, 142 miles from the Gulf, is presently the functional limit of navigation on the Flint. The lower 25 miles of the Apalachicola River is subject to tidal influence and within this reach at River Junction six miles above the port of Apalachicola, the A-C-F makes a juncture with the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. The A-C-F Waterway project had the appearance of being carefully justified. Cost-benefit ratios were calculated in 1945 and again in 1956, both sets based upon field surveys of immediate freight potential coupled with analysis of data for production, consumption, and population within *Dr. Vanderhill is professor of geography at Florida State University. This paper was accepted for publication in August 1974. Southeastern Geographer THE APALACHICOLA-CHATTAHOOCHEE-FLINT SYSTEM 1974 Columbus ____________«ORGIA ChatiohooehM FLQ»IO* anama Ci Wolter F 6*0rç* Dam B Lee» Albany O \ Dothan -? CMe Bainbrtdge SEOl(Q Figure 1 the river basin. The first cost-benefit ratios were more favorable than the second, for they antedated the arrival of gas and petroleum products pipelines in the Columbus-Phenix City area. Both reflected the factors of power production, flood control, and recreational possibilities as supporting benefits. Traffic was projected for years 1975 and 2000 through application of a multiplier factor. (6) Apart from the necessity of projecting water transport demand and directions of regional development from the base of existing institutions and patterns, the Corps of Engineers accepted the basic assumption that industries and other enterprises would locate at waterside to take advantage of the unit savings deriving from bulk shipment. (7) As events proved, this assumption was illfounded . The present report, drawn from a decade of inquiry and observation along the A-C-F Waterway, is intended as an objective assessment of initial experimentation with waterborne traffic and waterfront de- Vol. XV, No. 1 velopment and of the problems associated with the use of this water route. HISTORIC USE OF THE RIVER SYSTEM. An Indian route for centuries , the A-C-F system began to assume a new role in 1827 when the initial barge-load of cotton from the upper river area was landed at the port of Apalachicola. (8) A steamboat first reached Columbus in 1828, and after 1830 a fleet of shallow-draft stern-wheelers and auxiliary barges were in service on the rivers. (9) Such traffic was a corollary of the spread of settlement into this part of the South and especially of the introduction of...