South Knox Bubba posts on three articles in yesterday’s Knoxville News Sentinel regarding traffic on the Tennessee River. I find this blurb in the cover story a bit ironic:
The type of goods transported into Knoxville varies from the primary products moved along the Tennessee River as a whole.
The primary No. 1 product for Knoxville is asphalt at about 50 percent of the traffic or 250,000 tons a year. It is followed by salt at 20 percent of the traffic or 100,000 tons. The remainder of the Knoxville traffic is coke and steel.
“Knoxville can’t live without its road projects, so we feed those road projects,” Nelson said, explaining the transportation of asphalt.
Yep. We need the river so we can continue building more roads! It’s a good thing river freight is so much cheaper than road traffic–makes hauling the asphalt more economical for the road builders.
Yeah, and there’s also a lot of coal brought in by barge for TVA. Hard to promote that, but better utilization of waterways (and railways) might help get some trucks off the road.