There is a category of infrastructure decision that quietly sets a ceiling on a port for the rest of its working life.

Fixed-height crossings over port access channels are a common example, and they exist in maritime cities all over the world. A bridge is built for sound reasons — a city needs the crossing, the traffic case is overwhelming, the engineering is excellent. The clearance is set by the requirements of the day. And from that moment the maximum size of vessel able to reach the terminals upstream is fixed permanently, because there is rarely a future in which anyone raises a primary cross-water bridge.

It is worth being precise about how these constraints come about. Decisions of this kind are sometimes not made by the port. They can be taken by state and municipal authorities, for road and transport reasons, in processes where nobody is asked to consider vessel cascading or top end size changes forty years out, and frequently before the scale of modern shipping was foreseeable. The port inherits the consequence, perhaps without ever having had a say in the cause.

That is what I mean by a negative legacy: a decision that builds a limit into a port which cannot afterwards be removed. Not a mistake that just costs money — a mistake that costs options. Ports can live with these for generations, and they are the most expensive problem our industry faces.

I see them on almost every masterplanning commission we take on. And I think the problem is getting worse.

The legacies nobody decided

Not every negative legacy comes from a bad decision. Some of the hardest ones come from no decision at all.

Historic city ports were sited exactly where trade required them. Then they generated the trade that grew the cities, and the cities grew back over them. The Port of New York and New Jersey is the clearest example of the pattern, but it is not unusual — it is the normal fate of any port successful enough to build a city around itself.

The encroachment takes things away in a fairly predictable order. Land that was once the natural expansion route becomes residential and never comes back. Road and rail corridors that would need widening become politically impossible to widen. Operating hours come under pressure as noise complaints arrive from housing that was built, knowingly, next to a working port.

Nobody chose any of this. There is no decision to point at and no one to blame. But the effect on the port is identical to a bad decision: options that existed a generation ago are gone, and they are not recoverable.

The responses vary considerably by port and by study. Densification of what you already hold. Reclamation and the creation of new land. Both buy time, sometimes decades of it. But the honest conclusion is occasionally that neither is enough, and the port has to move.

That is what our Port Future Study concluded for New Zealand: that Auckland would eventually need to relocate its port operations elsewhere. It is not a comfortable finding to deliver, and it is not one anybody commissions hoping to hear. It is, however, what the evidence supported.

It is also worth noting what kind of consultant reaches that conclusion. A firm positioned to design the terminal expansion does not generally recommend that the port leave for instance.

The doorstop problem

Most port masterplans fail in a specific and unglamorous way. They do not get rejected. They get published, presented, welcomed — and then they sit on a shelf, because within a few years they no longer describe the world the port is operating in.

A port authority will spend a serious sum on a document that is obsolete long before it should be. That is the common failure, and it is worth being precise about the cause: these plans do not fail because the future was unknowable. They fail because they were written as though the future were knowable, and then written down as a single answer.

A plan that describes one future is a prediction. A plan that describes how a port changes shape as different futures arrive is a framework. The first becomes a doorstop. The second keeps earning its cost for decades.

Why the wrong people are doing this work

Strategic port planning bears very little resemblance to other forms of engineering. It does not even much resemble operational port planning — a discipline we work in ourselves, and one that shares almost none of the same drivers or technical needs.

It requires something engineering consultancies are not generally organised to produce: creative, inventive, leftfield thinking about what a region’s trade might become and what infrastructure would serve it. I have watched excellent civil engineers, and capable operational port planners, attempt to plan a country’s future port requirements. It is not a matter of effort or intelligence. They simply cannot do it, because it is a different skill.

You would not ask a painter to design your house. Both work on buildings. They are not the same job.

And yet port authorities routinely appoint large brand-name engineering firms who dabble in maritime work, and receive something close to worthless in return. The question I hear at the end of those processes, more often than anyone in my industry would like to admit, is some version of: we knew all this already, and after months of work we are no closer to understanding what we should do.

The conflict nobody names

There are numerous reasons this keeps happening. One of them has nothing to do with competence.

Planning work is relatively small. The design and delivery that follows a masterplan is typically large, and the consultancy that wins the plan can be better placed to win the engineering that flows from it.

I will let readers draw their own conclusions about what that does to the advice.

A strategic port plan should be capable of concluding that the port needs to build far less than it expected, in a different place, or not at all. It should be able to recommend the option that drastically reduces cost and risk — including where that option eliminates the very project a planner might otherwise have hoped to design. That requires genuine neutrality, and neutrality is difficult to sustain when your firm’s next commission depends on the answer.

Where I have been wrong

I should be straight about the limits of what longer term strategic port planning can achieve, including in my own work over the years.

COVID broke the maritime and freight supply chain at a scale nobody in port planning had modelled. Containers were displaced en masse. Empty management became the central operational problem almost overnight. And some of our planning at the time was inadequately structured to absorb that change. We went back and reassessed container terminal layouts and latent capacity in light of what we had just watched happen.

I am not going to pretend that was foreseeable. It was not, by anyone. But it taught us something specific about where flexibility needed to sit in a plan, and our work is better for it.

It also produced something the industry does not talk about enough: supply chains have genuinely adapted. They absorb shocks better now than they did in 2019. That adaptation is real, and good port planners helped bring it about. The detail of short-term disruption at the moment remains tricky to forecast. The capacity to withstand disruption is not — that can be designed in.

The horizon is shrinking, and that is the wrong response

We are one of very few consultancies in the world to have delivered hundred-year outlook planning. Fifty-year plans have long been common. Recently the trend has moved decisively toward thirty.

I understand why. After the last few years, planning half a century ahead feels like an indulgence. Clients who once re-engaged us every five years to tweak our planning outlooks for them now come back at three.

I understand it, but I think it is the wrong conclusion.

The shortening horizon carries an assumption inside it: that a port plan cannot usefully last longer than a few years, so why pretend otherwise. That assumption is false, and it is expensive. A properly built plan is not a forecast that decays — it is a framework and a roadmap that continues to give direction precisely because it never depended on one version of the future being right.

The irony is that the more volatile the world becomes, the more valuable long-horizon planning is. The infrastructure being committed to now will still be there in fifty years, whether or not anyone planned for fifty years. A bridge does not become less permanent because the future was uncertain when it was built.

What good planning actually does

I am not going to set out how we build flexibility into our port planning. It is our method, it is hard-won, and it is genuinely different on every project — which is itself an argument against the current push to make port planning more generic and process-driven. I understand the appeal of standardisation. I think, applied here, it produces exactly the doorstops described above.

But the principle is simple enough to state.

Good strategic port planning is the discipline of reading potential future disruptive change, and then building into the port the ability to change the infrastructure it has — without starting again. Ports often cannot afford to start again. And if a port must move, the strategic planner must ensure it does not face the same negative legacies in its new home. That capacity has to be designed in at the planning stage, where it is comparatively cheap, to avoid the far greater cost of retrofitting it afterwards — assuming a retrofit is possible at all.

That is the whole of it. Everything else is execution.

Why it matters

If a port masterplan is wrong, the port suffers, and the city or region it serves suffers with it, potentially for decades. Ports are not standalone assets. They are the trading position of everything behind them.

That is why the question is almost never how do we accommodate one more ship or how do we save a million on this berth. The question worth asking is how this port transforms the trading position of the region it serves, and how that can be done cost-effectively, and to the benefit of society and the environment as well as the client.

Ports that ask the small question get small answers — and, in time, a set of limits nobody can lift and a doorstop strategy that they can’t use.

 

Glen Curry is Founder and Managing Director of Black Quay Consulting. He has delivered some of the world’s largest strategic port plans, including the Port of New York & New Jersey 30-Year Masterplan, the South Australian Ports 50-Year Masterplan, the New Zealand North Island Port Future Study and aspects of the Westport Masterplan in Western Australia.