Traverse City Research Paper

Traverse City Michigan is a small town in Northern Michigan, with a port, an airport, a rail system running through it, and lots of roads. While there is most likely the most freight carried through trucking on the roads, I would like to talk about the shipping industry. Because Traverse City is located with access to the Lake Michigan there is obviously a great deal of materials shipped over the water. Water is the cheapest, besides pipeline, of the 5 major transportation modes; if a city is located on the water it makes sense to take advantage of it. According to the Michigan Department of Transportation in 2009 the port of Traverse City transported somewhere between 100,000 and 900,000 tons of freight. This is not as much as other ports

It is a well-known problem in Michigan, the ships, which travel around in other bodies of water and collect mollusks and species that are not normally found in the Great Lakes, they then end up in Lake Michigan and cause a lot of problems in the ecosystem. This causes a lot of people to be against water transportation systems that involves ships from outside the Great Lakes. Future challenges to this transportation system are mostly environmentally based. People in Northern Michigan are very passionate about our Great Lakes; anything that puts them at risk is tough to get away with. But there are other challenges they could face in the future. If the railways in Traverse City start transporting materials again, it could challenge water transport for business. Rail is not quite as cheap as water, but it is faster. In conclusion, water transport is one of the main modes of transportation for materials in Traverse City, MI but it is in trouble because of pollution and other threats to the Great Lakes. Because it is such a large part of the logistics picture for Michigan I think they will find a way to minimize the negatives and make this process as efficient as