When the Key Bridge fell in March 2024, it created two simultaneous disruptions: On land, traffic on I-695 had to reroute through already-congested tunnels and alternate corridors. On water, debris in the Patapsco River temporarily blocked large vessels from reaching the Port of Baltimore.
The Port of Baltimore is a national hub for vehicles and roll-on/roll-off (Ro/Ro) cargo, handling hundreds of thousands of cars and light trucks each year and billions of dollars in international trade. In the months immediately after the collapse, container volumes, auto exports, and Ro/Ro tonnage all dropped sharply compared with the same period the previous year, and economic losses were estimated in the tens of millions of dollars per day as ships were rerouted.
Research Approach
Rather than looking only at what happened during the closure, this research asks a forward-looking question: how do we design ports and logistics systems so that when the next “Key Bridge moment” comes, supply chains can adapt quickly?
At the core of the study is a question about governance and investment. Ports rely on coordination between government agencies, public port authorities, and private terminal operators, with each institution having different goals, budgets, and appetites for risk. The study uses an analytical model to explore how those players interact when deciding where to put limited resources, comparing outcomes under fully public governance, fully private governance, and the kind of hybrid public–private partnership that Baltimore actually operates under.
The model distinguishes between two broad types of investment. Preventive investments — structural hardening, redundancy, and protective infrastructure — reduce the chance or severity of rare, catastrophic events like a major bridge or channel closure. Adaptive investments — operational improvements and technologies — help handle the more frequent disruptions that ports face regularly: congestion, storms, labor issues, and routine incidents. The central question is what mix of the two makes the most sense when budgets are constrained and no single actor controls the whole system.
In Baltimore, public and private institutions coordinate through different incentive structures to share and mitigate risk. This approach model proves to be durable compared to alternative models.
Baltimore as a Case Study
The Port of Baltimore operates under a hybrid governance model that makes it an ideal setting for studying these questions:
- The Maryland Port Administration (MPA), a public agency, owns and manages several terminals
- Ports America Chesapeake (PAC), a private company, operates the Seagirt Marine Terminal through a long-term public–private partnership
During and after the Key Bridge incident, public and private partners coordinated rerouting and recovery operations, and other East Coast ports helped absorb diverted cargo. PAC invested in additional equipment, which allowed Seagirt reach record truck volumes by early 2025 in what was a remarkably quick rebound for trade activity.
At the same time, the State of Maryland and federal partners allocated new funding for decarbonization and electrification projects at the port, signaling continued public investment in long-term capacity. This mix of public leadership and private initiative is exactly the kind of dynamic the research seeks to model and understand.
Key Findings & Implications
The analysis yields several practical insights for logistics and supply chain resilience, each with direct implications for how agencies and operators plan ahead.
Governance structure matters more than total spending.
Under a fixed budget, the theoretical maximum resilience is comparable whether a port is publicly run, privately run, or hybrid. But in practice, incentives and cost-sharing rules determine what actually gets built. A well-designed hybrid model tends to produce the most balanced outcomes, because public and private actors share costs in ways that support both resilience and competitiveness. Thus, public–private partnerships should be designed with resilience as an explicit goal, not just throughput or revenue. Policymakers should furthermore build expectations for both preventive and adaptive spending into concession agreements.
Prevention and adaptation must be planned together
Ports like Baltimore have historically made strong adaptive investments by expanding capacity, improving operations, strengthening everyday security. These help with frequent, moderate disruptions. But the Key Bridge collapse illustrates that rare, extreme events remain a weak point when preventive investments are underfunded. A system can look robust under normal conditions yet remain fragile to low-probability, high-impact shocks. Agencies should test “what-if” scenarios to evaluate whether their investment mix covers the full spectrum of risk.
Smart subsidies can unlock private investment
Well-targeted government subsidies can encourage terminal operators to invest in resilience measures that benefit the broader region. Poorly designed subsidies or complicated coordination requirements can backfire, crowding out private effort or creating duplication. Policymakers should instead direct public funds toward measures that private actors are unlikely to fund on their own, and reward operators that demonstrate coordinated, forward-looking strategies.
Resilience planning must extend beyond any single facility
The Port of Baltimore connects to truck corridors, rail yards, and distribution centers across the Mid-Atlantic. A disruption at one node ripples outward. Resilience strategies need to work at the network level.
