California Is Choking on Traffic and One Potential Solution Is Effectively Illegal

A century-old law, the Jones Act, is keeping coastal shipping off the map—while traffic, costs, and emissions keep rising on land.

Erik Olsen
Mar 26, 2026

President Trump recently issued a temporary waiver of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, allowing oil to be moved on foreign-flagged vessels between US ports in an effort to ease supply constraints and lower prices. The move put a spotlight back on this century-old law that quietly shapes how goods move around the United States. Then on Sunday, 60 Minutes aired a segment examining the Jones Act itself and the decline of the U.S. maritime industry it was designed to protect. The picture it painted was not of a thriving, competitive shipbuilding sector, but of one that has been in steady decline for decades, particularly compared to the massive shipbuilding industries of places like China, Japan, and South Korea.

The topic is familiar to me. A few years ago, I reported on the Jones Act for Quartz and asked important questions about how the act impacts California. I’d like to readdress that question here because the issues I wrote about then are just as important now, if not more so.

The Jones Act is protectionist. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. It was designed to shield U.S. shipbuilders and maritime operators from foreign competition, reserving domestic shipping for American-built and American-crewed vessels in the name of national security and economic self-reliance. Sadly, as 60 Minutes pointed out clearly, it has not done its job very well.

In California, the Jones Act effectively prevents the state from experimenting with something it seems perfectly built for: a blue highway running just offshore, moving goods between ports instead of forcing so much of it onto already traffic-clogged roads. And with congestion worsening, infrastructure under strain, and growing pressure to cut carbon emissions, it is worth looking again at how California could begin to solve several huge problems. Because if this century-old policy were rethought, or even partially reformed, California could open the door to a new era of coastal shipping and transportation innovation.

Continued
https://open.substack.com/pub/californiacurated/p/california-is-choking-on-traffic