It may be — just may be — that after more than 25 years of backing and forthing between Woods Hole, Martha’s Vineyard, New Bedford and the Steamship Authority, the idea of some freight service to the Vineyard coming through New Bedford (bypassing Falmouth) could become a reality.

The Steamship Authority currently has before it a proposal by 41 North Offshore LLC, a New Bedford-based tug and barge company, to initiate service this coming summer. It would not carry passengers, or passenger cars, but it would carry freight trucks.

41 North Offshore has a proven track record of providing the same service from New Bedford to Nantucket, something they fell into in 2022 when UPS forgot to make their annual SSA reservations for the trucks they need to get to that island every day. 41 North Offshore filled their need, and found there were other customers as well.

They worked out acceptable docking arrangements at the Steamship Wharf, and recently were given an extension of their license by the SSA, to 2026.

Now they propose to provide the same service to the Vineyard. Neither service would require any financial subsidy from the SSA, a fact of critical importance.

Back in the year 2000, freight service to the Vineyard from New Bedford was actually tried. The Steamship Authority, New Bedford and the Vineyard were all reluctant, each for different reasons, but they eventually agreed to try out a six month freight service by a contracted private company, Hvide Marine, at a cost to the Authority of $1,484,500.

Two trips a day every weekday from May through October brought a total of 1,929 vehicles to the Island. In those six months, 289 shippers used the service. UPS was the biggest customer, along with smaller truckers, hazardous cargo tank trucks and construction and landscaping material.

The shippers were charged the same rates as from Woods Hole, and in the end they utilized only 50 per cent of the available deck space. The operating loss to the Steamship Authority was an astounding $680 per truck — a total net loss of $1,291,000, 25 years ago, when a million dollars was still a lot of money. For that reason, the contract was not renewed.

Unlike that pilot program, the current proposal would require no Steamship Authority subsidy. It would certainly be welcome in Woods Hole, where New Bedford freight service has been a demand for decades.

But it is running into some resistance from the Vineyard town of Tisbury, where the town manager is singing the “why were we not consulted” song, demanding a traffic study on the town’s Five Corners intersection, and even a traffic study on the harbor and, he says, “we have significant concerns” about, of course, safety.

He shouldn’t be worried. All the traffic this new service would bring is truck traffic that supplies the Vineyard’s needs, and all of it would have come to the Vineyard’s roads anyway, except it would have come through Woods Hole. And a harbor like Vineyard Haven’s, which hosted thousands of ships a year in the days of sail, can certainly cope with one tug and barge a day.

In fact, for well over half a century the harbor has coped with a tug and barge operation — Ralph Packer’s Tisbury Towing company. Mr. Packer has been the sole operator barging fuel and bulk products from New Bedford to the Island for decades, and it is possible he would prefer not to see any competition.

For most of those decades Mr. Packer has also been suggesting he could develop a New Bedford freight operation with the Steamship Authority. In all that time nothing has ever come of it. It is time for someone who can and will.

For the first time in its existence, the Steamship Authority has the possibility of a proven and experienced private freight operation from New Bedford, taking some of the trucks that so aggravate Woods Hole road residents off that road, and doing it with no financial subsidy from the Steamship Authority.

It may not be everything, but it is a start, and the Steamship Authority should seize it.

Eric Turkington was the state representative for the Barnstable, Dukes and Nantucket District from 1989 to 2009. He lives in Falmouth.