It's weird to me that thousands of people work at the docks or with the trucks, and likely understand these problems quite well, but only after a silicon valley guy rented a boat to take a look and tweeted about it did it come to attention of the larger world.
Is it just that these other people don't want to "rock the boat" at their place of employment?
If Ryan's tweets had anything to do with this, my respect for him just went through the roof (and my disappointment with people actually tasked with figuring this out diminished proportionally).
Wait what? They are/were only stacking 2 containers high? When I google on how another big port is doing it, or example Rotterdam, I get a 5 year old video of 5 high stacks and a fully automated system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60Fz5gZRX9c.
I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions in this thread.
>It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam
This seems like definitely not the real bottleneck. You have to ask yourself, "why is there no space to put new containers" and the answer is (probably) "well we don't have enough trucks to move the ones we have off the docks". Why don't you have enough trucks? This is where the root cause for the bottleneck probably splits. I'm speculating here, but we either don't have enough physical trucks (I doubt this) or we don't have enough labor to load the containers on the trucks and actually drive them off the dock.
Which is probably the most important question: why don't you have enough labor? I can venture a guess[1].
>Port truckers are typically independent contractors, without the benefits and protections of unionized transport sectors or even major companies with shipping divisions, like Amazon.com Inc. Their jobs require them to line up for hours to pick up cargo, and they’re paid only when they move it. [Emphasis mine]
>“The port truck driver, for decades now, has basically been the slack adjuster in the whole system,” said Steve Viscelli, an economic sociologist with the University of Pennsylvania who studies labor markets and supply chains. The entire system, he said, is built around free labor from truck drivers as they wait for containers.
Cut checks to these people, and get those containers off the docks. I feel like we're living through some Black Mirror version of The Wire Season 2.
Owner-operators are actually not completely allowed in California. And trucks for the most part must be very new to comply with California emissions requirements. The "labor shortage" is in part aggravated by these regulations.
>Danielle Inman, a spokesperson for the National Retail Foundation, which has lobbied for California to overturn AB 5, told PolitiFact that the state’s regulations on trucking impact the availability of drivers and trucks
>(AB 5) makes it nearly impossible for truck drivers to be independent contractors
>At the time AB 5 passed, industry experts said that some owner-operators sought work elsewhere. Some fleets, too, chose to stop doing business with owner-operators in California.
And
>To meet the current clean air regulations, the state Department of Motor Vehicles blocks new registrations of any oversized vehicles older than 2011 — or those with engines manufactured before 2010.
>Some trucking companies have used the regulations to pressure drivers to buy newer rigs, and some in the industry have claimed that, while not necessarily the cause of the backlog, this kind of policy doesn't help.
This is addressed later in the thread. Normally, many trucks haul containers to their destination, unload the container, then return it empty to the port, pull it off the trailer, and haul away another loaded container. But the port is too full to accept empty containers, and zoning laws mean truck companies have already maxed out their own container holding areas. This leaves enormous numbers of truck trailers sitting idle, waiting for somewhere to put the empties they're holding before they can pick up more goods to haul.
No, this is not the likely root cause for reasons another commenter notes.
But I want to point something out: ports and logistics infrastructure are the most unionized, protected industries that exist. The truckers may not be, but the rest of the value chain is, often resulting in huge inefficiencies.
You note something like truckers waiting in lines for hours but only getting paid when they move the goods. 1) they are waiting in line for hours because unions strictly control the amount of labor in ports (these manual labor jobs often pay low-mid six figures) and 2) driver’s simply factor these types of costs and many others into their prices. Owner operators aren’t paid hourly, like millions of other business owners.
This is absolutely not where the current issues lie.
Doesn’t the thread say that there is nowhere to unload containers to, even if there was labor? That seems like what’s causing the truck shortage - it’s not a truck shortage, it’s an empty truck shortage.
The truck driver is a part of the solution, but not to any of the primary issues right now.
Just saying “give truck drivers more compensation and better working conditions” doesn’t fix the fact that their destinations aren’t open 24/7 so keeping the ports open for an extra shift doesn’t do much right now.
It doesn’t fix the fact that the truck driver depends on someone else to take their container and/or chassis at the end of a delivery and many delivery depots can’t or won’t right now.
And the biggest asymmetry right now has nothing directly to do with truck drivers. There is a shortage of empty containers in East Asia and a glut in the US. Container ships aren’t waiting in the US ports to load up with empty containers, so thyme are exacerbating the issue.
Trucks are plentiful. Trailer empty chassis are not. Your assumption that truck labor is in short supply is a derivative of your misunderstanding of the difference between the trucks and the chassis.
The truck is the thing with the Diesel engine, the cab, and the truck driver. It can detach the trailer and pick up a new trailer.
The thread clearly identifies the “empty chassis” (the trailer with wheels that is capable of mounting a standard container on top) as one of the scarce items.
>we either don't have enough physical trucks (I doubt this)
There was a reddit thread in the truckers group around a year back which literally said this: there are not enough physical trucks since trucks have to been maintained and the spare parts for it are not making their way across border fast enough. This meant that owners have to buy new trucks to compensate for their broken down trucks and leading to escalation of costs which means they expect the same person to work 2x to make up for it.
It's in the Twitter thread, to do a port pickup you have to wait days at the port because they're so slow, (because of the traffic jam of containers), truckers are choosing to do pickups elsewhere that doesn't involve waiting for two days to get their load on.
They're paid by the load, so sitting idle is a non option.
Every available chassis and inch of yard space is filled with empty containers. Maybe the labor deficit is in the production of exportable goods that would turn the empty containers into full containers on their way out of the docks.
There's an ongoing world wide (minus some regions) container shortage going on at the same time.
It feels like everyone is trying real hard to come up with solutions that just continue the status quo of having all of our goods produced in China.
Just 20-25 years ago we were still making a lot of things in the US. But the American worker, and economy, was sold out to cheap, high-polluting, IP-stealing, yes-lets-ship-it-2000-miles-instead-of-making-it-in-the-US Chinese labor and manufacturing at the benefit of the CCP but everyone else’s expense.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. This wasn’t even a direct supply chain disruption and it’s hitting us hard. Imagine if we ever had one, and there’s no evidence to suggest we won’t again. We’re dependent on… China of all places for everything?
Why can’t we focus our brainstorming sessions on bringing manufacturing back to the USA? Why is this not a major talking point? Americans have been polled and across the aisle people prefer made in the USA.
Let the CCP take care of its own people. It certainly thinks it’s system is the right way.
It’s madness and it’s sad. Every corporation and politician that had a hand in this ought to be ashamed. Every media outlet that ignores it ought to be ashamed too.
because we live in a globalised world. your phone would cost 10x what it costs now if you moved production to the US. that would mean lots of people without phones, so a much smaller economy. no one wants that.
> Americans have been polled
ah, polls :)
> across the aisle people prefer made in the USA
as a European, i have always associated American made with low quality, cheaply made, bad taste and expensive. American products are to be avoided at all times. this has been the case for decades and decades, before the move to China. at least now even American companies realised this and moved production to far superior Chinese manufacturers.
We still make things in the US. Manufacturing revenue has been consistently increasing. However manufacturing as a share of GDP has fallen as other sectors grew faster. And employment has fallen due to automation and process improvements.
Agree. Almost all the discourse I see on this topic is really just a band-aid for what are actually much deeper and systemic problems with global supply chains that are just too damn optimized for JIT and cost-reduction. You can find lots of ink spilled over "MBAs" and "shareholder" or "managerial" capitalism, but functionally in order to fix this we actually have to reorder how industry is situated in the United States.
If there ever was a direct supply chain disruption (intentional or not), the US would be in a much worse spot than we are right now. Everything from semiconductors to nuts and bolts would be a problem (some more than others). There isn't a single issue more important to national security right now.
This was an odd read after this Ed Zitron piece[1] which included a tweet[2] mentioning how truckers aren’t paid when waiting in line to load up only when they are actually moving something are they paid.
I’m going to hypothesize that there’s an enormous and possibly unfair labor requirement for moving these containers so the ships can be unloaded. As long as companies involved with these logistics are optimizing for profit bottleneck improvements won’t significantly change.
I wouldn't say it's weird -- it seems like you understood what he was saying and he misspoke. Clearly he was trying to indicate that he believed that something negative was increasing. While I agree this isn't what a negative feedback loop is, I can see how saying this is a positive feedback loop of slowdowns (an undesirable negative effect) might feel like the wrong thing to say.
Does this person actually know what the problem is? For example see https://news.yahoo.com/lazy-crane-operators-making-250-20010.... The symptom might be not enough space for containers, but the root cause could be something a few degrees removed, or a combination of things.
This person is the CEO of FlexPort, a startup that has been watching the efficiencies of the ports and the transport industry that interfaces with them slow to a crawl for months now. He has been tweeting out the size of the parking lot of ships outside of LA/LB port complex for months.
I think he has a pretty good understanding of the issues at least one or two degrees removed, but I think he is also just trying to unblock the critical path (the large cranes at the ports).
The other issues like “fully loaded cargo trains in North Dakota blocking the tracks because they can’t unload” need to be solved by others.
I feel like it'd be pretty easy to pinpoint the problem with data.
Historical rates of arriving containers to the port, leaving the port, time spent at the port, time spent in yards, number of drivers, number of trucks, etc.
High level, throughput was lost somewhere, or there's more volume, or maybe both.
RE Railroads: This is much harder than it seems. Most of the railroads are also stuck with thousands of intermodal platforms that have loaded containers they can’t unload, or empty containers they can’t reposition.
Trains are stacked up outside intermodal terminals. UP has miles of them outside chicago. There are no ways to get them off trains and it snarls the system even further.
If we need to get containers off trains, we need to get to them and unload. The trip to Dallas isn’t the issue, instead we need to focus on shifting empty platforms to where they’re needed.
There are no empties in the ports because all the spots to put containers are filled with full ones. In order to get empties back into the ports and onto ships you need to do three things.
1. Get full containers out of ports to make room for empties
2. Bring empties back to port and queue them up
3. Unload a bunch of fulls and reload a bunch of empties onto every ship that comes into port
Right now there's no room to store empties do they're being stored on trailers. Which means there are no trailers to unload full containers onto. So nothing is being unloaded. Deadlock.
There is a lack of empty containers in Asia and a glut in the US. There are all sorts of constraints in the US like how high a stack is allowed to be (presumably for safety or sightly reasons). There are too many containers in the US on chassis so there is a shortage of empty chassis available to take to ports. Distribution centers are reporting that truck drivers are dropping off trucks overnight and blocking their loading docks. There are reports that loaded cargo trains are unable to load so they are just blocking critical tracks.
The Twitter thread is from the CEO of FlexPort which is a startup trying to make ports and trust transport more efficient. He is pointing out critical paths in the port nodes of the supply chain graph, but the root causes are many and not necessarily all within his visibility.
This has had me thinking all day about situations and industries where we all assume the “experts” have it “figured out”.
I don’t think these people are stupid, there’s just this huge combination of junk that stacks up that nobody fully understands over time.
It’s a lot like a really large, old codebases. Nobody dares to look under the covers and change anything out of fear of it breaking. What it takes is an outside who doesn’t know any better to start poking and prodding at it to see what it does. In this case Ryan effectively ran a profiler on the Long Beach port, a “decades old codebase”, and found a hotspot that was created by a deadlock between the local government and the yards.
What other physical world situations can you think of what would benefit from an outside running a “profiler” against it?
> He’s not allowed by the city of Long Beach zoning code to store empty containers more than 2 high in his truck yard. If he violates this code they’ll shut down his yard altogether.
Anyone here surprised? The little things add up, multiply this code by the hundreds of others and you have a supply shortage.
It’s not a million little government regulations that is causing the majority of the supply chain kinks.
China was the only country working full speed after the Wuhan lockdown for about a year. The entire world bought masses of PPG and ventilators in addition to our normal plastic consumerism widgets. China sent tons of full containers to the rest of the world but those containers haven’t returned to China.
Everything else is a symptom of some local issue due to a region or industry being host to a disease outbreak or being host to a supply/demand mismatch with either containers or chassis.
Even that distribution lot would not need containers stacked above 2 high if the distribution channels downstream of it were not similarly overloaded.
> What about a temporary, emergency suspension of the Jones Act for select flagged vessels?
The Jones Act applies to shipping between US ports, which isn’t the issue, and suspending the Jones Act would allow more ships on internal runs, but the problem is that we have too little port capacity for import runs, so it solves something that is, in a couple different dimensions, completely the wrong problem.
> It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam.
The author makes this claim without proof. The circumstances may be consistent with the explanation, but maybe others are as well. Also, the source of the claim is not clear. Did he glean all of this information from the boat captain, or someone else?
The problem is that the claim is central to the entire thread and the proposed solution.
If the root cause is wrong, then allowing containers to pile up in yards 6-deep could cause yet another bottleneck - a lack of containers to return back on ships, for example. This could happen, for example, if yard computer systems were never designed for this kind of use and records start going to paper.
This article reports that the port has processed record numbers of ships:
> In June, the Los Angeles port became the first in the western hemisphere to process 10m container units in a 12‑month period. The Long Beach port will likely process more than 9m container units this year, exceeding last year’s record of 8.1m units, the most in the port’s 110-year history.
Pointing out a problem, being ignored and then someone with some clout pointing it out resulting in the problem being fixed is sadly relatable. It's very depressing that these kinds of inefficiencies scale up to national supply chain levels.
Buttigieg should have been on that boat. But, as has become a custom lately, he's MIA, just like VP is MIA at the border. Not the worst outcome though - he could also be actively harmful like, say, Mayorkas.
People should be able to take family leave, it is the responsibility of the organization and his “manager” to make sure the job is getting done while they’re on leave.
This is mostly being amplified by failed California regulation (CARB 20) which unfortunately was enforced starting 2020. The rule limited old trucks from being registered by the DMV to reduce emissions. CA policies now reveal themselves to be a hindrance to the nation, it used to be its own bubble.
Since more goods are being shipped to people on a one off basis, there is more demand for all of the resources needed to do this, from boats, to containers, to warehouses.
When you start to see slow-downs in international shipping, there become large incentives to do silly things, like stockpile supply in warehouses, so all of the warehouses fill up, and then all of the container yards fill up, and then all of the container ships have to wait, exacerbating the problem.
On top of all of this, there is a huge shortage of truck drivers, because it sucks to drive a truck for a living.
What can we do about all of this? Expand the number of containers we can store? Seems like an unlikely fix. If you have a clogged pipe, expanding the size of the funnel feeding it doesn't solve the problem.
Why not put a price on the clog itself? If it cost an exponential rate to store containers full of stuff at ports I think the stockpiling would quickly subside, wouldn't it?
There's some good stuff in here, but also some bad ideas. The bad ones:
- Bring the military and National Guard container chassis to relieve the ports. That works, unless there's a situation where the military or National Guard need them, in which case it could be catastrophic.
- Force railroads to haul to this one particular new site. First, I kind of bristle at the word "force". That's not how it works in a free country. Second, there is no unused facility available that has the rail bandwidth to handle the traffic level that he's talking about. Third, the containers were intended to go to Dallas (the example he used), not to this new site 100 miles from LA. How and when do they get from there to Dallas?
Which of the two chief executives tagged in this Twitter thread is supposed to have the legal authority to unilaterally overrule Long Beach’s zoning ordinances? Surely it isn’t newsom, but I bet Biden has even less authority.
This is not a judgment on the merit of the idea bc the zoning rule seems dumb but what’s the point of proposing a “solution” which it isn’t clear either man can actually implement?
The thread proposed five solutions. Only the first[0] (which is also the one implemented) is changing a local zoning ordinance. The second[1] was to use the national guard (controlled by the governor) and the US military (controlled by the president), and the third[2] was to establish a holding zone further inland on government land.
[+] [-] graton|4 years ago|reply
https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757...
[+] [-] drcode|4 years ago|reply
Is it just that these other people don't want to "rock the boat" at their place of employment?
[+] [-] aerosmile|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thesimp|4 years ago|reply
What's going on in Long Beach?
[+] [-] jliptzin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remarkEon|4 years ago|reply
>It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam
This seems like definitely not the real bottleneck. You have to ask yourself, "why is there no space to put new containers" and the answer is (probably) "well we don't have enough trucks to move the ones we have off the docks". Why don't you have enough trucks? This is where the root cause for the bottleneck probably splits. I'm speculating here, but we either don't have enough physical trucks (I doubt this) or we don't have enough labor to load the containers on the trucks and actually drive them off the dock.
Which is probably the most important question: why don't you have enough labor? I can venture a guess[1].
>Port truckers are typically independent contractors, without the benefits and protections of unionized transport sectors or even major companies with shipping divisions, like Amazon.com Inc. Their jobs require them to line up for hours to pick up cargo, and they’re paid only when they move it. [Emphasis mine]
>“The port truck driver, for decades now, has basically been the slack adjuster in the whole system,” said Steve Viscelli, an economic sociologist with the University of Pennsylvania who studies labor markets and supply chains. The entire system, he said, is built around free labor from truck drivers as they wait for containers.
Cut checks to these people, and get those containers off the docks. I feel like we're living through some Black Mirror version of The Wire Season 2.
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/biden-tac...
Edit: added the larger context for the Bloomberg article quote
[+] [-] hammock|4 years ago|reply
>Danielle Inman, a spokesperson for the National Retail Foundation, which has lobbied for California to overturn AB 5, told PolitiFact that the state’s regulations on trucking impact the availability of drivers and trucks
>(AB 5) makes it nearly impossible for truck drivers to be independent contractors
>At the time AB 5 passed, industry experts said that some owner-operators sought work elsewhere. Some fleets, too, chose to stop doing business with owner-operators in California.
And
>To meet the current clean air regulations, the state Department of Motor Vehicles blocks new registrations of any oversized vehicles older than 2011 — or those with engines manufactured before 2010.
>Some trucking companies have used the regulations to pressure drivers to buy newer rigs, and some in the industry have claimed that, while not necessarily the cause of the backlog, this kind of policy doesn't help.
[+] [-] spiffytech|4 years ago|reply
This is addressed later in the thread. Normally, many trucks haul containers to their destination, unload the container, then return it empty to the port, pull it off the trailer, and haul away another loaded container. But the port is too full to accept empty containers, and zoning laws mean truck companies have already maxed out their own container holding areas. This leaves enormous numbers of truck trailers sitting idle, waiting for somewhere to put the empties they're holding before they can pick up more goods to haul.
[+] [-] qeternity|4 years ago|reply
But I want to point something out: ports and logistics infrastructure are the most unionized, protected industries that exist. The truckers may not be, but the rest of the value chain is, often resulting in huge inefficiencies.
You note something like truckers waiting in lines for hours but only getting paid when they move the goods. 1) they are waiting in line for hours because unions strictly control the amount of labor in ports (these manual labor jobs often pay low-mid six figures) and 2) driver’s simply factor these types of costs and many others into their prices. Owner operators aren’t paid hourly, like millions of other business owners.
This is absolutely not where the current issues lie.
[+] [-] edmundsauto|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thephyber|4 years ago|reply
Just saying “give truck drivers more compensation and better working conditions” doesn’t fix the fact that their destinations aren’t open 24/7 so keeping the ports open for an extra shift doesn’t do much right now.
It doesn’t fix the fact that the truck driver depends on someone else to take their container and/or chassis at the end of a delivery and many delivery depots can’t or won’t right now.
And the biggest asymmetry right now has nothing directly to do with truck drivers. There is a shortage of empty containers in East Asia and a glut in the US. Container ships aren’t waiting in the US ports to load up with empty containers, so thyme are exacerbating the issue.
[+] [-] thephyber|4 years ago|reply
Trucks are plentiful. Trailer empty chassis are not. Your assumption that truck labor is in short supply is a derivative of your misunderstanding of the difference between the trucks and the chassis.
The truck is the thing with the Diesel engine, the cab, and the truck driver. It can detach the trailer and pick up a new trailer.
The thread clearly identifies the “empty chassis” (the trailer with wheels that is capable of mounting a standard container on top) as one of the scarce items.
[+] [-] ganeshkrishnan|4 years ago|reply
There was a reddit thread in the truckers group around a year back which literally said this: there are not enough physical trucks since trucks have to been maintained and the spare parts for it are not making their way across border fast enough. This meant that owners have to buy new trucks to compensate for their broken down trucks and leading to escalation of costs which means they expect the same person to work 2x to make up for it.
[+] [-] lugged|4 years ago|reply
They're paid by the load, so sitting idle is a non option.
[+] [-] vilppuvuorinen|4 years ago|reply
There's an ongoing world wide (minus some regions) container shortage going on at the same time.
[+] [-] coolso|4 years ago|reply
Just 20-25 years ago we were still making a lot of things in the US. But the American worker, and economy, was sold out to cheap, high-polluting, IP-stealing, yes-lets-ship-it-2000-miles-instead-of-making-it-in-the-US Chinese labor and manufacturing at the benefit of the CCP but everyone else’s expense.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. This wasn’t even a direct supply chain disruption and it’s hitting us hard. Imagine if we ever had one, and there’s no evidence to suggest we won’t again. We’re dependent on… China of all places for everything?
Why can’t we focus our brainstorming sessions on bringing manufacturing back to the USA? Why is this not a major talking point? Americans have been polled and across the aisle people prefer made in the USA.
Let the CCP take care of its own people. It certainly thinks it’s system is the right way.
It’s madness and it’s sad. Every corporation and politician that had a hand in this ought to be ashamed. Every media outlet that ignores it ought to be ashamed too.
[+] [-] jdhn|4 years ago|reply
They may say this, but when push comes to shove, people simply don't buy a lot of consumer goods that are made here.
[+] [-] kmlx|4 years ago|reply
because we live in a globalised world. your phone would cost 10x what it costs now if you moved production to the US. that would mean lots of people without phones, so a much smaller economy. no one wants that.
> Americans have been polled
ah, polls :)
> across the aisle people prefer made in the USA
as a European, i have always associated American made with low quality, cheaply made, bad taste and expensive. American products are to be avoided at all times. this has been the case for decades and decades, before the move to China. at least now even American companies realised this and moved production to far superior Chinese manufacturers.
[+] [-] nradov|4 years ago|reply
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/manu...
[+] [-] remarkEon|4 years ago|reply
If there ever was a direct supply chain disruption (intentional or not), the US would be in a much worse spot than we are right now. Everything from semiconductors to nuts and bolts would be a problem (some more than others). There isn't a single issue more important to national security right now.
[+] [-] digikata|4 years ago|reply
BTW for fun reading on operations logistics and identifying and attacking bottlenecks see "The Goal" by Eli Goldratt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_%28novel%29
[+] [-] twright|4 years ago|reply
I’m going to hypothesize that there’s an enormous and possibly unfair labor requirement for moving these containers so the ships can be unloaded. As long as companies involved with these logistics are optimizing for profit bottleneck improvements won’t significantly change.
[1] https://ez.substack.com/p/there-isnt-a-labor-shortage-theres
[2] https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1451163926780076032
[+] [-] aptxkid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidjfelix|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thephyber|4 years ago|reply
I think he has a pretty good understanding of the issues at least one or two degrees removed, but I think he is also just trying to unblock the critical path (the large cranes at the ports).
The other issues like “fully loaded cargo trains in North Dakota blocking the tracks because they can’t unload” need to be solved by others.
[+] [-] bagels|4 years ago|reply
Historical rates of arriving containers to the port, leaving the port, time spent at the port, time spent in yards, number of drivers, number of trucks, etc.
High level, throughput was lost somewhere, or there's more volume, or maybe both.
[+] [-] kposehn|4 years ago|reply
RE Railroads: This is much harder than it seems. Most of the railroads are also stuck with thousands of intermodal platforms that have loaded containers they can’t unload, or empty containers they can’t reposition.
Trains are stacked up outside intermodal terminals. UP has miles of them outside chicago. There are no ways to get them off trains and it snarls the system even further.
If we need to get containers off trains, we need to get to them and unload. The trip to Dallas isn’t the issue, instead we need to focus on shifting empty platforms to where they’re needed.
[+] [-] arduinomancer|4 years ago|reply
Is it too many full or empty containers?
If full is the root cause a lack of truckers?
If empty then why aren't boats picking up the empty containers when they leave?
[+] [-] msandford|4 years ago|reply
1. Get full containers out of ports to make room for empties
2. Bring empties back to port and queue them up
3. Unload a bunch of fulls and reload a bunch of empties onto every ship that comes into port
Right now there's no room to store empties do they're being stored on trailers. Which means there are no trailers to unload full containers onto. So nothing is being unloaded. Deadlock.
[+] [-] thephyber|4 years ago|reply
There is a lack of empty containers in Asia and a glut in the US. There are all sorts of constraints in the US like how high a stack is allowed to be (presumably for safety or sightly reasons). There are too many containers in the US on chassis so there is a shortage of empty chassis available to take to ports. Distribution centers are reporting that truck drivers are dropping off trucks overnight and blocking their loading docks. There are reports that loaded cargo trains are unable to load so they are just blocking critical tracks.
The Twitter thread is from the CEO of FlexPort which is a startup trying to make ports and trust transport more efficient. He is pointing out critical paths in the port nodes of the supply chain graph, but the root causes are many and not necessarily all within his visibility.
[+] [-] bradgessler|4 years ago|reply
I don’t think these people are stupid, there’s just this huge combination of junk that stacks up that nobody fully understands over time.
It’s a lot like a really large, old codebases. Nobody dares to look under the covers and change anything out of fear of it breaking. What it takes is an outside who doesn’t know any better to start poking and prodding at it to see what it does. In this case Ryan effectively ran a profiler on the Long Beach port, a “decades old codebase”, and found a hotspot that was created by a deadlock between the local government and the yards.
What other physical world situations can you think of what would benefit from an outside running a “profiler” against it?
[+] [-] GaryTang|4 years ago|reply
Anyone here surprised? The little things add up, multiply this code by the hundreds of others and you have a supply shortage.
[+] [-] thephyber|4 years ago|reply
China was the only country working full speed after the Wuhan lockdown for about a year. The entire world bought masses of PPG and ventilators in addition to our normal plastic consumerism widgets. China sent tons of full containers to the rest of the world but those containers haven’t returned to China.
Everything else is a symptom of some local issue due to a region or industry being host to a disease outbreak or being host to a supply/demand mismatch with either containers or chassis.
Even that distribution lot would not need containers stacked above 2 high if the distribution channels downstream of it were not similarly overloaded.
[+] [-] Ajay-p|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
[+] [-] dragonwriter|4 years ago|reply
The Jones Act applies to shipping between US ports, which isn’t the issue, and suspending the Jones Act would allow more ships on internal runs, but the problem is that we have too little port capacity for import runs, so it solves something that is, in a couple different dimensions, completely the wrong problem.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|4 years ago|reply
But it's hard to see that it affects this problem much.
[+] [-] yuliyp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aazaa|4 years ago|reply
The author makes this claim without proof. The circumstances may be consistent with the explanation, but maybe others are as well. Also, the source of the claim is not clear. Did he glean all of this information from the boat captain, or someone else?
The problem is that the claim is central to the entire thread and the proposed solution.
If the root cause is wrong, then allowing containers to pile up in yards 6-deep could cause yet another bottleneck - a lack of containers to return back on ships, for example. This could happen, for example, if yard computer systems were never designed for this kind of use and records start going to paper.
This article reports that the port has processed record numbers of ships:
> In June, the Los Angeles port became the first in the western hemisphere to process 10m container units in a 12‑month period. The Long Beach port will likely process more than 9m container units this year, exceeding last year’s record of 8.1m units, the most in the port’s 110-year history.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/20/supply-chai...
Nowhere does the thread mention this record-high ship traffic.
[+] [-] wbl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] computerfriend|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0zg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eightysixfour|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|4 years ago|reply
Why did we ever agree to this?
[+] [-] epa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex_young|4 years ago|reply
Since more goods are being shipped to people on a one off basis, there is more demand for all of the resources needed to do this, from boats, to containers, to warehouses.
When you start to see slow-downs in international shipping, there become large incentives to do silly things, like stockpile supply in warehouses, so all of the warehouses fill up, and then all of the container yards fill up, and then all of the container ships have to wait, exacerbating the problem.
On top of all of this, there is a huge shortage of truck drivers, because it sucks to drive a truck for a living.
What can we do about all of this? Expand the number of containers we can store? Seems like an unlikely fix. If you have a clogged pipe, expanding the size of the funnel feeding it doesn't solve the problem.
Why not put a price on the clog itself? If it cost an exponential rate to store containers full of stuff at ports I think the stockpiling would quickly subside, wouldn't it?
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|4 years ago|reply
- Bring the military and National Guard container chassis to relieve the ports. That works, unless there's a situation where the military or National Guard need them, in which case it could be catastrophic.
- Force railroads to haul to this one particular new site. First, I kind of bristle at the word "force". That's not how it works in a free country. Second, there is no unused facility available that has the rail bandwidth to handle the traffic level that he's talking about. Third, the containers were intended to go to Dallas (the example he used), not to this new site 100 miles from LA. How and when do they get from there to Dallas?
[+] [-] huitzitziltzin|4 years ago|reply
This is not a judgment on the merit of the idea bc the zoning rule seems dumb but what’s the point of proposing a “solution” which it isn’t clear either man can actually implement?
[+] [-] graton|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkbm|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543801194024961
[1] https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543803307905026
[2] https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543804482359297