> There was a rule in the Port of Los Angeles saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.
This is incorrect.
There was a zoning rule which affected truck yards in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Truck yards. Not the port itself.
As stated in the linked tweets actually.
But if you don't believe that you can just google an image of the Port of Los Angeles from let's say 2019 and count how high the container piles go. Here is a randomly selected image from 2019 where 5 high piles can be clearly counted: https://www.joc.com/sites/default/files/field_feature_image/...
Accuracy is important. I'm not an expert on logistics, or zoning laws. But how could I trust the article's author when they clearly unable to parse their own sources?
> Normally one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we won’t get into price mechanisms aren’t working properly to fix supply shortages.
It's nice that the article is not going into that. Instead it hammers on that politicians regulate where and how many containers can you plop down. That is not the real issue.
If you are moving containers into an area, and you are not moving an equal amount out then you are going to run out of space to store the containers. It is that simple. You can tweak rules to make a bit more space, for example by stacking them higher in the truck yards. But the real question is: why are the people who own these containers incentivised to move them back to where they want them to be filled? If you solve that the problem solves itself. If you can't solve that piles of containers will fill up what little more space you won by tweaking. So the very point the article decides to "not go into" is the only one worth going into.
Anecdote: I was driving into San Pedro in 2019, and I didn't have a smart phone at the time (so no map/gps). I took the wrong exit off of the 710 and ended up on Terminal Island. That was the most visually overwhelming place I have ever been... the scale of the ships, the height of the stacked containers (more than 2), the abundance of trains... the cranes... visually, overwhelming. And then there was all the road work, construction, detours, one-ways down wrong-way streets.... I was a hell of a morning as I tried to get to my presentation....
Sure, when your critical system goes down an RCA is hugely important and ultimately you have to apply a fix that addresses the core issue to avoid it happening again in the future.
But, at the time that the system is actually down it seems like the most important first step (once you understand the problem) is to get the system running again ASAP. This can give you the runway to fix the actual problem.
Indeed. Given the "balance" of trade, surely most of the empty containers need to go back on a ship so China can fill them up again? The problem is not the size of the buffer but the fact that we aren't emptying the buffer.
Ok, a fair point. But in the end is the same thing: stupid public worker bureaucrats exerting their petty, ignorant power like the Gods they think they are.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the 'stacking rule' meant that people with more empties than they could stack 2 high on their property were "storing" empties on trailer chassis that carry one container.
As I understood it, by letting them stack empties higher, it freed up trailers to be used by trucks to go get containers out of the port. When that happens the port then wants empties to put back on the ship (or full if they are going somewhere) and then the ship can continue on.
So the "win" here was that more trailers would be available to take full containers from ships and that would move things along.
You're correct. The article was imprecise with its terminology.
Most people who aren't familiar with trucking understand a tractor-trailer as a single vehicle, because that's what they usually see on the road.
When in reality it's exactly what the phrase describes: a tractor (or cab, or engine and steering and driver) + a trailer (or chassis + whatever it's hauling).
The entire idea of modern over-the-road trucking is built on the concept that one cab can pick up and haul any standard chassis (leaving aside hazmat and other complexities).
This is what allows for optimized freight movement, as you can limit the amount of time cabs are moving around without hauling anything, in addition to decoupling the load/unloading of a trailer (time consuming) from the driver turning around (want to minimize).
I.e. driver arrives at warehouse with container A on chassis B, parks it in a loading dock, and immediately hooks up to container T, already waiting on chassis U, and heads back out.
The bottleneck in this case was: (1) nowhere to legally put empty containers, causing (2) empty containers to stay on chassis, leading to (3) no available empty chassis to unload port cargo onto (containers must be loaded onto some sort of chassis to be removed from a port), leading to (4) a backup and full port yard, leading to (5) ports refusing to accept empties, to conserve their limited yard space, leading to GOTO 1.
From Ryan Peterson's description, it was more that there was no space left to unload full containers from ships or empties from trucks to then pick up a full one from the ship. In essence container grid lock.
I suppose it's not fair, but I was disappointed after reading the title, hoping that the article would be an assessment on whether changing the container stacking rule has made a difference yet. There seems to be a fair amount of skepticism that the stacking rule was having a large negative impact, so I was excited to see an assessment of how/if it's made any difference.
There are many problems. Many. So it’s unlikely one fix is going to solve a lot and make a huge dent. But those problems need to be fixed one after each other as they compound on each other.
> * 14. Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.*
> 15. None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away.
It's been my experience that nearly all of the times it's the low-, and maybe mid-, -level workers who see problems. And it's usually the upper end of the business or bureaucracy who end up ignoring the problem.
And then it's also been my experience that after the problem gets ignored for a while, the people who see the problem also don't report later problems because they know it won't be fixed and they're not empowered to fix it themselves.
While you are not wrong, it isn't 100% true either. The problem has long been recognized in various forms and solutions have been developed. I did a factory tour a few years back for a local major manufacture (I work for them but I won't say who...), and there were signs all over "stop the line: you have the power!" to remind workers when they see something wrong they have the power to stop everything until it is fixed. It doesn't happen often, but more than once a worker has seen a part that looked "off" stopped the line and had a full investigation done. Sometimes it was determined things were okay, but other times the wrong alloy was used if the part had gone to a customer it would have been an early failure.
Of course the above is only able to fix local issues. It doesn't really leave any way for someone to say "we will have a bottleneck here if something else goes wrong"...
Apropos the importance of building new container shipping ports in places that don’t have land scarcity, traffic, and well organized NIMBYs? Let me introduce you to the port of Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia.
The port of Prince Rupert has 5 (as in “can be counted on one hand”) berths and transfers 1.2M containers per year.
The port of Long Beach has 80 (yes, eight-zero!!!) berths and only transfers 8.1M containers per year.
Long Beach transfers 100k containers per berth per year. Prince Rupert transfers 240k containers per berth per year.
Prince Rupert is also physically closer to Asia (saves 2-3 days of sailing time), and has very little other sea traffic. The rail line is also expanding, and has very little non-port traffic.
The port itself is protected by geography, and is one of the deepest natural harbours in the world.
It's a neat place!
Well, except for being one of the rainiest cities in Canada.
I wonder if the containers per berth number goes down as the number of berths increases in one port because other bottlenecks appear. I suspect adding more ports is actually a way to maintain efficiency here, but there's probably logistical challenges with that (skilled workforce, supply chain support, road network & other infrastructure to handle the volume, etc). There's probably also far more cost to adding a port than adding a berth.
> A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously.
This is a little disingenuous. From what I understand, this was a rule put in place a long time ago, in a different context. The ramifications of such rule under unprecedented stress weren't understood or foreseen. Infinitely stacked containers would probably be an eyesore to be honest.
Great they removed the rule, but don't forget about Chesterton's fence.
> A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore
No, that wasn't the case. It was a Fire Department ordinance for the city and not the port. It didn't apply to the Port of Long Beach itself. This is a photo from October 19th, before the emergency order on October 22.
I’ve seen this kind of thing happen at companies. There is a serious problem that all the lower level people know about, but nobody says anything to the higher ups because nobody wants to be seen as a troublemaker and potentially lose their job. Everyone assumes that eventually it will become so bad that the higher ups will notice. That rarely happens in my experience. Instead things become bad and the solution is layoffs, reorgs, etc. In the midst of the chaos we can often make the change that precipitated the whole crisis without anyone becoming wiser. Rinse and repeat.
This is where big money consultants make their money. They come in and tell everyone what they already knew in a way that lets everyone pretend is was magically discovered.
This article is ridiculous. "It's so easy but nobody expected it to happen!"
Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility!
It's therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn't realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair. This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem and the fact that he resolved it in 8 hours (!) is something to be celebrated, not chided.
Flexport's technology had nothing to do with this, though. The CEO literally took a boat ride around the bay and looked at what was happening + talked to some people. He did the thing everyone assumes public officials do, but who clearly are not doing.
*A local city mayor who also happens to have one of the busiest ports in the world in his city. The back up is literally in the global news. It doesn't seem unreasonable for him to, at the very least, ask someone on his staff to give him a gigantic list of problems at the port and spend quite a lot of time figuring out which problems he had the power to solve. He probably speaks at least monthly, if not weekly, with who knows how many people connected with the port.
I agree that the fact it was changed so quickly should be celebrated, but it also gives me pause to think about just how many things could instantly be improved if the people with the power sat up and paid attention.
I don't know. If it's such a problem how can the mayor not be concerned, appraised, and trying to solve the problem? The article says "everyone knew this was happening and didn't do anything". So I'm not sure it's fair to suggest that people simply didn't know and thank god Flexport with it's vested interest in improving logistics took a look".
> Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair.
HNers have pretty much no understanding or respect for what it means to realistically be in public service. They treat the realities as unfortunate errors ripe for optimization.
It is quite reasonable to make fun of people who required a 2 container limit for aesthetic reasons which accidentally caused a major kink in the global supply chain. It was also inarguably effective to publicly shame them into reversing their decision.
That is the definition of the word bureaucrat, which was absolutely used in a fair manner to describe the person who caused this issue.
Reason 4 of the cause is what you should rail against: "This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing."
> This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem
Isn't that alone an indictment of him or his organization (which, by extension, is an indictment of him)? Why did no one on his team tell him about the container backlog? If they did, why did they not suggest that he allow containers to be stacked higher? This isn't a new problem, it's been going on since at least March if not earlier.
You appear to assume that the problem described is the problem faced. I bet we don't get a nice neat story about how changing stacking rules didn't actually solve the problem, and after a short time made it worse.
From what I heard, the real issue is the ships are not bringing these containers back, because: 1. there's not so much good for US to export (volume-wise); 2. shipping price is so high that to save time, ships do not wait to load empty containers.
As long as US has a net import of containers, whatever buffer created will be filled up soon.
That's the popular consensus here in LA, it's cheaper to discard the containers than to ship them back empty (and nobody at the receiving end wants enough of what we have to make it worth sending them back full). However I drive through the port area frequently and always see containers stacked well above the 2-high limit. I suppose that means they are not empty containers? There definitely has to be some alternate use for these empty containers. People have tried to build houses with them, but I think one issue preventing widescale implementation of that use is that quite a few of them were originally holding some kind of material that would be hostile to human inhabitants. And living in a metal box in the Southern California summer would not be feasible without expensive air conditioning retrofits.
I was also thinking about this after reading the original thread.
If the port is full and the trucks are full, clearly we have more overall containers than before. Where did they come from? And is the place they come from now short on containers?
Those are of course separate problems. If we are accumulating empty containers, you could just dump them somewhere for the time being. Yes, the trucks would have to drive somewhere else than the port to dump them, but that's clearly better than economic standstill. And if it turns out that China is short on empty containers, then we might need to work on the incentives for ships to bring back the empties.
But unless this whole clogging was caused by a very temporary spike in container throughput, increasing buffer capacity will only alleviate the problem for so long.
All the dismissals here are fascinating to me — and sure seem to be exactly the overarching story of TFA. Yes, this certainly isn't the only problem here, but it's certainly the easiest to fix.
And yes, the narrative of the story is definitely important, because it avoided all the rabble you see here that was getting in the way of a simple first step.
We are so used to doom and negativity in the news that we discard any positive news outright... which creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop that everything is terrible all the time.
I followed this and from my understanding the changes while enacted quickly are still only temporary (rollback in 120 days). If that's the case, I'd like "them" to think about how this situation could have been avoided all together. I can't help but thinking about how all the Asian markets were having similar log jams due to economies reopening and the Suez issue months ago. Surely it was known (or, could have been known) that that log jam was tsunami wave heading to LA?
I'm not sure if stacking 5-6 high is a long term solution. It works now, because it's only at 2 high and the buffer is available. But if they were at 5-6 high under normal circumstances when this tsunami wave hit we'd be talking about letting them go 8-9 high? Maybe limit them to 2 high but allow them to file a temporary permit to go to X high with justification... something along those lines, so it is a rather accessible flex up and down and it doesn't require extreme levels of non-local politics to accomplish.
The problem is "them" in this case is the mayor of Long Beach. The people he worries about are the voters in Long Beach, who probably (given what we know about California...) complain very loudly about having to see container stacks. He has no incentive to care about things that the cities voters don't care about directly like... the global economy. I have to wonder if he got a very angry call from the White House telling him he'd better issue a suspension or he'd suddenly lose various federal funds.
The hyperlocalization of things like this in the US are the source of a lot of our problems IMO. We get stuck in local maxima that actually add up to terrible inefficiencies on the whole.
This was the first of five or six steps recommended by the Flexport CEO. I don't know if they would all 'work' in concert but clearly if the changes stop here the plan wasn't even followed to begin with.
What exactly is the problem with 8-9 high, or 20 high, or whatever the technical limit is? The land belongs to the port owners, why should anyone else be able to restrict how they stack containers?
OK so this is essentially a self-written news story that was manipulated to make it feel-good.
That's bad.
Also, now that I know I'm manipulated, I'm skeptical that the changes will have the outcome that they want. It could but it's not good that you've told me you've manipulated me.
While you could argue that Flexport did this for their own benefit, I think the outcome is still incredibly useful to the general public. Further, nobody is faking the quick turnaround in removing the rule - that actually happened.
From near the end:
"My going theory on why the news isn’t being shared is because it is being instinctively suppressed by the implicit forces that filter out such actions from the official narratives. The whole scenario might give people the idea that we could do things because they’re helpful. It gives status to someone for being helpful. It highlights our general failure to do helpful things, and plausibly blames all our supply chain (and also plausibly all our civilizational) problems on stupid pointless rules and a failure to do obviously correct things. That’s not a good look for power, and doesn’t help anyone’s narratives, so every step of the way such things get silenced."
No, I think the news isn't being shared because it doesn't stoke fear, greed, or anger. The economics of the news causes people in those industries to (consciously or subconsciously) prioritize headlines which stoke fear, greed, or anger. "We solved a problem" doesn't stoke any of that.
In Factorio design this is simply increasing the buffer size. If the truck-loadings-per-hour don't increase then it's not going to matter how large you make the buffer.
Adding a secondary site for putting containers also seems like it's going to be a new challenge for the logistics company scheduling the rides (I have a friend who deals with train cargo scheduling). Truckers who are used to showing up at the port are now going to have to go to a completely different site altogether, and who knows how many IO issues the new site will also bring in.
Now's the chance for logistics companies to start hiring OpenTTD players.
I mean, I also play Factorio and came away from reading the article thinking that yeah, increasing the headroom in the chests (aka container stacks) from 2 slots to 6 slots would definitely introduce slack into the system. The short haul loop to a staging and integration area would also help because it allows you to re-sort the inputs to maximize pickup efficiency and is also something I've done in Factorio games.
It might be fun to release a Port of Los Angeles savegame that challenges folks to unhork the port.
There were supposedly trucks that couldn’t be loaded because they had no place to get rid of the empty container they currently had. So truck loading rate was low, not because of the speed of the workers and cranes, but because of the availability of the trucks. So this is supposed to allow the truck loading rate to go up by making it easier for trucks to become available.
I don’t know if that will happen, but this is an increased buffer size that is directly addressing a limiting factor. It might help.
The trucks were acting as a buffer, if you believe the CEO of Flexport. So if you increase the buffer size, then the trucks can be trucks again and it's guaranteed to increase truck loadings per hour.
Truck-loadings-per-hour will increase, but that does not help shrink the buffer if every truck picking up a container also brings back an empty one.
Increasing the buffer size is a temporary relief, but clearly the underlying problem is an ever-increasing number of containers (empty or full), or we wouldn't have gotten into this situation.
If we could dispose of the empty containers somewhere then this bottleneck would cease to exist - trucks could just haul away containers at max throughput. I gather that it's become harder to ship back empty containers though, and presumably just scrapping them is not a sound solution in the long run either.
You have idle trucks unable to increase the truck-loadings-per-hour because they can't complete a single job due to the lack of storage space for their empty containers.
Providing that storage space will allow the trucks to complete their circuit.
You could also look at it as putting down a storage chest so that you can run down a belt and pick up all the items that shouldn't be there, or sticking a chest next to your un-barreling factory while you work out how to get a return train back to the barreling factory, or putting down some fuel tanks to hold light/heavy oil while you research advanced oil processing (before the basic oil change).
I'm skeptical that this will fix the problem by itself, but it buys time to observe the system in action and adjust capacity on other bottlenecks to bring it back into balance.
Buffer size is critical in the case of things like the credit crunch that seized up the global economy back in 2008. Having room to maneuver makes it possible to address long term problems. Although it can also be thoughtlessly filled in service of short term needs with moves that don't actually provide a long term benefit.
Some talk about 'building a new port' as part of the solution. I'm thinking that's a decade project and $100B or some such? PoLA tried to expand for a decade and the impact statements got bogged down and nothing happened if I remember right (my sister-in-law was doing the math on the statements)
Yeah I'm not convinced as much by the new ports only being the solution. A big part of the reason that the SF Bay area and LA grew was because of the ports and the rail connections. Setting up a new port in, say, the area near Pismo Beach, might have slightly lower land costs, but it also has far lower value.
All those warehouses, importers, all the network of knowledge and people and demand for imports, all the stuff that's real but maybe difficult to see, that's the magic that really makes a port have high value.
I'd like to think that if we declared a state of emergency, suspended all regulations and deployed a couple battalions of Seabees we could still build a port in a matter of months, rather than years.
I'd like to think we still have those kinds of capabilities if they were needed, but I'm increasingly not sure that we actually do.
This seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Something is causing a surplus of empty containers, and allowing them to expand storage for them isn't going to change the underlying problem. So if the new rule to allow them 6-high is temporary, the owners will stack them 6-high and then run out of room again. But next time the (temporary) rule change will revert to 2-high and they'll all be in violation. If they get the proposed government land to "dump" them "temporarily" that will simply become a huge pile of empty containers.
It sounds like anyone with a fancy use for empty shipping containers can probably get them for "free" right now if you just show up with a truck to haul them away.
This. As the old saw says, for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. I mean, it's not a bad thing they fixed the rule, but either way it's unlikely to cause or prevent the collapse of the US economy.
My money is on the ports themselves being the problem. Having people waiting around for hours if not days is incredibly inefficient, and the Rotterdams, Singapores and Shenzhens of the world do not have this issue.
The bureaucratic rule of only stacking containers of two in storage areas seem absurd when in the rest of the world there examples of them being stacked 9 or even 12 high. Weird government rules should have sunset clauses, at least for man-made emergencies.
Maybe they should travel and see how ports are managed in the rest of the world.
This workflow rule that clogged the port seems to be the perfect platform for a former McKinsey consultant like Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to shine. Yet that thunder is stolen by the WSJ coverage and Flexport CEO tweetstorm.
I think we can summarize that the solution is to remove things that prevent the free market from functioning properly. Here are some additional ideas:
-Unions are good for representing workers in negotiations with private companies. Taxpayers do not have anyone to represent them in negotiations with public unions. Disallow unions in government jobs. Government already has enough corruption and inefficiency.
-Dismantle the patent system. Ideas are worthless, execution is everything.
-Abolish the limited liability company. We saw in the mortgage crisis that allowing private companies to profit by putting risk on the public shoulders leads to disaster.
-Publish all tax records and make a constitutional amendment that all prices paid must be public. The free market makes the basic assumption that all prices paid and offered are public information.
Great post. I more or less assumed this is what had happened, but great to see it written up.
On one hand, the fact that you need to go through this kind of song and dance to get anything done is probably yet another good indicator that America is deep into an irreversible decline. One the other hand, it's great to see this kind of well-document contemporaneous analysis of what good change making actually entails right now, something that's not only interesting and useful currently, and will surely be of interest to folks long into the future.
Like maybe being right was never enough to get things done at any point in history, but the amount of hoops you currently need to jump through in addition to being right seems deeply pathological.
It seems weird that there is no incentive to put empty containers on an empty boat to China, esp when there is a shortage of containers in China. Maybe the port should charge higher rent for storing empty containers? There is something missing in the story.
This is a lesson on policy and rhetoric. As a programmer I always assumed people thought like me. But they don't. Studying policy mid-career is one of the most eye opening things I have done. Like it or not, if you want to advance policy you have to set up an organized plan that evokes some emotion. This is opposed to applying only logic which would motivate me if I were the audience. Apply to reason alone and you will lose.
> Then our hero enters, and decides to coordinate and plan a persuasion campaign to get the rule changed. Here’s how I think this went down.
First, negative feedback is good. The problem here was a case of positive feedback, which are always bad. This Ryan person might be helping in the one crisis, but he has just installed a thousand new timebombs.
Second, the reason NYT has nothing about this is that NYT editors tell its reporters to find stories that seem to illustrate what the editors want said. NYT is not really interested in what is actually happening; NYT has always been that way.
What will people be watching to see the effect? Is there any data published that would show an increase in freight behind moved because of this change?
This was a great story to read, especially after enduring over a year where so many small problems scaled into largely avoidable huge harms due to well-intentioned (but poorly thought through) rules being followed or created.
This is a regional problem. There are other ports in the US (East Coast, etc). I don’t see how it will be a global problem. Sure it will affect supply and demand significantly, but it’s not a global catastrophe.
I just finished listening to the freaknomics podcast about negativity in the media. Maybe this story didn't gain traction because it doesn't fit the "If it bleeds, it leads" model.
This article suggests that the twitter thread about the boat ride was just a story that could be told. If so, it's harmless, but I'm left wondering, is it true?
So in short, NIMBY zoning rules caused the port to suffocate on its own containers, even though it is merely a stone's throw from working oil pumps and LAX.
Wow. There's just no straight talk anymore... Why does everyone have to dance around the issue. Just say the facts and this article could have been quite a bit shorter.
Humans are not perfect, some of us get angry at the perception of being superceded by those less experienced. Some will dig in their heels and not fix the issue if it means admitting they were unable to see the problem and suggest a solution.
So that's the beauty of how it was communicated. No blame was placed on anyone, plausible deniability was given out to everyone, and he pre-empted being derided as a layman who doesn't know shit by pretending to accidentally discover the issue. In one fell swoop so many egos were placated and a plan was laid out on top of all that. No back and forth, just all boxes checked and all given license to proceed forward with enthusiasm and intent.
Or, and this is radical, we could just stop buying cheap Chinese-made crap like inflatable Halloween decorations made from petroleum products and shipped across the sea using bunker oil.
Or, we could pass strong right-to-repair legislation and mandate 3-5 year warranties on electronics so that my 55-inch Samsung curved LED TV can be fixed when it dies at 2 years and one month old.
Or, even more radical, we could stop squeezing out consumer babies and training them in our wasteful ways.
But no, let's keep feeding the bloated consumers of America. Let the planet burn!
dang|4 years ago
What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29029825
The previous stack:
Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28971226 - Oct 2021 (483 comments)
Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 - Oct 2021 (265 comments)
krisoft|4 years ago
This is incorrect. There was a zoning rule which affected truck yards in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Truck yards. Not the port itself.
As stated in the linked tweets actually.
But if you don't believe that you can just google an image of the Port of Los Angeles from let's say 2019 and count how high the container piles go. Here is a randomly selected image from 2019 where 5 high piles can be clearly counted: https://www.joc.com/sites/default/files/field_feature_image/...
Accuracy is important. I'm not an expert on logistics, or zoning laws. But how could I trust the article's author when they clearly unable to parse their own sources?
> Normally one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we won’t get into price mechanisms aren’t working properly to fix supply shortages.
It's nice that the article is not going into that. Instead it hammers on that politicians regulate where and how many containers can you plop down. That is not the real issue.
If you are moving containers into an area, and you are not moving an equal amount out then you are going to run out of space to store the containers. It is that simple. You can tweak rules to make a bit more space, for example by stacking them higher in the truck yards. But the real question is: why are the people who own these containers incentivised to move them back to where they want them to be filled? If you solve that the problem solves itself. If you can't solve that piles of containers will fill up what little more space you won by tweaking. So the very point the article decides to "not go into" is the only one worth going into.
daveslash|4 years ago
Anecdote: I was driving into San Pedro in 2019, and I didn't have a smart phone at the time (so no map/gps). I took the wrong exit off of the 710 and ended up on Terminal Island. That was the most visually overwhelming place I have ever been... the scale of the ships, the height of the stacked containers (more than 2), the abundance of trains... the cranes... visually, overwhelming. And then there was all the road work, construction, detours, one-ways down wrong-way streets.... I was a hell of a morning as I tried to get to my presentation....
jlkuester7|4 years ago
Sure, when your critical system goes down an RCA is hugely important and ultimately you have to apply a fix that addresses the core issue to avoid it happening again in the future.
But, at the time that the system is actually down it seems like the most important first step (once you understand the problem) is to get the system running again ASAP. This can give you the runway to fix the actual problem.
lowbloodsugar|4 years ago
dmingod666|4 years ago
elzbardico|4 years ago
ChuckMcM|4 years ago
As I understood it, by letting them stack empties higher, it freed up trailers to be used by trucks to go get containers out of the port. When that happens the port then wants empties to put back on the ship (or full if they are going somewhere) and then the ship can continue on.
So the "win" here was that more trailers would be available to take full containers from ships and that would move things along.
ethbr0|4 years ago
Most people who aren't familiar with trucking understand a tractor-trailer as a single vehicle, because that's what they usually see on the road.
When in reality it's exactly what the phrase describes: a tractor (or cab, or engine and steering and driver) + a trailer (or chassis + whatever it's hauling).
The entire idea of modern over-the-road trucking is built on the concept that one cab can pick up and haul any standard chassis (leaving aside hazmat and other complexities).
This is what allows for optimized freight movement, as you can limit the amount of time cabs are moving around without hauling anything, in addition to decoupling the load/unloading of a trailer (time consuming) from the driver turning around (want to minimize).
I.e. driver arrives at warehouse with container A on chassis B, parks it in a loading dock, and immediately hooks up to container T, already waiting on chassis U, and heads back out.
The bottleneck in this case was: (1) nowhere to legally put empty containers, causing (2) empty containers to stay on chassis, leading to (3) no available empty chassis to unload port cargo onto (containers must be loaded onto some sort of chassis to be removed from a port), leading to (4) a backup and full port yard, leading to (5) ports refusing to accept empties, to conserve their limited yard space, leading to GOTO 1.
ajmurmann|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
lftl|4 years ago
UncleOxidant|4 years ago
jeromegv|4 years ago
inetknght|4 years ago
> 15. None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away.
It's been my experience that nearly all of the times it's the low-, and maybe mid-, -level workers who see problems. And it's usually the upper end of the business or bureaucracy who end up ignoring the problem.
And then it's also been my experience that after the problem gets ignored for a while, the people who see the problem also don't report later problems because they know it won't be fixed and they're not empowered to fix it themselves.
This is a widespread problem in my eyes.
bluGill|4 years ago
Of course the above is only able to fix local issues. It doesn't really leave any way for someone to say "we will have a bottleneck here if something else goes wrong"...
Invictus0|4 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977056
BitLit|4 years ago
The port of Prince Rupert has 5 (as in “can be counted on one hand”) berths and transfers 1.2M containers per year.
The port of Long Beach has 80 (yes, eight-zero!!!) berths and only transfers 8.1M containers per year.
Long Beach transfers 100k containers per berth per year. Prince Rupert transfers 240k containers per berth per year.
mig39|4 years ago
The port itself is protected by geography, and is one of the deepest natural harbours in the world.
It's a neat place!
Well, except for being one of the rainiest cities in Canada.
Edit: If you're interested in this kind of thing, here's a drone video I shot last year, of Prince Rupert's container port: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DyG9wOWi0c
vlovich123|4 years ago
gouggoug|4 years ago
This is a little disingenuous. From what I understand, this was a rule put in place a long time ago, in a different context. The ramifications of such rule under unprecedented stress weren't understood or foreseen. Infinitely stacked containers would probably be an eyesore to be honest.
Great they removed the rule, but don't forget about Chesterton's fence.
YokoZar|4 years ago
In this case we do know the reason why: aesthetics. The side effects are just greater now, so out the rule goes.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter|4 years ago
Also, how high of a stack of containers do you feel safe working around in the next major SoCal earthquake?
esturk|4 years ago
CalChris|4 years ago
No, that wasn't the case. It was a Fire Department ordinance for the city and not the port. It didn't apply to the Port of Long Beach itself. This is a photo from October 19th, before the emergency order on October 22.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/26/los-an...
Containers are stacked five high.
irrational|4 years ago
bombcar|4 years ago
Invictus0|4 years ago
revel|4 years ago
Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility!
It's therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn't realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair. This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem and the fact that he resolved it in 8 hours (!) is something to be celebrated, not chided.
saas_sam|4 years ago
ksdale|4 years ago
I agree that the fact it was changed so quickly should be celebrated, but it also gives me pause to think about just how many things could instantly be improved if the people with the power sat up and paid attention.
dcow|4 years ago
whateveracct|4 years ago
HNers have pretty much no understanding or respect for what it means to realistically be in public service. They treat the realities as unfortunate errors ripe for optimization.
more_corn|4 years ago
IncRnd|4 years ago
Reason 4 of the cause is what you should rail against: "This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing."
s1artibartfast|4 years ago
defen|4 years ago
Isn't that alone an indictment of him or his organization (which, by extension, is an indictment of him)? Why did no one on his team tell him about the container backlog? If they did, why did they not suggest that he allow containers to be stacked higher? This isn't a new problem, it's been going on since at least March if not earlier.
ramblenode|4 years ago
That's kind of the heart of the perennial frustration with bureaucracy: it's nobody's fault, so nothing gets done.
ncmncm|4 years ago
bhy|4 years ago
As long as US has a net import of containers, whatever buffer created will be filled up soon.
slobiwan|4 years ago
MauranKilom|4 years ago
If the port is full and the trucks are full, clearly we have more overall containers than before. Where did they come from? And is the place they come from now short on containers?
Those are of course separate problems. If we are accumulating empty containers, you could just dump them somewhere for the time being. Yes, the trucks would have to drive somewhere else than the port to dump them, but that's clearly better than economic standstill. And if it turns out that China is short on empty containers, then we might need to work on the incentives for ships to bring back the empties.
But unless this whole clogging was caused by a very temporary spike in container throughput, increasing buffer capacity will only alleviate the problem for so long.
mbauman|4 years ago
And yes, the narrative of the story is definitely important, because it avoided all the rabble you see here that was getting in the way of a simple first step.
munificent|4 years ago
mcguire|4 years ago
ISL|4 years ago
conductr|4 years ago
I'm not sure if stacking 5-6 high is a long term solution. It works now, because it's only at 2 high and the buffer is available. But if they were at 5-6 high under normal circumstances when this tsunami wave hit we'd be talking about letting them go 8-9 high? Maybe limit them to 2 high but allow them to file a temporary permit to go to X high with justification... something along those lines, so it is a rather accessible flex up and down and it doesn't require extreme levels of non-local politics to accomplish.
xxpor|4 years ago
The hyperlocalization of things like this in the US are the source of a lot of our problems IMO. We get stuck in local maxima that actually add up to terrible inefficiencies on the whole.
jcims|4 years ago
ciphol|4 years ago
justinator|4 years ago
That's bad.
Also, now that I know I'm manipulated, I'm skeptical that the changes will have the outcome that they want. It could but it's not good that you've told me you've manipulated me.
That's also bad.
yunohn|4 years ago
otterley|4 years ago
Invictus0|4 years ago
zitterbewegung|4 years ago
dqpb|4 years ago
rossdavidh|4 years ago
No, I think the news isn't being shared because it doesn't stoke fear, greed, or anger. The economics of the news causes people in those industries to (consciously or subconsciously) prioritize headlines which stoke fear, greed, or anger. "We solved a problem" doesn't stoke any of that.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
sleibrock|4 years ago
Adding a secondary site for putting containers also seems like it's going to be a new challenge for the logistics company scheduling the rides (I have a friend who deals with train cargo scheduling). Truckers who are used to showing up at the port are now going to have to go to a completely different site altogether, and who knows how many IO issues the new site will also bring in.
Now's the chance for logistics companies to start hiring OpenTTD players.
politician|4 years ago
It might be fun to release a Port of Los Angeles savegame that challenges folks to unhork the port.
parsimo2010|4 years ago
I don’t know if that will happen, but this is an increased buffer size that is directly addressing a limiting factor. It might help.
unreal37|4 years ago
MauranKilom|4 years ago
Increasing the buffer size is a temporary relief, but clearly the underlying problem is an ever-increasing number of containers (empty or full), or we wouldn't have gotten into this situation.
If we could dispose of the empty containers somewhere then this bottleneck would cease to exist - trucks could just haul away containers at max throughput. I gather that it's become harder to ship back empty containers though, and presumably just scrapping them is not a sound solution in the long run either.
notwedtm|4 years ago
Providing that storage space will allow the trucks to complete their circuit.
nostrademons|4 years ago
I'm skeptical that this will fix the problem by itself, but it buys time to observe the system in action and adjust capacity on other bottlenecks to bring it back into balance.
darkerside|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
JoeAltmaier|4 years ago
epistasis|4 years ago
All those warehouses, importers, all the network of knowledge and people and demand for imports, all the stuff that's real but maybe difficult to see, that's the magic that really makes a port have high value.
thrower123|4 years ago
I'd like to think we still have those kinds of capabilities if they were needed, but I'm increasingly not sure that we actually do.
JKCalhoun|4 years ago
Is there a reason it does not get the traffic of L.A.? Or is a 3rd large port needed?
darkarmani|4 years ago
phkahler|4 years ago
It sounds like anyone with a fancy use for empty shipping containers can probably get them for "free" right now if you just show up with a truck to haul them away.
zitterbewegung|4 years ago
LurkingPenguin|4 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022124
dustintrex|4 years ago
My money is on the ports themselves being the problem. Having people waiting around for hours if not days is incredibly inefficient, and the Rotterdams, Singapores and Shenzhens of the world do not have this issue.
1cvmask|4 years ago
Maybe they should travel and see how ports are managed in the rest of the world.
This workflow rule that clogged the port seems to be the perfect platform for a former McKinsey consultant like Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to shine. Yet that thunder is stolen by the WSJ coverage and Flexport CEO tweetstorm.
silexia|4 years ago
-Unions are good for representing workers in negotiations with private companies. Taxpayers do not have anyone to represent them in negotiations with public unions. Disallow unions in government jobs. Government already has enough corruption and inefficiency.
-Dismantle the patent system. Ideas are worthless, execution is everything.
-Abolish the limited liability company. We saw in the mortgage crisis that allowing private companies to profit by putting risk on the public shoulders leads to disaster.
-Publish all tax records and make a constitutional amendment that all prices paid must be public. The free market makes the basic assumption that all prices paid and offered are public information.
Alex3917|4 years ago
On one hand, the fact that you need to go through this kind of song and dance to get anything done is probably yet another good indicator that America is deep into an irreversible decline. One the other hand, it's great to see this kind of well-document contemporaneous analysis of what good change making actually entails right now, something that's not only interesting and useful currently, and will surely be of interest to folks long into the future.
Like maybe being right was never enough to get things done at any point in history, but the amount of hoops you currently need to jump through in addition to being right seems deeply pathological.
zz865|4 years ago
Factorium|4 years ago
Short-term optimisation.
Diesel555|4 years ago
> Then our hero enters, and decides to coordinate and plan a persuasion campaign to get the rule changed. Here’s how I think this went down.
ncmncm|4 years ago
First, negative feedback is good. The problem here was a case of positive feedback, which are always bad. This Ryan person might be helping in the one crisis, but he has just installed a thousand new timebombs.
Second, the reason NYT has nothing about this is that NYT editors tell its reporters to find stories that seem to illustrate what the editors want said. NYT is not really interested in what is actually happening; NYT has always been that way.
unethical_ban|4 years ago
ksdale|4 years ago
seymore_12|4 years ago
miniatureape|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
scythe|4 years ago
There are other ports. They're not economically viable. See e.g. my old comment about the history of Prince Rupert, BC:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871284
mrandish|4 years ago
cyberge99|4 years ago
robbrown451|4 years ago
phicoh|4 years ago
LA and Long Beach don't seem big enough to cause a global problem.
Seattle3503|4 years ago
TedShiller|4 years ago
The only thing this achieves is even more garbage in the ocean.
codazoda|4 years ago
contingencies|4 years ago
Nelkins|4 years ago
aninteger|4 years ago
datameta|4 years ago
So that's the beauty of how it was communicated. No blame was placed on anyone, plausible deniability was given out to everyone, and he pre-empted being derided as a layman who doesn't know shit by pretending to accidentally discover the issue. In one fell swoop so many egos were placated and a plan was laid out on top of all that. No back and forth, just all boxes checked and all given license to proceed forward with enthusiasm and intent.
walkerbrown|4 years ago
This is not correct.
Next though, CA DOT should do a one time waiver and extension of the 90-day BIT inspections on trailer chassis.
zelienople|4 years ago
Or, we could pass strong right-to-repair legislation and mandate 3-5 year warranties on electronics so that my 55-inch Samsung curved LED TV can be fixed when it dies at 2 years and one month old.
Or, even more radical, we could stop squeezing out consumer babies and training them in our wasteful ways.
But no, let's keep feeding the bloated consumers of America. Let the planet burn!
dang|4 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
fabianfabian|4 years ago
C19is20|4 years ago
eli_gottlieb|4 years ago
beastman82|4 years ago
ReptileMan|4 years ago
johnklos|4 years ago
skybrian|4 years ago