Truckers are leaving containers all over Los Angeles.[1]
Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. A place that just stacks empty containers 2 high probably only has large forklifts. The special equipment for high stacking is far more expensive, and only bought if you need it.[2]
A more useful proposal is a "peel pile".[3] This is a system which assigns outgoing trucks an easily accessible container to deliver, rather than a specific container that has to be retrieved. There's an app for that. This is being implemented by IMC, the largest marine drayage company in the US. They say they're already up to 8 high stacks in the LA area. The higher the stack, the longer the retrieval time.
"This keeps drivers moving and productive, even if they don’t know the exact load they’re getting or the delivery location." So it's really dumping the sorting problem on drivers. They have no idea where they're going next. There has to be some way to separate containers by approximate location to make this work, so a driver knows how far they're going to be asked to take the thing.
How well this all works depends on how well the software organizing the stacking works.
> Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high.
These are empty containers that are getting unloaded and stacked in order to free up the truck and its chassis for another load. The equipment for doing that stacking/unstacking is called an Empty Container Stacker [1]. These are different from a Reach Stacker [2] which will have much less vertical reach and are also different from Container Cranes [3].
Plenty. That isn't actually the important question or rather important problem. The storage yards are currently stacked X x Y x 2 and now they need to be re-stacked into something like X x (Y / 2) x 4 to free up space for more empties but that re-stacking has to happen from the edges. That will take a little time.
How many cranes does the Port of Long Beach have?
The berths at the Port of Long Beach's Pier G International Transportation Service terminal are equipped with 17 gantry cranes. Of those cranes, six have outreach of 19 containers across, seven have outreach of 16 containers across, and four have outreach of 13 containers across.
That's neat, but isn't this whole thing about stacking restrictions on empty containers?
My understanding of what the Flexport CEO said in their twitter thread was that the best example of the problem is the haulage company that's keeping its driver count * 3 empty containers around on-chassis (which I think means on wheels), just sitting in their parking lot, because they have nowhere to put their empties, because they empty-storage is maxed out at the 2-height capacity. All/most of the haulage company's chassis are now tied up with empty containers, which prevents them from being able to go pick up filled containers to ship, which stops the full containers from getting picked, etc.
> That's neat, but isn't this whole thing about stacking restrictions on empty containers?
It's stacking restrictions for empty containers in lots that are not at the port, I believe.
> on-chassis (which I think means on wheels)
In container shipping, a chassis is basically a trailer that accepts a container and can be pulled by a semi-truck or one of the utility vehicles they've got at the port to move things around.
If a chassis comes back with an empty container on it, and the port isn't accepting empties, you've got to leave it somewhere before you can grab one of the many containers sitting at the dock that have goods waiting to be delivered. If the dock yard is full of containers, they can't unload the boats. If the can't unload the boats, they can't load outgoing cargo including outgoing empties.
Stacking empties higher, especially away from the dock may free up chassis that frees up dock space, etc, that gets things moving and then the empties can come back. But, that only works if the storage yards have the equipment to stack higher; which probably they don't all have. The thread mentions a limit on stacking empty containers, but the zoning limitation is for stacking any containers, it's just that outside of the yards at the port, you tend not to store full containers. Once you get those on a chassis, you want to get them delivered either to the final destination or a storage yard at another port or a train depot, etc. Empties are a bit different; you'd prefer to load filled containers most of the time, so it makes sense to stack some empties from time to time; also a trucking company may want to have some empties to take to an exporter, etc.
Honestly, I had thought that both chassis and empties were fungible, kind of like with rail wagons. You count what goes where and if things are uneven over time, make some transfers to bring it back, but otherwise no big deal. But the thread says otherwise.
For US railroads, railroad cars may seem to be fungible, but someone owns each one and there's a settlements system running behind the scenes. The Association of American Railroads, via their Railinc subsidiary, is behind that, and all railroads that interchange traffic are members. There are standard rates.
Apparently, it doesn't. I would have thought at least some shipping lines would have gotten together to allow for offsets and settlements and all that to ease logistics. Maybe the lines don't want to coordinate or enjoy the semi-lockin that returning a container to the line's yard means it's most convenient to pick up an outgoing container from that yard, or don't trust their inventory with each other.
All places I have done real estate development require permits for putting containers on your land, and it is not a quick process to get one. At the least, you usually have to justify why you need the container space and for how long.
And I cannot imagine a local zoning board wanting to go out on a limb to do something novel like approving containers just because a port is backed up.
As this is a short term problem and part of a national crisis ... just stack them up, and get them removed in the near future. Any place big enough to stack up enough containers to matter (stadium parking lot, dead airport, etc) isn't going to have neighbors that raise a huge stink immediately, and the wheels of zoning disputes take times.
Heck, budget the possible fines into your business plan for holding the containers. Delivery firms already budget for tickets from parking illegally to make deliveries. This isn't so far removed from that.
Exactly. Fix the problem, then ask for permission to do so afterwards.
If you can honestly say, "we fixed the problem and didn't hurt anything with our temporary fix" then the permission people who come along afterwards to fine you are going to have to think seriously about suspending the fine that your solution drew. Don't do anything criminal, but accrue a bit of civil liability: it will either be a cost of business, or will be forgiven.
As for contracts: If I am obligated to return the containers, but I dump them for a few weeks on a disused airstrip, I'm still going to, eventually, fulfill my contract, when the port allows me to.
No excuses. Fix problems, don't brainstorm reasons not to fix then.
> And I cannot imagine a local zoning board wanting to go out on a limb to do something novel like approving containers just because a port is backed up.
I can, if they get paid for it. Rent should be reasonable for short-term storage and unreasonable for long-term.
From a quick Google map look, I'd ask the National Guard to take over runway 8R of LGB. That would still leave plenty of runways there, including 8L, usable under the same wind conditions.
There is also a huge amount of land at Palmdale airport, 1h30 north of Long Beach.
A glut of empty containers is a stupid problem, but the solution can be stupid easy, if we choose to make it so.
Most of the stacks are already at 6 high https://www.tiktok.com/@stanimal18/video/7019310183545376006. The automated storage & retrieval system cannot go higher. Peel pile would be great if the empty containers did not have to be taken to Dallas. It is questionable if this is a government failure to zone empty buffer yards out in desert as there would be even less of an incentive to return the empty containers; changing the zoning at the secondary yards does not fix the underlying incentive issue and should only be put in place once the ratio of the rate at which new containers are being received to the rate at which containers are leaving begins to decline to accelerate the removal of the bottleneck. The storage fee needs to be raised to a point at which it is justifiable to move the empty containers out over processing fully loaded containers until the storage bottleneck is removed. Changing the zoning before figuring out the rate problem almost surely will just make the bottleneck worse. It would also be interesting to know if it would be feasible to make the containers able to be disassembled and multi-packed into an empty container.
Those 6 high stacks are the ones at the port. From the thread, there are plenty of smaller secondary lots outside the ports where empties are being stacked, because the ports won't accept them, and there's room. The zoning based stacking limit affects those secondary yards, but not the port yards. A real question is if the secondary yards have equipment to stack higher or if they can really only go two high, because they were limited by zoning anyway.
> It would also be interesting to know if it would be feasible to make the containers able to be disassembled and multi-packed into an empty container.
Not really; everything's welded together, and if you unweld and reweld, it's not going to be as strong. Plus that's a lot of labor. There are some collapsible containers, but those tend not to have sides or a top, which is not ideal for ocean shipping.
Each of the yards have unique constraints. Hopefully, the 2 to 4 increase is to be some sort of test such that the ability to stack 6/9 high is still within reason given it as the limit of the higher end stackers. Additionally, these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSn-dT4EMcM do not require welding to transform; are quoted with the same strength, a quarter of the original size, and 20% more expensive in early 2017.
Okay, but fancy collapsible containers does nothing to solve the problem with all the containers piling up right now. That's a longer term solution at best.
It's definitely a long term thing. Some guys from my university founded a company around foldable containers in 2008 (https://4foldcontainers.com/). It's still not common.
The way I read the linked article, the idea is to use peel piles for drayage only. That is, for goods that is due for shorter trips within the same urban area, not for long-haul freight. I think it seems like a part of the solution by virtue of having some potential for lowering drivers’ waiting time and maximizing the speed of emptying out a fully stacked terminal.
G/O media is particularly terrible with illustrations. They once had an article abut the ISS with a picture of Mir as an illustration.
I think they have a contract with a stock image provider, no photographer, and no one to seek out and license original pictures. Writer are probably asked to select an illustration in their stock image library.
I think it is a disgrace to journalism. The front picture is, with the title, the most important part of the article, do some effort FFS, or don't put a picture at all.
> G/O Media Inc. is an American media holding company that runs Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel, The Root, The A.V. Club, The Takeout, The Onion, and The Inventory
It is -- the sites sold for $135m in 2016 (out of the gawker bankruptcy) to Univision. Gawker media group was famously operationally well run and threw off lots of cash.
After Great Hill bought them for $20m -- presumably with a ton of debt, or something -- they then put an idiot named Jim Spanfeller in charge. Jim managed to get the entire staff of deadspin -- also a profitable, well run site -- to quit en masse. Said staff later started Defector and are running it as a coop, basically. Defector has survived a full year running on subscription fees and largely without advertising (or maybe entirely without?).
Over the past decade advertisers shifted spending onto deep targeting (benefitting primarily FB and GOOG) and re-targeting (benefitting any rando site with lots of pageviews) away from interest-based publishers.
> Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. A place that just stacks empty containers 2 high probably only has large forklifts. The special equipment for high stacking is far more expensive, and only bought if you need it.
This begs the question: If container storage were the only bottleneck, wouldn't operators merely lease space further afield? There's plenty of space in Corona, San Bernardino, and environs that wouldn't take more than a 30 minute commute each way.
I can't help but feel like there are other confounding factors at play.
Sidenote... I think this might be the first time I've personally heard "There's an app for that" to essentially indicate "this is a solved problem" - even if in this case it does kind of mean "software exists to solve this problem" in a literal sense.
We're only a decade or so out from when "there's an app for that" represented this cool new novel idea that you could install an app on your fancy new smartphone to do something useful.
Now it's trivial and commonplace but I could see this slogan sticking around in our vernacular outside of its original context kinda like the save icon. Neat.
I wrote "there's an app for that" because IMC does have an app for that.[1] Also a web site.[2] Drivers need to be able to talk to the container dispatching system.
That's a side issue, though. As the number of containers in temporary storage increases, system throughput drops. So, once you get into overload, you're stuck there until you somehow reduce traffic or get more capacity. That seems to be the current situation.
It's not just at the US end. Shipify reports about 200 ships stuck waiting to get into Chinese ports.[3] (That article has a good overview of the situation.) At the China end, there's an empty shipping container shortage.
Back in July, US farmers were also complaining about an empty shipping container shortage.[4] Ship lines wanted to load up and get out, because the China->US rate is currently much, much higher than the US->China rate. So loading up containers at the US end apparently cost time and profits. The way empties are handled is driven by a system of economic incentives to not hold onto empties, and apparently that's not working well enough to get containers back to someplace useful. Someone has to pay to ship the containers back.
It sounds like these are complementary solutions, no? Some yards have stacking equipment, some don't. It seems far more reasonable to let them become "sinks" for containers, which they'd gladly do and which would require nothing other than removing red tape, rather than requiring adoption of a more complex routing system.
Though efficient, this sounds incredibly stress-inducing for drivers, since it makes them even less able to plan ahead and know their future work schedule.
Couldn't large forklifts that have enough weight capacity to lift one full container and enough height capacity to lift an empty container on top of another simply pick up a stack of two containers from the bottom at the same time and put the two on top of a third, making a three-high stack?
The ends aren’t flat and the containers aren’t structurally designed for that. You’re putting twice the designed load for the bottom of the container on an end that wasn’t made to support that. I’d imagine it would do a fair amount of damage.
There are truck driver shortages too. It’s a crappy deal for a truck driver to take a load which they don’t know it’s risks/payout or how long of a drive they will be taking, what they’ll do at destination, or if they’ll have a return trip.
Odds are you could offer truckers a special premium flat rate to clear the blockage - but it wouldn’t be sustainable.
California emission standards also disallow a decent portion of truck fleets from operating in the state. Source is an extended family member who owns a small trucking company in Midwest.
The Twitter thread said that the crackdown on illegal immigrants hit the California trucking industry hard since so many companies were using undocumented drivers to cut down on their costs.
Ah well, I guess that’s a nice opportunity to quote and paraphrase the meme: if you can’t make a profit while paying a living wage, the problem is not with minimum wage but with your business model.
Arguably this is more true in shipping than other disciplines. There are great economies of scale in shipping, and drivers/operators will be required regardless of wage. importing goods from low-cost areas, transporting goods with underpaid workers, and selling them in minimum wage stores doesn't seem like a great business model.
Do shoes need to cost $20 or do the workers need to be paid $20/hr to afford $60 locally produced shoes?
This is literally the same argument for why Uber/Lyft/Doordash drivers need to know the details of a fare before accepting, but a couple of orders-of-magnitude higher.
my understanding is that not all containers pay the same (since they are different weights, have different destinations, etc.) and so this mostly screws over the driver who loses the ability to select the best offer.
Not only do containers not pay the same, but containers to the same location often don't pay the same. So many variables and often the driver is the one that ends up getting screwed in the process. I completely understand why so many simply refuse certain loads. And getting assigned a load you know nothing about before it's on your truck is a no go for most drivers.
I mean the rhetoric of free unregulated market is that the “homo economicus” would use total information and make fully conscious decisions.
Seems like some are withholding information to push other actors to make bad deals, externalize losses and generally speaking skirt from supply/demand dynamics.
No, it isn't. Most, or at least a very high percentage of independent truckers bid for cargo runs. Your cargo needs to get from point A to point B and weighs X amount and needs pickup and delivery at certain times. Truckers bid on the those routes and the the winning bidder gets the route.
If you don't want a delivery you don't bid on it or you set your bid high enough to make you want to take it. If no one bids on a delivery then the shipper raises the maximum they will pay and the process starts all over. Delivery location or pickup location a horrible place? Again, don't bid or bid high.
This is exactly the definition of a free market. Telling an independent that they must take the next load available without letting them decide if they even want it is not. That's being an employee. And shipping companies have spent years getting rid of their own fleets and drivers to push the cost to the individual drivers. And yes, there are a LOT of apps for this.
Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. A place that just stacks empty containers 2 high probably only has large forklifts. The special equipment for high stacking is far more expensive, and only bought if you need it.[2]
A more useful proposal is a "peel pile".[3] This is a system which assigns outgoing trucks an easily accessible container to deliver, rather than a specific container that has to be retrieved. There's an app for that. This is being implemented by IMC, the largest marine drayage company in the US. They say they're already up to 8 high stacks in the LA area. The higher the stack, the longer the retrieval time.
"This keeps drivers moving and productive, even if they don’t know the exact load they’re getting or the delivery location." So it's really dumping the sorting problem on drivers. They have no idea where they're going next. There has to be some way to separate containers by approximate location to make this work, so a driver knows how far they're going to be asked to take the thing.
How well this all works depends on how well the software organizing the stacking works.
[1] https://jalopnik.com/the-streets-of-los-angeles-are-overflow...
[2] https://www.bison-jacks.com/why-bison/blog/how-to-lift-a-shi...
[3] https://www.peelpile.com/