1) Executive order effective immediately over riding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days.
This will free up tens of thousands of chassis that right now are just storing containers on wheels. Those chassis can immediately be taken to the ports to haul away the containers
2) Bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere in the US to the ports and loan them to the terminals for 180 days.
3) Create a new temporary container yard at a large (need 500+ acres) piece of government land adjacent to an inland rail head within 100 miles of the port complex.
4) Force the railroads to haul all containers to this new site, turn around and come back. No more 1500 mile train journeys to Dallas. We're doing 100 mile shuttles, turning around and doing it again. Truckers will go to this site to get containers instead of the port.
5) Bring in barges and small container ships and start hauling containers out of long beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up.
This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don't need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas.
We must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK and get these ports working again. I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail.
Funny how free-market, small-government, deregulation, rhetoric flies out of the window when own profit maximization short-terminism falls apart and everyone starts invoking centrally coordinated state intervention.
I wonder if some governmental bureau tasked with coordinating this market hasn’t been shuttered in the last couple years to some lobbyist great success…
I agree with you, but this isn't necessarily the best example. In this case, frankly part of this issue had to be resolved by relaxing strict zoning laws that weren't allowing space to be used in a way that the market demanded (offloading empty chassis). Such a measure falls under deregulation/free-market/small-government.
The other measures proposed (forcing railroads, national guards etc) are of course of a different order, but it's not clear they'd be necessary if the build-up of empty chassis at the port (because offloading in the nearby area wasn't allowed) never materialised into a massive bottleneck, because zoning laws were deregulated.
Presumably the port would've architected its systems to work within all sorts of constraints, come they from physics, or business, or regulation. The fact that one of them can easily be relaxed is immaterial to their failure to account for it in the first place.
It was the international demand imbalance that tipped it into service disruption; the landscape regulation just set the conditions for the existing bottleneck.
2) Bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere in the US to the ports and loan them to the terminals for 180 days.
Loan them sounds like they want them for free.
What's the plan for the military to move containers during the 180 days if all their kit is loaned out?
But we don't live in a world of small governments and deregulated free markets. Without a regulation on stacking LA might not be at a point where any of those other measures are needed. A funny thing would be limiting yourself to approaches relevant in a system that doesn't exist.
Might, would… look, I don’t want to come up with a True Scotsman counter argument, but it does sound like one: blaming this mess on the single one restriction that seemed to exist.
Are we going to blame driving time restrictions next?
Next I'd blame environment regulations that banned older short-haul trucks from operating in the state, but that's besides that point. The point being: there is no contradiction between wanting smaller government and less regulations and wanting a mess caused by heavy handed regulations to be fixed by heavy handed mobilisation of resources.
<snip>
1) Executive order effective immediately over riding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days.
This will free up tens of thousands of chassis that right now are just storing containers on wheels. Those chassis can immediately be taken to the ports to haul away the containers
2) Bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere in the US to the ports and loan them to the terminals for 180 days.
3) Create a new temporary container yard at a large (need 500+ acres) piece of government land adjacent to an inland rail head within 100 miles of the port complex.
4) Force the railroads to haul all containers to this new site, turn around and come back. No more 1500 mile train journeys to Dallas. We're doing 100 mile shuttles, turning around and doing it again. Truckers will go to this site to get containers instead of the port.
5) Bring in barges and small container ships and start hauling containers out of long beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up.
This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don't need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas.
We must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK and get these ports working again. I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail.
</snip>