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This is: A Brief Introduction to Container Logistics, published by Vitor on the LessWrong.
Container logistics is an interesting but complicated topic, with a lot of implicit knowledge kept by industry insiders. In this post, I'll give a brief overview, based on my experiences having worked in the industry for three different shipping companies (all located in Chile) over a period of five years. Hopefully, this will allow people to get more accurate models of the heavy port congestion in Long Beach that has been theorized about extensively here on LW. I can't comment on circumstances specific to that port or the US more generally; but there's a set of underlying intuitions that should give people a solid, universal foundation to think about the issue. Based on those intuitions, I think people are way too optimistic about simple and easy solutions that claim to make major progress on the problem overnight.
Lifecycle of a Container Shipment
I'll start with the basics. Let's say you want to send some cargo from port A to B. Thanks to the invention of standardized shipping containers, this is a relatively easy process, vastly easier than 100 years ago. All the equipment used along the trip (ships, cranes, truck trailers, etc) are specialized for the task of moving containers. This reduces costs dramatically, and makes your cargo arrive faster and safer.
The main trunk lines of international transport are between Asia and the US west coast, and between Asia and Europe (through the Suez canal). There's a significant amount of traffic across the Atlantic too. All of this is done with massive container ships carrying 8'000 or more TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units. 20' container = 1 TEU, 40' container = 2 TEUs). Then there are many, many feeder services with much smaller vessels, going along the coasts of every continent, delivering cargo to/from smaller ports. I was in charge of container logistics for one such feeder line along the South American West Coast, visiting Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile.
From a user perspective the process of shipping from A to B looks like this: you make a booking with a shipping company. This booking allows you to pick up a standardized container at a depot, which is usually near A, but might be hundreds of kilometers inland as well. You fill the container with your goods, and apply a tamper proof seal. You then arrange to get that container to port A, which will give you a bill of lading (a physical or virtual document similar to a cheque for the goods). The container is then loaded onto a ship, and sometime later that ship arrives at port B, where it can be claimed by someone who holds the bill of lading. The container may or may not be on its original ship: it may have been a straight shot, or it may have been transferred at multiple ports between A and B, e.g., from a small feeder route to a larger trunk route.
After the recipient unloads the container at port B, it returns it to a depot. This depot is either directly owned by the shipping line, or it may be a separate company that offers their services to multiple shipping lines. A depot will typically contain thousands of containers. Here, containers are inspected, and minor damages like tears, dents and oil spills can be cleaned up between uses. Shipping lines will typically insist on a return to a depot even if the recipient immediately wants to ship something back out, for liability reasons.
These depots are concentrated near the port of course, but there are also many depots far away from any port, near important cities and industrial centers. In that sense, a port can have a very large area of influence, and the container fleet that a shipping company keeps will also be spread over this entire area.
Issues of Trust and Cooperation
The whole shipping process involves dozens of actors, fro...
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