Instapundit has posted a link to the following Tweet stream which offers an explanation of the congestion at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. As I understand the argument, the bottleneck is getting empty containers off the chassis where they are being stored so the chassis can be used to move full containers out of the port. You need to go read the description of the problem and the author’s proposed solutions.
If it was up to me I’d rent 300 acres of Mojave desert, and have the empties towed out there and stacked six high where it will bother nobody and hurt nothing. This would free the chassis to haul full containers away from the ports and make room for more containers to be unloaded from ships.
What the Tweet author doesn’t say is that every time a ship of full containers is unloaded, it should be reloaded with empties and sent on its way. Somebody needs to determine why this isn’t happening routinely. If every ship which unloads then takes away a similar number of empties clogging of the terminal should not occur.
Is this the whole story? I have no first hand knowledge and provide no guarantees. It does sound like a part of the story. Go here to see Wall Street Journal video of the SoCal ports and their congestion.
