An Unexpected Victory: Container Stacking at the Port of Long Beach
A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened. It’s important to 1. Understand what happened. 2. Make sure everyone knows it happened. 3. Understand how and why it happened. 4. Understand how we might cause it to happen again. 5. Update our models and actions. 6. Ideally make this a turning point to save civilization. That last one is a bit of a stretch goal, but I am being fully serious. If you’re not terrified that the United States is a dead player, you haven’t been paying attention – the whole reason this is a miracle, and that it shocked so many people, is that we didn’t think the system was capable of noticing a stupid, massively destructive rule with no non-trivial benefits and no defenders and scrapping it, certainly not within a day. If your model did expect it, I’m very curious to know how that is possible, and how you explain the years 2020 and 2021. Here’s my understanding of what happened. First, the setup. 1. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together are responsible for a huge percentage of shipping into the Western United States. 2. There was a rule in the Port saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high. 3. This is despite the whole point of shipping containers being to stack them on top of each other so you can have a container ship. 4. This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing. 5. If you violated this rule, you lost your right to operate at the port. 6. In normal times, this was annoying but not a huge deal. 7. Thanks to Covid-19, there was increased demand to ship containers, creating more empty containers, and less throughput to remove those containers. 8. 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. 9. Trucking comp
