An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

Ongoing related thread:<p><i>What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29029825" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29029825</a><p>The previous stack:<p><i>Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28971226" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28971226</a> - Oct 2021 (483 comments)<p><i>Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28957379" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28957379</a> - Oct 2021 (265 comments)

&gt; There was a rule in the Port of Los Angeles saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.<p>This is incorrect. There was a zoning rule which affected truck yards in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Truck yards. Not the port itself.<p>As stated in the linked tweets actually.<p>But if you don&#x27;t believe that you can just google an image of the Port of Los Angeles from let&#x27;s say 2019 and count how high the container piles go. Here is a randomly selected image from 2019 where 5 high piles can be clearly counted: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joc.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;field_feature_image&#x2F;Port%20of%20Los%20Angeles%20trucks%20Jan.%202019%20FIT.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joc.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;field_feature_image&#x2F;...</a><p>Accuracy is important. I&#x27;m not an expert on logistics, or zoning laws. But how could I trust the article&#x27;s author when they clearly unable to parse their own sources?<p>&gt; 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.<p>It&#x27;s nice that the article is not going into that. Instead it hammers on that politicians regulate where and how many containers can you plop down. That is not the real issue.<p>If you are moving containers into an area, and you are not moving an equal amount out then you are going to run out of space to store the containers. It is that simple. You can tweak rules to make a bit more space, for example by stacking them higher in the truck yards. But the real question is: why are the people who own these containers incentivised to move them back to where they want them to be filled? If you solve that the problem solves itself. If you can&#x27;t solve that piles of containers will fill up what little more space you won by tweaking. So the very point the article decides to &quot;not go into&quot; is the only one worth going into.

Someone correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, but my understanding is that the &#x27;stacking rule&#x27; meant that people with more empties than they could stack 2 high on their property were &quot;storing&quot; empties on <i>trailer chassis</i> that carry one container.<p>As I understood it, by letting them stack empties higher, it freed up trailers to be used by trucks to go get containers out of the port. When <i>that</i> happens the port then wants empties to put back on the ship (or full if they are going somewhere) and then the ship can continue on.<p>So the &quot;win&quot; here was that more trailers would be available to take <i>full</i> containers from ships and that would move things along.

I suppose it&#x27;s not fair, but I was disappointed after reading the title, hoping that the article would be an assessment on whether changing the container stacking rule has made a difference yet. There seems to be a fair amount of skepticism that the stacking rule was having a large negative impact, so I was excited to see an assessment of how&#x2F;if it&#x27;s made any difference.

&gt; * 14. Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.*<p>&gt; <i>15. None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away.</i><p>It&#x27;s been my experience that nearly all of the times it&#x27;s the low-, and maybe mid-, -level workers who see problems. And it&#x27;s usually the upper end of the business or bureaucracy who end up ignoring the problem.<p>And then it&#x27;s also been my experience that after the problem gets ignored for a while, the people who <i>see</i> the problem also don&#x27;t report later problems because they know it won&#x27;t be fixed and they&#x27;re not empowered to fix it themselves.<p>This is a widespread problem in my eyes.

Apropos the importance of building new container shipping ports in places that don’t have land scarcity, traffic, and well organized NIMBYs? Let me introduce you to the port of Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia.<p>The port of Prince Rupert has 5 (as in “can be counted on one hand”) berths and transfers 1.2M containers per year.<p>The port of Long Beach has 80 (yes, eight-zero!!!) berths and only transfers 8.1M containers per year.<p>Long Beach transfers 100k containers per berth per year. Prince Rupert transfers 240k containers per berth per year.

&gt; A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously.<p>This is a little disingenuous. From what I understand, this was a rule put in place a long time ago, in a different context. The ramifications of such rule under unprecedented stress weren&#x27;t understood or foreseen. Infinitely stacked containers would probably be an eyesore to be honest.<p>Great they removed the rule, but don&#x27;t forget about Chesterton&#x27;s fence.

&gt; A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore<p>No, that wasn&#x27;t the case. It was a Fire Department ordinance for the city and not the port. It didn&#x27;t apply to the Port of Long Beach itself. This is a photo from October 19th, before the emergency order on October 22.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;nation&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;26&#x2F;los-angeles-long-beach-ports-fine-firms-over-container-backlog&#x2F;8549770002&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;nation&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;26&#x2F;los-an...</a><p>Containers are stacked five high.

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen at companies. There is a serious problem that all the lower level people know about, but nobody says anything to the higher ups because nobody wants to be seen as a troublemaker and potentially lose their job. Everyone assumes that eventually it will become so bad that the higher ups will notice. That rarely happens in my experience. Instead things become bad and the solution is layoffs, reorgs, etc. In the midst of the chaos we can often make the change that precipitated the whole crisis without anyone becoming wiser. Rinse and repeat.

This article is ridiculous. &quot;It&#x27;s so easy but nobody expected it to happen!&quot;<p>Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility!<p>It&#x27;s therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn&#x27;t realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair. This guy almost certainly didn&#x27;t even realize he could do anything to fix the problem and the fact that he resolved it in 8 hours (!) is something to be celebrated, not chided.

From what I heard, the real issue is the ships are not bringing these containers back, because: 1. there&#x27;s not so much good for US to export (volume-wise); 2. shipping price is so high that to save time, ships do not wait to load empty containers.<p>As long as US has a net import of containers, whatever buffer created will be filled up soon.

All the dismissals here are fascinating to me — and sure seem to be exactly the overarching story of TFA. Yes, this certainly isn&#x27;t the only problem here, but it&#x27;s <i>certainly</i> the easiest to fix.<p>And yes, the narrative of the story is definitely important, because it <i>avoided</i> all the rabble you see here that was getting in the way of a simple first step.

Government can move extremely quickly when there is universal agreement. For precisely that reason, periods of universal agreement rarely last long.

I followed this and from my understanding the changes while enacted quickly are still only temporary (rollback in 120 days). If that&#x27;s the case, I&#x27;d like &quot;them&quot; to think about how this situation could have been avoided all together. I can&#x27;t help but thinking about how all the Asian markets were having similar log jams due to economies reopening and the Suez issue months ago. Surely it was known (or, could have been known) that that log jam was tsunami wave heading to LA?<p>I&#x27;m not sure if stacking 5-6 high is a long term solution. It works now, because it&#x27;s only at 2 high and the buffer is available. But if they were at 5-6 high under normal circumstances when this tsunami wave hit we&#x27;d be talking about letting them go 8-9 high? Maybe limit them to 2 high but allow them to file a temporary permit to go to X high with justification... something along those lines, so it is a rather accessible flex up and down and it doesn&#x27;t require extreme levels of non-local politics to accomplish.

OK so this is essentially a self-written news story that was manipulated to make it feel-good.<p>That&#x27;s <i>bad</i>.<p>Also, now that I know I&#x27;m manipulated, I&#x27;m skeptical that the changes will have the outcome that they want. It <i>could</i> but it&#x27;s not good that you&#x27;ve told me you&#x27;ve manipulated me.<p>That&#x27;s <i>also bad</i>.

From near the end: &quot;My going theory on why the news isn’t being shared is because it is being instinctively suppressed by the implicit forces that filter out such actions from the official narratives. The whole scenario might give people the idea that we could do things because they’re helpful. It gives status to someone for being helpful. It highlights our general failure to do helpful things, and plausibly blames all our supply chain (and also plausibly all our civilizational) problems on stupid pointless rules and a failure to do obviously correct things. That’s not a good look for power, and doesn’t help anyone’s narratives, so every step of the way such things get silenced.&quot;<p>No, I think the news isn&#x27;t being shared because it doesn&#x27;t stoke fear, greed, or anger. The economics of the news causes people in those industries to (consciously or subconsciously) prioritize headlines which stoke fear, greed, or anger. &quot;We solved a problem&quot; doesn&#x27;t stoke any of that.

In Factorio design this is simply increasing the buffer size. If the truck-loadings-per-hour don&#x27;t increase then it&#x27;s not going to matter how large you make the buffer.<p>Adding a secondary site for putting containers also seems like it&#x27;s going to be a new challenge for the logistics company scheduling the rides (I have a friend who deals with train cargo scheduling). Truckers who are used to showing up at the port are now going to have to go to a completely different site altogether, and who knows how many IO issues the new site will also bring in.<p>Now&#x27;s the chance for logistics companies to start hiring OpenTTD players.

Some talk about &#x27;building a new port&#x27; as part of the solution. I&#x27;m thinking that&#x27;s a decade project and $100B or some such? PoLA tried to expand for a decade and the impact statements got bogged down and nothing happened if I remember right (my sister-in-law was doing the math on the statements)

This seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Something is causing a surplus of empty containers, and allowing them to expand storage for them isn&#x27;t going to change the underlying problem. So if the new rule to allow them 6-high is temporary, the owners will stack them 6-high and then run out of room again. But next time the (temporary) rule change will revert to 2-high and they&#x27;ll all be in violation. If they get the proposed government land to &quot;dump&quot; them &quot;temporarily&quot; that will simply become a huge pile of empty containers.<p>It sounds like anyone with a fancy use for empty shipping containers can probably get them for &quot;free&quot; right now if you just show up with a truck to haul them away.

Just because they changed behavior doesn’t mean it will work.

The bureaucratic rule of only stacking containers of two in storage areas seem absurd when in the rest of the world there examples of them being stacked 9 or even 12 high. Weird government rules should have sunset clauses, at least for man-made emergencies.<p>Maybe they should travel and see how ports are managed in the rest of the world.<p>This workflow rule that clogged the port seems to be the perfect platform for a former McKinsey consultant like Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to shine. Yet that thunder is stolen by the WSJ coverage and Flexport CEO tweetstorm.

I think we can summarize that the solution is to remove things that prevent the free market from functioning properly. Here are some additional ideas:<p>-Unions are good for representing workers in negotiations with private companies. Taxpayers do not have anyone to represent them in negotiations with public unions. Disallow unions in government jobs. Government already has enough corruption and inefficiency.<p>-Dismantle the patent system. Ideas are worthless, execution is everything.<p>-Abolish the limited liability company. We saw in the mortgage crisis that allowing private companies to profit by putting risk on the public shoulders leads to disaster.<p>-Publish all tax records and make a constitutional amendment that all prices paid must be public. The free market makes the basic assumption that all prices paid and offered are public information.

Great post. I more or less assumed this is what had happened, but great to see it written up.<p>On one hand, the fact that you need to go through this kind of song and dance to get anything done is probably yet another good indicator that America is deep into an irreversible decline. One the other hand, it&#x27;s great to see this kind of well-document contemporaneous analysis of what good change making actually entails right now, something that&#x27;s not only interesting and useful currently, and will surely be of interest to folks long into the future.<p>Like maybe being right was never enough to get things done at any point in history, but the amount of hoops you currently need to jump through in addition to being right seems deeply pathological.

It seems weird that there is no incentive to put empty containers on an empty boat to China, esp when there is a shortage of containers in China. Maybe the port should charge higher rent for storing empty containers? There is something missing in the story.

This is a lesson on policy and rhetoric. As a programmer I always assumed people thought like me. But they don&#x27;t. Studying policy mid-career is one of the most eye opening things I have done. Like it or not, if you want to advance policy you have to set up an organized plan that evokes some emotion. This is opposed to applying only logic which would motivate me if I were the audience. Apply to reason alone and you will lose.<p>&gt; Then our hero enters, and decides to coordinate and plan a persuasion campaign to get the rule changed. Here’s how I think this went down.

Two points:<p>First, negative feedback is <i>good</i>. The problem here was a case of positive feedback, which are always <i>bad</i>. This Ryan person <i>might</i> be helping in the one crisis, but he has just installed a thousand new timebombs.<p>Second, the reason NYT has nothing about this is that NYT editors tell its reporters to find stories that seem to illustrate what the editors want said. NYT is not really interested in what is actually happening; NYT has always been that way.

Article is wrong. The rule for max 2 container height stacking was for areas *outside&quot; of the port&#x2F;terminal, i.e various container yards hinterland.

What will people be watching to see the effect? Is there any data published that would show an increase in freight behind moved because of this change?

&gt;how about we create a new port?<p>There <i>are</i> other ports. They&#x27;re not economically viable. See e.g. my old comment about the history of Prince Rupert, BC:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28871284" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28871284</a>

This was a great story to read, especially after enduring over a year where so many small problems scaled into largely avoidable huge harms due to well-intentioned (but poorly thought through) rules being followed or created.

This is a regional problem. There are other ports in the US (East Coast, etc). I don’t see how it will be a global problem. Sure it will affect supply and demand significantly, but it’s not a global catastrophe.

I just finished listening to the freaknomics podcast about negativity in the media. Maybe this story didn&#x27;t gain traction because it doesn&#x27;t fit the &quot;If it bleeds, it leads&quot; model.

This is not a victory. In the area where I live containers constantly fall into the ocean because shipping companies stack them too high.<p>The only thing this achieves is even more garbage in the ocean.

This article suggests that the twitter thread about the boat ride was just a story that could be told. If so, it&#x27;s harmless, but I&#x27;m left wondering, is it true?

So in short, NIMBY zoning rules caused the port to suffocate on its own containers, even though it is merely a stone&#x27;s throw from working oil pumps and LAX.

But did it actually help? It&#x27;s not clear to me that suspending the rule had the intended effect.

Wow. There&#x27;s just no straight talk anymore... Why does everyone have to dance around the issue. Just say the facts and this article could have been quite a bit shorter.

&gt; There was a rule in the Port of Los Angeles saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.<p>This is not correct.<p>Next though, CA DOT should do a one time waiver and extension of the 90-day BIT inspections on trailer chassis.

Or, and this is radical, we could just stop buying cheap Chinese-made crap like inflatable Halloween decorations made from petroleum products and shipped across the sea using bunker oil.<p>Or, we could pass strong right-to-repair legislation and mandate 3-5 year warranties on electronics so that my 55-inch Samsung curved LED TV can be fixed when it dies at 2 years and one month old.<p>Or, even more radical, we could stop squeezing out consumer babies and training them in our wasteful ways.<p>But no, let&#x27;s keep feeding the bloated consumers of America. Let the planet burn!

This is one of the most incredible victories I&#x27;ve ever seen. Congratulations!

Simple fix: stand containers on their ends. You&#x27;d fit a heck of a lot more even if you don&#x27;t stack two high.