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.
The port of Prince Rupert has 5 (as in “can be counted on one hand”) berths and transfers 1.2M containers per year.
The port of Long Beach has 80 (yes, eight-zero!!!) berths and only transfers 8.1M containers per year.
Long Beach transfers 100k containers per berth per year. Prince Rupert transfers 240k containers per berth per year.
Prince Rupert is also physically closer to Asia (saves 2-3 days of sailing time), and has very little other sea traffic. The rail line is also expanding, and has very little non-port traffic.
The port itself is protected by geography, and is one of the deepest natural harbours in the world.
It's a neat place!
Well, except for being one of the rainiest cities in Canada.
Yes! On one hand, very little snow (and if there is snow, it melts soon enough). On the other hand, no real summer, either. Just rainy season, and less rainy season :-)
To me, you're raising the question of: why are ports in locations like Long Beach and LA (and SF/Oakland)? They seem like terrible locations for ports. There's a lot of coastline on the western US. Why pick places where land is astronomically expensive, and transportation options aren't great?
One reason I can think of is availability of labor, but how many people does it take to run a good-sized port? Not saying we build a new port out in the middle of nowhere, but a location where there is already a small- to mid-sized town nearby might be suitable. And also consider that the existing port locations have housing costs that are probably too high for many/most port workers anyway.
It seems like we need more ports in the US in places similar to Prince Rupert.
Well, to be fair, San Francisco Bay is one of the best natural harbors on the West Coast, and very close to some of the most productive agricultural land in the world. It's a great place for a port, or it was until the NIMBYs showed up. I don't know LA, but I bet it's similar.
LA was never a good natural harbor - in fact I think it was pretty terrible. But they had a lot of cattle hides to export, so ships came, which built up the city, so more ships came, and on and on and on until it was worth building the port facilities:
> The fourteenth of August (in the year 1834) was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim, on her voyage from Boston, round Cape Horn, to the Western coast of North America.
> What brought us into such a place, we could not conceive. No sooner had we come to anchor, than the slip-rope, and the other preparations for southeasters, were got ready; and there was reason enough for it, for we lay exposed to every wind that could blow, except the northerly winds, and they came over a flat country with a rake of more than a league of water.
> I also learned, to my surprise, that the desolate-looking place we were in furnished more hides than any port on the coast. It was the only port for a distance of eighty miles, and about thirty miles in the interior was a fine plane country, filled with herds of cattle, in the centre of which was the Pueblo de los Angeles,– the largest town in California,– and several of the wealthiest missions; to all of which San Pedro was the seaport.
I wonder if the containers per berth number goes down as the number of berths increases in one port because other bottlenecks appear. I suspect adding more ports is actually a way to maintain efficiency here, but there's probably logistical challenges with that (skilled workforce, supply chain support, road network & other infrastructure to handle the volume, etc). There's probably also far more cost to adding a port than adding a berth.
Indeed. And Prince Rupert is probably an outlier since it has almost everything going for it in terms of ship-to-shore efficiency. With a population is ~12k, road traffic rounds to zero. This also shows that a large population isn’t required for a large port.
But, more importantly Prince Rupert is well connected to the CN rail network. A rail connection is key for efficient intermodal shipping. And there aren’t many deep water harbours on the west coast with railways. Building rail or road connections to new ports wouldn’t be trivial.
The port of Prince Rupert has 5 (as in “can be counted on one hand”) berths and transfers 1.2M containers per year.
The port of Long Beach has 80 (yes, eight-zero!!!) berths and only transfers 8.1M containers per year.
Long Beach transfers 100k containers per berth per year. Prince Rupert transfers 240k containers per berth per year.