Containership sizes and port planning: As small as possible but as big as necessary
If you ask an ocean carrier how big a port should be, he would immediately tell you “as big as possible”. Apparently, he wouldn’t want to wait even for a minute if he could help it, and we have well established that, at a port capacity utilization of around 75%, congestion starts to set in. If instead you ask the same question to a port manager, particularly one responsible for the returns on his money, the answer would be “as small as possible”. Obviously, he would love having ships queuing up outside his port, like the good old times, if he could help it. As usual, both need to put some water in their wine: the ship cannot wait, nor however can the port continue spending taxpayer money so that the ship doesn’t wait. This is particularly so in increasingly commercial activities, such as those of transshipment container terminals, whose impacts are not localized in the economies which have borne the brunt of the investment, but are rather dissipated throughout the supply chain, from the country of origin to the country of final destination of the transported goods.
▻http://haralambides-mel.blogspot.ch/2016/01/containership-sizes-and-port-planning.html
#transport_maritime #container #port #optimisation
