www.zerohedge.com By Tyler Durden
By Greg Miller of FreightWaves,
If so many container ships are stuck in the Pacific Ocean, waiting for weeks for a berth in Los Angeles or Long Beach, why not reschedule calls to another port? Why not make like Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in the circa-1996 film and “Escape from LA”?
It’s not that simple, given how much warehousing and transloading capacity is built around the Southern California gateway — and congestion is affecting every port in America. Even so, shippers and carriers are indeed moving to sidestep Los Angeles/Long Beach.
In the ongoing battle for Asian imports between the West Coast and East Coast, the momentum is once again swinging back to the east. “November was the sixth straight month in a growing dichotomy in performance between the West Coast and East/Gulf Coast port ranges, with the latter performing markedly better,” wrote consultant John McCown in the new edition of the McCown Container Volume Observer.
