TRUCK turn times in Los Angeles-Long Beach are back normal, but that's not nearly good enough, says the developer the Metris index.
The Metris index, which rates turn times from zero to 100, rated LA-Long Beach at 40 in June - an 11-month high. The ports' best reading was 64 in January 2011, when average turn times were less than an hour.
But Metris Index developer Digital Geographic Research Corp says a reading of 40 is troubling because it should at least be an acceptable level of 50.
But to achieve an optimal level it should be 60 or higher, said Digital Geographic president Val Noronha, whose firm analyses truck turn times using GPS technology, Under his rating scheme zero and single digit scores are those third world ports where trucks are stuck in port for days while readings in the 90s go to Busan, which advertises 10-minute turn times.
Mr Noronha said terminal shutdowns for the hour-long lunch breaks were unwarranted, suggesting instead they stagger lunches so the gates can remain open.
The worst time of the day in Los Angeles-Long Beach, he said, is the hour when the day shift ends at 5pm and the night shift begins at 6pm.
Under the PierPass extended gates programme, a traffic mitigation fee is charged during the day shift to encourage more traffic during the night shift, when no fee is charged.
Truckers queue up for an hour or longer at that time of day to wait for the fee-free night shift to begin. Mr Noronha suggested changing the PierPass fee in a way that will make it unnecessary to queue up for an hour or longer.
In the last year, terminal congestion began to increase in the spring of 2014 because of railway trouble, a chassis shortage and the arrival of large ships that created dock clogging cargo surges.
Conditions worsened in November when the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) refused to dispatch men needed to clear the backlog and the employers of the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) retaliated by cutting highly paid night and weekend work.
These conditions persisted until a tentative agreement was reached in February, but it took three months to clear the backlog of vessels at anchorage and containers ashore.
Since then, volumes increased, ships got bigger, carriers expanded their presence in alliances, which caused logistical, carriers stopped providing chassis and container surges of 5,000 or more became common.
The port authorities have launched neutral chassis pool, which has brought stability, he said. The ports have started a "peel off" programme that block-stores containers that will be pulled by a single trucking company, thus improving turn times.
The ports have also identified near-dock sites where inbound containers can be trucked off as soon as they are discharged from the vessels to improve terminal fluidity.
Mr Noronha said those measures are positive, but are producing only incremental gains, reports Newark's Journal of Commerce. His research has identified specific times of the day when turn times regularly exceed two hours, and he said immediate action is needed to eliminate those roadblocks.
