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Logistics article in LA Times
Dec. 16th, 2022 11:19 amhttps://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-16/southern-california-ports-vital-jobs-and-economy-fight-east-coast-rivals
May be paywalled.
This is really nice reporting by Staff Writer Ronald D. White. Earlier in the year / late last year, LA ports were constantly in the news: delays in goods reaching shelves for the holiday season that stretched well into the new year, snarls of ship traffic, truck traffic, etc. Even as it was getting better, there was a lot of fear around whether the end of key contracts at the port would lead to a major strike and further backups. It was hard for shippers to know what to do, but ports on the East Coast — especially Savannah, but NY/NJ, Boston and elsewhere as well — had been trying to lure ships to their ports for years and they finally got some takers.
This survey of the LA logistics landscape touches on all of these points and many more. The port continues on without a contract, but East Coast ports will have a contract coming up in the New Year. During the pandemic, lots of people upgraded their domestic environment, but they aren’t buying furniture any more (and while not mentioned, high interest rates have slowed household formation, another major driver of furniture acquisition), leading to the demise of at least one LA area furniture company. A nice quote from Mario Gonzalez, erstwhile executive, helping former employees find new jobs. Also perspective from a trucker sitting in his truck waiting for a load for a company that abruptly laid him off as it closed up shop completely.
BNSF’s “Barstow International Gateway” is also mentioned — it’s interesting to see that rail is slogging away trying to improve connectivity between ports and the rest of the country.
Booms and busts are both noteworthy, and worth taking the time to understand and think about. While the “bust of the moment” is the implosion of all things crypto (but especially FTX), the rearranging of our logistics landscape from one that is almost entirely focused on Asia-SoCal plus rail and truck, to one that is distributed a bit more around the country and perhaps one day around the world, is important.
ETA:
Barstow, of course, we all know from the song route 66, but its location on 15 well back from 5 is striking. The Marine Corps has a logistics base in Barstow. There are already BNSF rail yards there. I haven’t been to Barstow in over 20 years, and it was pretty small then and doesn’t look that much bigger now. Freight has moved through there for a very long time, tho. The current yard is about 600 acres, second largest west of the Rockies, with the largest being in Roseville near Sacramento, which is 900ish. BNSF is advertising the gateway as increasing to 4500, which is astonishing, when you compare to what seems to be the current largest in the US in Nebraska, Bailey Yard which is under 300 acres.
Railway Age had a piece on it back in October when BNSF announced this, and included some extensive commentary. The only commentary included that makes any sense to me is Larry Gross’ — the idea that you could or would _want_ to plot a large intermodal facility down in the middle of the Central Valley kinda boggles the mind honestly. But Gross’ network analysis is interesting.
Anyway, comparing the size of the proposed gateway to existing classification yards very much misses the point — this isn’t really a classification yard at all. It includes that — albeit at a larger granularity — along with a lot of other things as well. The _most_ striking difference in the commentary on the Railway Age article is that Gross’ ably captures the system implications of this location in terms of reducing overall drayage.
ETAYA:
If you were wondering, hey, is that a good or bad place from an earthquake perspective, so was I!
https://scedc.caltech.edu/earthquake/mojave.html
“Fortunately, the risk of casualties and damage posed by rupture along faults in the Mojave Block is mitigated by the fact that it is a sparsely developed area.”
Not an awesome sentence, but *shrug*. It’s California, after all.
May be paywalled.
This is really nice reporting by Staff Writer Ronald D. White. Earlier in the year / late last year, LA ports were constantly in the news: delays in goods reaching shelves for the holiday season that stretched well into the new year, snarls of ship traffic, truck traffic, etc. Even as it was getting better, there was a lot of fear around whether the end of key contracts at the port would lead to a major strike and further backups. It was hard for shippers to know what to do, but ports on the East Coast — especially Savannah, but NY/NJ, Boston and elsewhere as well — had been trying to lure ships to their ports for years and they finally got some takers.
This survey of the LA logistics landscape touches on all of these points and many more. The port continues on without a contract, but East Coast ports will have a contract coming up in the New Year. During the pandemic, lots of people upgraded their domestic environment, but they aren’t buying furniture any more (and while not mentioned, high interest rates have slowed household formation, another major driver of furniture acquisition), leading to the demise of at least one LA area furniture company. A nice quote from Mario Gonzalez, erstwhile executive, helping former employees find new jobs. Also perspective from a trucker sitting in his truck waiting for a load for a company that abruptly laid him off as it closed up shop completely.
BNSF’s “Barstow International Gateway” is also mentioned — it’s interesting to see that rail is slogging away trying to improve connectivity between ports and the rest of the country.
Booms and busts are both noteworthy, and worth taking the time to understand and think about. While the “bust of the moment” is the implosion of all things crypto (but especially FTX), the rearranging of our logistics landscape from one that is almost entirely focused on Asia-SoCal plus rail and truck, to one that is distributed a bit more around the country and perhaps one day around the world, is important.
ETA:
Barstow, of course, we all know from the song route 66, but its location on 15 well back from 5 is striking. The Marine Corps has a logistics base in Barstow. There are already BNSF rail yards there. I haven’t been to Barstow in over 20 years, and it was pretty small then and doesn’t look that much bigger now. Freight has moved through there for a very long time, tho. The current yard is about 600 acres, second largest west of the Rockies, with the largest being in Roseville near Sacramento, which is 900ish. BNSF is advertising the gateway as increasing to 4500, which is astonishing, when you compare to what seems to be the current largest in the US in Nebraska, Bailey Yard which is under 300 acres.
Railway Age had a piece on it back in October when BNSF announced this, and included some extensive commentary. The only commentary included that makes any sense to me is Larry Gross’ — the idea that you could or would _want_ to plot a large intermodal facility down in the middle of the Central Valley kinda boggles the mind honestly. But Gross’ network analysis is interesting.
Anyway, comparing the size of the proposed gateway to existing classification yards very much misses the point — this isn’t really a classification yard at all. It includes that — albeit at a larger granularity — along with a lot of other things as well. The _most_ striking difference in the commentary on the Railway Age article is that Gross’ ably captures the system implications of this location in terms of reducing overall drayage.
ETAYA:
If you were wondering, hey, is that a good or bad place from an earthquake perspective, so was I!
https://scedc.caltech.edu/earthquake/mojave.html
“Fortunately, the risk of casualties and damage posed by rupture along faults in the Mojave Block is mitigated by the fact that it is a sparsely developed area.”
Not an awesome sentence, but *shrug*. It’s California, after all.