I worked for a startup in Hampton Roads, VA a while back trying to develop a software program that could predict the location of empty containers so that truckers who delivered a full container more than just a few miles outside of the port areas could save time in locating an empty to bring back. It’s been at least 5 − 6 years, and I don’t remember all of the details, but I remember spending a lot of time involved with trying to understand this industry.
One of the problems, as I recall, was the proprietary nature of some of the information. By that I mean, there was a brokerage or something that actually knew where all the containers were, but they were not going to release that information. So we had to rely on open source bill of lading information from U.S. Customs to develop our model, and even though we had a lot of data, it was still scant in the overall scheme of things. And this goes directly to your observation that all the actors are pretty much in it for themselves.
On a separate but related note, a few years later my wife and I rode a contaier/RO-RO cargo ship for two weeks from Baltimore, MD to Hamburg, Germany. We had stops in Norfolk, VA . . . Halifax, Nova Scotia . . . and Liverpool, England along the way. It was fascinating watching port operations from that perspective. And if anyone’s interested, I wrote a travelog about that journey, with links to two aspects of shipping that few people think about: the evolution of those 20-foot boxes, and the hidden role of the wooden pallet.
Nice article.
I worked for a startup in Hampton Roads, VA a while back trying to develop a software program that could predict the location of empty containers so that truckers who delivered a full container more than just a few miles outside of the port areas could save time in locating an empty to bring back. It’s been at least 5 − 6 years, and I don’t remember all of the details, but I remember spending a lot of time involved with trying to understand this industry.
One of the problems, as I recall, was the proprietary nature of some of the information. By that I mean, there was a brokerage or something that actually knew where all the containers were, but they were not going to release that information. So we had to rely on open source bill of lading information from U.S. Customs to develop our model, and even though we had a lot of data, it was still scant in the overall scheme of things. And this goes directly to your observation that all the actors are pretty much in it for themselves.
On a separate but related note, a few years later my wife and I rode a contaier/RO-RO cargo ship for two weeks from Baltimore, MD to Hamburg, Germany. We had stops in Norfolk, VA . . . Halifax, Nova Scotia . . . and Liverpool, England along the way. It was fascinating watching port operations from that perspective. And if anyone’s interested, I wrote a travelog about that journey, with links to two aspects of shipping that few people think about: the evolution of those 20-foot boxes, and the hidden role of the wooden pallet.
https://cargoshipvoyage.blogspot.com/2019/