A wild idea that I haven’t heard proposed, which won’t solve our short term problems but does seem like a good idea, is how about we create a new port? If I asked you exactly where not to try and hire a bunch of people and especially not to drive a truck away from efficiently, and also to not try to expand into more space and capacity for the future, in all the Western part of the land, I’m pretty sure that my two answers would have been Los Angeles and San Francisco. Not that they are bad places for ports, but they’re where all the people and high prices and land scarcity and traffic are right now.
Um, I don’t really know for sure about Los Angeles, but the whole city of San Francisco is there because it’s geographically a really good place for a port. And I would suspect that LA is the same way. Harbors create big cities. And then huge road and rail networks get built to serve them… over decades and centuries.
Even if a big container port magically materialized in Morro Bay (and I have no idea whether that’s a suitable place from the ocean’s point of view), there’d be no way to move the freight to or from it. But in fact you’d have to start by creating the infrastructure to move the material to build the port itself.
I mean, if you have a magic wand, then instead of moving ports that require massive infrastructure because people have cluttered up the areas with a bunch of software businesses that could operate anywhere, why not just relocate the software businesses?
Um, I don’t really know for sure about Los Angeles, but the whole city of San Francisco is there because it’s geographically a really good place for a port. And I would suspect that LA is the same way. Harbors create big cities. And then huge road and rail networks get built to serve them… over decades and centuries.
Even if a big container port magically materialized in Morro Bay (and I have no idea whether that’s a suitable place from the ocean’s point of view), there’d be no way to move the freight to or from it. But in fact you’d have to start by creating the infrastructure to move the material to build the port itself.
I mean, if you have a magic wand, then instead of moving ports that require massive infrastructure because people have cluttered up the areas with a bunch of software businesses that could operate anywhere, why not just relocate the software businesses?