That's a great point, Rotterdam and Oakland are both not great choices for comparisons. However, there is a general point that US ports such as LA + Long Beach do lag in efficiency compared to Asian ports such as Singapore for example (which is heavily automated but also unionized).

For example in "CONTAINER TERMINAL PRODUCTIVITY: EXPERIENCES AT THE PORTS OF LOS ANGELES AND LONG BEACH" Le and Murphy give some comparisons of LA and Long Beach to other leading terminals.

Taking Singapore as our main example, as of 2004 it moved 2.7 as much container volume as LA but occupied roughly half the land area. It has 6 times the TEU/acre of LA and 64% higher TEU/crane. General trends also hold for Kwai Tsing (HK) and Klang (Malaysia).

To quote Le and Murphy in the above-mentioned paper:

"Further consideration of these factors reveals that the terminal operators at these ports are aware of the technologies and practices used at other world ports that would allow them to achieve a higher level of performance. However, the present operating agreements between terminal operators and port labor prevent the implementation of such technologies and practices."

LA and Long Beach may also be hampered somewhat in that we apply pollution regulations to them, do these other ports have those restrictions?

Effectively, "it's complicated".

Everything is complicated, and we live in a world of high causal density, but that does not mean we should throw up our hands in dismay and self-pity.

It is clear that the union is exploiting its monopoly on the supply of port labor, to decrease efficiency, and increase costs and union membership. For some reason, most people are less likely to attribute high costs to monopoly unions, but more than happy to do so for monopoly corporations.

I don't think their agenda is anti union as much as it is driven by generating readership.

We see lots of these kind of on the surface interesting articles, but when it comes to having any meat, there isn't any. Just this morning on npr, there was a piece about white and Asian students being disproportionately designated as gifted, but then went on to say that there were no resources afforded those students anyway, so it was all for naught. They might as well have nominated all students as gifted because nothing accompanied such nomination.

It's like congress saying everyone is on the us presidential ballot, except everyone who is six foot three. I could complain, but it makes no difference. It's not as if you get a consolation prize.

Now, surely, _if_ they had resources behind the charade, then yes, they should try to identify all gifted students, but as is, its a meaningless designation.

Rotterdam's ships arrive after having dropped off cargo at may ports along the way as they travel from Asia, whereas those arriving in LA are making their first port of call of the journey. That accounts for the difference in containers unloaded per ship.

It seems to me that the relevant metric would be the ports' per-container handling fees. According to the article, Oakland charges $300, but it doesn't provide comparable numbers to compare against.

What if we measure efficiency in cost per container moved, rather than size of port per container moved?

er, what does volume of traffic or harbor size have to do with efficiency? And a larger number of smaller ships in Rotterdam seems harder to process, so that would count in favor of LA.

The ideal metric would be $ cost per container; we don't have that in the article, but he does talk about containers per crane, which while not perfect, is at least relevant.