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Trucking Trends: As port backlogs ease, record imports take to the road
Truckload capacity remains tight in Southern California

By Dean Croke, DAT Solutions

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach comprise the San Pedro Bay Port Complex, which handles more containers per ship call than any other port complex in the world. On any given day, the waters are dotted with container vessels waiting to unload cargo.

Nineteen container vessels were anchored on Monday, April 19, with an average eight-day wait time to unload. This time last year, there was only one anchored vessel waiting to unload.

Ripple effects

While the number of ships at anchor is well below the peak of 40 in February, congestion at the country's largest gateway for Asian imports remains and it has a ripple effect on supply chains across North America.

According to the PIERS database provided by IHS Markit, the San Pedro Bay port complex handled 33% of all loaded import containers in the U.S. and 75% of all import containers on the West Coast in March.

Setting records

In March, the Port of Long Beach reported loaded import containers volumes were up 48% year-over-year. Next door at The Port of Los Angeles—the larger of the two ports in the San Pedro Bay Port Complex—March import volumes were up 107% year over year.

All this activity comes as consumers "continued to practice physical distancing guidelines in March and turned their computers into virtual shopping malls," the Port of Long Beach said in a statement.

Furniture was the number-one import commodity at 15% of all imported containers as consumers continue to work and spend more time at home. In March, furniture container volumes were triple the volume compared to March 2020.

Volumes drop, rates rise and capacity tightens

The need to move containers efficiently extends beyond the ports to the warehouses, rails and roads.

DAT Freight & Analytics, which operates the

industry's largest load board for truckload freight, has seen record levels of load posts on the Los Angeles spot market. More recently, we've seen declining volumes and increasing spot rates as capacity continues to tighten. This suggests a strong positive correlation between import volumes and load posts in the Los Angeles market since January 2020.

For example, the highest dry van volume lane from L.A. to Phoenix (8% of load posts) had three-day average rates of $4.01 per mile in mid-April. The rate has almost doubled from last year at the same time and is close to $1 per mile higher than February's average monthly rate.

There's a similar tight-capacity situation on the L.A. to Stockton lane where three-day rates averaged $3.53 per mile, $1.44 per mile higher than this time last year and 44 cents per mile higher than February's average.

Available trucks are hard to find in nearby Ontario, where a large number of import containers are warehoused before being moved to their final destinations.

No matter which lane we look at—and despite the ongoing port congestion—West Coast freight-hauling capacity is constricted, and rates are going up even though import container volumes appear to be cooling.

But we'll keep watching.

The L.A. and Ontario freight markets combined represent around 5% of weekly load post volumes, which makes it the largest freight region in the country.

Dean Croke is the principal industry analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics, a SaaS company that operates the industry's largest data analytics service and load board for truckload freight.