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I'm reading about the massive negative effects of having a single port closed in the US will have on the economy and it makes me wonder why.
The obvious answer is that all US ports operate at 100% capacity all the time and there's no slack to allow for traffic from a closure to be rerouted.
If that's the answer, then I want to know why more capacity hasn't been added.
For some ports, like Tampa, there's infrastructure preventing the entrance of the large ships. I'd love to see Skyway III built so that the really big ships could get in.
But lots of other places the reason is lack of political will to spend the money to expand capacity.
There's gobs of blame to spread around, but it's the usual suspects when it comes down to it.
Our national transportation infrastructure should not be so brittle that losing a single node causes collapse. Inconvenience, sure, but not collapse.
It's especially galling in that I know we had plans for several of our ports to be hit with nukes and to be back into shipping armies and materiel to Europe mere days after the attack.
What the fuck happened?
Sadly, "the usual suspects" is the answer, yet again.
A lot of it isn't even the lack of political will to expand ports... it's politics actively thwarting it. A good example are ports in California which are the primary entry points to an extremely large percentage of Chinese manufactured goods (and Japan, India, etc). In order words, massively important. California is working on putting rules into effect which will massively impact companies that move goods from ships to elsewhere. They are going to ban any diesel trucks from being used at the ports, and force only use of EV. That's going to cause a lot of companies to make massive purchases (the intent), but it will also have massive side effects which should be obvious but the libtards are ignoring or oblivious. It is going to dramatically increase shipping costs for sure. It will also probably cause a lot of companies to use a smaller EV fleet to move goods to warehouses outside the port then transfer them to diesel trucks. CA of course is also moving to ban new diesel trucks from their roads entirely, so it may move a lot of warehousing to Nevada or Arizona. It may also spur shipping to other ports, Houston being one of the obvious ones that may see increases. I wouldn't be surprised to see someone build a port in Baja Mexico to circumvent California since NAFTA allows Mexican "flagged" trucks to easily cross into AZ, NM & Texas. Or possibly use rail to move cargo containers from MX to the US to get around California.
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