Seattle, Oakland lag in terminal efficiency
The ports of Seattle and Oakland are the least efficient ports on the West Coast in terms of TEUs handled per acre per year, according to research conducted by Port of Seattle staff.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported this week that Oakland (3,175 annual TEUs per acre) and Seattle (3,511) performed the worst. Vancouver was the most efficient, handling 7,145 TEUs per acre per year. Long Beach, Los Angeles and Tacoma also had higher TEU/acre ratios.
West Coast ports handle a disproportionate amount of U.S. containers, and generally have higher per-acre usage than East Coast ports. But ports on both coasts lag well behind ports in Asia, which move anywhere from 9,000 to 15,000 TEUs per acre annually. A caveat is that many of the most efficient ports, using the annual TEU-per-acre measurement, are transshipment ports, like Hong Kong and Singapore, where an inbound and outbound transshipment movement is counted as two separate moves.
