101992 Resource 94086 93210 94146 1126148182978 1201213328189 Controlled West Coast Port Situation for 2005 Peak Season LA and Long Beach Say No Significant Congestion Issues Expected The AmCham (American Chamber of Commerce) Shanghai Logistics and Transportation Services Committee recently met to discuss the LA Port congestion situation in preparation for the upcoming peak season. Don Snyder, Director of Trade &amp; Maritime Services at Long Beach and Jim McClellan, Director of Marketing for Port of Los Angeles attended our meeting via teleconference. <br /><br />During the meeting, Long Beach and LA gave their firsthand accounts of the port situation. Shipping liner experts also joined us to share their insights. To summarize, the ports of LA and Long Beach do not expect to see significant problems during this year&rsquo;s peak season. <br /><br />The ports of LA and Long Beach foresee that cargo will be moving to DCs or rail in a timely fashion and there is no indication of issues to come. The only possible bottleneck they expect could be a shortage of truckers, however capacity seems to be sufficient at present. <br /><br />To ease traffic congestion, the following projects have been introduced: <br /><br /><ol><li>Pier Pass </li><li>Construction of a new dock and rail facility in LA <br /></li><li>Virtual container yards &ndash; where you can interchange containers without going through port <br /></li><li>Inland shuttle trains in the LA area <br /></li></ol>Also, in order to deal with the challenges of working in collaboration with the carriers, rail companies, etc., a &quot;harbor talking group&quot; was formed, the first one discussed chassis issues. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Comments</span> <br /><br />There are no easy solutions for the port congestion problem in the US. It is a good thing that this year the situation in LA/Long Beach may be under control. However, the unprecedented growth in Chinese exports to the US has far reaching long term effects on the US infrastructure. It is expected that LA will experience a 35 million&nbsp; TEU growth over the next few years. The port of Shanghai alone should have 30 million TEUs by 2009, with growth from China overall at 20%/year. <br /><br />About 43% of US imported cargo goes through the LA/Long Beach ports. Are there other options? The staggering growth in import volume at the ports of LA and Long beach is not being dealt with in terms of adequate infrastructure improvements. Explosive Chinese port expansion means ever larger volume of imports coming into lagging US ports. How will your company adapt to the challenges in the future? Will you continue to rely on Long Beach, or will other you consider other options such as the new Prince Rupert Port development? http://www.rupertport.com/ <br /> 9 application/xml false china import china supply chain harbor talking group LA Port Long Beach port congestion Prince Rupert Port supply chain US imports US ports. west coast port Maritime Exchange of Southern California Extensive reports of ship activities for the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach http://www.mxsocal.org/ Planned Prince Rupert Port May Streamline Imports from China to US Prince Rupert is the Closest North American Port for Chinese Imports http://supplychain.establishinc.com/public/item/96976 Pier Pass Registration Register for Pier Pass https://www.pierpass-tmf.org BNSF Rail Website Service Advisory http://domino.bnsf.com/website/updates.nsf/updates?ReadForm&service Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 Establish 208.105.4.154 false true false false true 187565 false false true false false false true 94086 blog blogsite/ChinaSupplyChain/web