Container shipping

Every intermodal move has one weak joint: the moment a box stops being a maritime asset and becomes a road asset. Everything upstream is planned in days, everything downstream in minutes, and the two schedules meet at the quay.

The ninety-minute problem

A container discharged at Le Havre is theoretically available the moment the crane releases it. In practice it waits — for customs clearance, for a slot, for a driver whose tachograph still has hours on it. Across our own corridors the median dwell between crane release and gate-out was eighty-seven minutes. Not catastrophic. Just repeated four thousand times a year.

What we changed

We stopped treating the port call as an event and started treating it as a window: paperwork pre-cleared against the bill of lading, drivers rostered against the berth window rather than the published ETA, and a chassis already staged inside the terminal gate.

Median dwell is now thirty-one minutes. The corridor did not get shorter — the waiting did.

Where it does not work

None of this survives a congested terminal. Above roughly eighty-five percent of crane capacity the berth window itself becomes unreliable, and slot-matched rostering costs more in idle driver hours than it saves in dwell. On those lanes we run the conventional model, and we say so in the quote.