A Tale of Two Ports: Automation at Oakland vs. Rotterdam | Hacker News Reader

A Tale of Two Ports: Automation at Oakland vs. Rotterdam

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68 pointsBootvis52 comments

TraPac and Middle Harbor in the Port of Los Angeles are automating. Oakland isn't considered big enough to need it.[1] for an overview of automation in Los Angeles ports, see [2]. The Port of Los Angeles isn't a port operator; it's a landlord. Thirteen private companies have their own terminals, docks and equipment, and two of them are automating now. To automate a terminal, you have to take it out of service and build a new one.

The above references may be too specialized for general readers. Here's a "gee whiz" video of Rotterdam port operations.[3] And a tutorial with animations, from the port of Busan, S. Korea.[4]

Note that the article is partly an ad for FlexPort. Automated ports have less need for FlexPort's service. Most automated ports have buffers, big stacks of containers. Containers come off ships and are transferred to container stacks nearby. On the other side of the stacks, trucks approach and have containers loaded onto them. The terminal handles container sorting.

Oakland loads many containers directly from ships to trucks towing container trailers, without buffering. Matching up trucks and containers is a problem. FlexPort's concept is "Uber for containers" (I know, but here it's real.) Any truck, any container, any destination within some distance limit.

If Oakland had automated container stack buffers, FlexPort wouldn't be needed.

[1] [http://www.joc.com/port-news/port-productivity/us-ports-weig...] [2] https://www.portoflosangeles.org/Board/2014/April/042014_ite... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxXZQ7emHC0 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t2cqiQl0BE

FlexPort's customer is the business paying for the shipping (freight forwarder & customs broker), not the port. Their interest in port automation* is that it makes for interesting content marketing and it may benefit their end-customer someday.

* from what I can tell

IIRC, Rotterdam had a massive govt. subsidy for going fully-automated, which kind of helps.

I spent 10 years between 1997 and 2009 (took a break for grad school) working on semi-automated tracking systems for ports up and down the West Coast (and other places), including one in Oakland. The recent surge in interest in intermodal container ports sure brings back memories!

My company developed niche systems for tracking container location within the terminal by instrumenting and tracking any crane/truck/etc. that could move a container. Even though longshoremen were still operating the equipment, it helped to have a real-time (and historical) picture of what happened, because planning systems were now less subject to clerical mistakes.

Here's their (sort of terrible) website: http://www.nowsol.com/

These guys pretty much own the market for the terminal-planning systems we fed: http://navis.com/

Rotterdam also has unions to deal with. A colleague of mine, who worked on the software for the final stage (some 15 years back) moving containers onto trucks, told a story where, after union negotiations, they implemented a system where forklift truck drivers could choose between three different containers to pick next instead of giving them just one instruction, for the single, most optimal, one.

What is the logic behind it? Having an opportunity to select is more entertaining to the driver?

I am in the middle of writing directed pick/put module for a warehouse. I just had a meeting last week on the exact same topic. My software gives the user the most optimal pick list and the warehouse manager wanted me to change it so his team could pick from alternate bins. His justifications:

1. My software doesn't know that there is a cart/ladder/forklift blocking the most optimal bin while the bin next to it is easily accessible.

2. My software cannot tell if QC is in middle of sampling or if Inventory team is in middle of cycle counting that exact bin.

3. My software doesn't factor in changes in real-world that have not yet been inputted into the computer system. So if there is spillage, quantity, or quarantine issues that haven't been scanned into the system yet, my software calculates the optimal bin incorrectly.

It's not that code cannot calculate what optimal means given a set of requirements. It's just that the end-user might be in a better position to decide if it really is optimal or not.

While the unions are arguably stronger on the US East Cost the International Longshore and Warehouse Union at the Oakland terminal certainly isn't a pushover.

The real automation in the Rotterdam port is the Automatic Guided Vehicle system that moves containers between the loading cranes and a container re-arranging system that optimizes the placement of containers dock side.

The loading cranes themselves are only remote control on the deep water side, and this is for health and safety reasons. The cranes for the trains and barges for the hinterland are sit-in cabs.

SOURCE: I did a tour of the terminal a few weeks ago as part of the 6th International Conference on Computational Logistics [1]

A similar AVG system is in place at Hamburg as seen in this video [2]

[1] http://realtimelogistics.info/iccl/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B3PzgYUK_0

This video suggests the cranes are automated as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxXZQ7emHC0

From the Wikipedia page, it looks like Rotterdam had 36,315 vessel arrivals in 2008 while Oakland had only 1,928. Is this comparison really apples to apples? They point out the difference in tonnage, but I'm just wondering if there isn't a better comparison to be made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Rotterdam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Oakland

As noted in the article, Oakland is containers only while Rotterdam handles other types of cargo as well, and their comparison is based purely on containers. However, all things being equal, it should be more efficient to unload a few ships with lots of cargo compared to lots of ships with little cargo.

That said, Oakland is somewhat weird choice, it's the world's 62nd busiest (by TEU) when Rotterdam is 11th. LA is the busiest in the US at 18th, with Long Beach (also greater LA) not far behind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_busiest_cont...

TIL the average salary for port workers is $147k.

This is the link in that sentence: http://www.pmanet.org/the-ilwu-workforce

Clicking around on that site shows that it is a non-profit representing the companies that negotiate with the longshoreman's union: http://www.pmanet.org/ceo-message

So it's the bosses' word that the average salary for port workers is 147k, and honestly I don't believe it.

That's the kind of quality of life a strong union will get you as a worker. No wonder the biggest business interests have undergone a decades-long propaganda campaign against them.

>>That's the kind of quality of life a strong union will get you as a worker.

The flip side of the coin is that the quality of air you will breathe every single day is guaranteed to be abysmal, and air quality has a very strong inverse correlation with life span.

Why's the air so bad? Because of the bunker oil used on ships, or some other reason?

With benefits worth another $82,000 per year! They don't need to deduct from that salary for a 401(k), that's certain.

And what's the separation between the mean and the median?

One worker making $1,000,000 and 9 making $10,000 gives you an average of $109,000 while only a single worker is above the mean.

This article tells you basically nothing if you're not already convinced that more automation is always better, or that while "technological disruption... almost inevitably leads to displacement of some segments of the workforce. In the long run, however, technology ends up creating better jobs and expanded opportunities across broad spectrums of the economy."

The calculation that "proves" Rotterdam is more efficient is based on the unargued and generally false assumption that both ports are operating at full capacity - the author just divides TEUs by number of cranes. TEUs handled per year in Oakland only just matched their 2006 peak after falling drastically during the Great Recession: http://www.portofoakland.com/maritime/containerstats.aspx

And Oakland's main capacity limitation actually seems to be congestion getting containers out of the Port: http://www.wsj.com/articles/oakland-port-proposes-trucking-f...

I was also expecting hard figures about how many containers and shifts have been lost in accidents compared to an automated port.

''But in many ways, the Port of Oakland, and most American ports in general, are some of the most technologically antiquated in the world.''

This BLDGBLOG post from earlier in the year details to automation on the on the East coast.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.ie/2015/04/infrastructure-as-proces...

I can't wait for more automation to hit US ports. I'm all for decent wages, but dockworkers get paid so much they end up behaving a lot like oilfield workers. Dockworkers are a prime example of what gives unions a bad name.

Do you think nobody should be making six-figure salaries? Or just that unionized workers shouldn't?

The idea of blue-collar workers getting well-paid is very upsetting to some white-collar workers. They feel their social status threatened by people they deem beneath them.

I don't think that's the primary issue people have with high wage union labor, and your comment shows an unwillingness to engage constructively with political opponents.

Unions are a monopoly, and when prices (in this case, of labor) are high due to a monopoly, we must ask whether the government should allow, forbid, or encourage this monopoly. When wages are very low, I think most people are not opposed to unions forcing wages above market rates (I am, but that's another issue). But when wages are high, or driven far above what people think market wages would be, people question the moral basis for protecting workers from competition.

So the issue isn't that blue collar workers are "beneath" white collar workers, but that (at least to an industry outsider) it's not clear what special skills these workers have that would command high market wages.

Let me just ask you: why, in a market system, shouldn't people get as wages whatever they can demand, using personal negotiating skills, collective negotiating skills, law, whatever?

Management won't leave money on the table, why should the workers?

You had me up to "law". From the econ perspective, the "free market" does not include lobbying for particular laws. To define it as such is mockery of the term.

Assuming completely free property rights and contracts, unions would probably have almost no power. The power of unions stems from the fact that they are protected (e.g. you can't fire someone for joining a union) and the fact that the state ignores violent crime when unions commit it (but as far as I know that's not the issue here, I'm just mentioning for completeness).

I think that a legal system that is skewed towards labor is ok, for various reasons. But when you see wages pushed far beyond market wages, it's fair to ask if the system is too skewed.

So to answer your question, a person should not get whatever they can command by influencing the political system. Yes, both sides will try to do it, but in both cases the response should be to argue against them, and instead argue for impartial laws.

EDIT: the delay before the "reply" link becomes active is there for a reason. I'll respond to any reply that I consider to be based on a thorough reading of my post, and not a knee jerk reaction (for reference, the reply I'm referring to was written 4 minutes after my post).

Of course the free market includes the rules that govern it. If you don't have rules, you don't have a market, just a rule of anarchic might-makes-right force.

If you're going to say "well, only property laws then," that's still laws! That's still a set of "this is how it should be" encoded into rules that we all have to agree to to take part in it!

It's just been, for so long, assumed that "screw the workers and don't let them fight back" is somehow "more free" that we treat that like a built-in thing, when really, that's just one way of doing it.

As for state-sanctioned, union-committed violent crime, oh please.

EDIT: Since you edited your remarks to include the last paragraph, I'll address that, too.

Why shouldn't people work to influence the political system in their favor? We all live here, we all have a role to play in the design and operation of the laws of our city/state/country. If enough people like strong worker protection laws, well, that's democracy, why shouldn't that stuff get encoded into law?

SECOND EDIT: Yeah, it only takes a minute or two to read what you're saying and respond to it. I saw a "reply" link right away, so if there's some extra delay built in, it didn't apply to me.

First, I was out of line in my edit. It's not for me to say how you should post on HN, so I apologize. I'll stick to the addressing the content of what you wrote.

The difference in our viewpoints seems to be that you have an "adversarial" understanding of the political system, where different interest groups try to get the best for themselves. On the other hand, I think that politics is mostly driven by ideology, not self-interest. If I can state an ideal set of laws, that should be sufficient and I don't need to concern myself with how special interest groups might try to manipulate the set of laws.

I also think you conflate self-interest with what is right/wrong when you say " If enough people like strong worker protection laws, well, that's democracy, why shouldn't that stuff get encoded into law?". Do they like it because they think it's right, or because it's good for them? That's an important difference.

On the specifics, I mostly believe in the free market. I don't consider the free market to be anti-worker (redistribution through taxation/welfare handles that aspect) or arbitrary. Classical economics shows that the free market should be considered the default position. I also support limited rights for unions, e.g. I don't think an employer should be able to fire you for joining a union, because the employers control of how people communicate in the workplace could be considered an unfair advantage.

Re violence, do you disagree that union members do sometimes commit violence against so-called scabs, when they attempt to enter a worksite? And do you think that in general these acts are punished in the same way that other violent acts would be?

>and the fact that the state ignores violent crime when unions commit it

It is absolutely absurd for you to say this, when unions and workers attempting to unionize have and still continue to be slaughtered for their attempts to gain basic human rights at their workplace.

I would say such a misstatement is laughable but it would be poor taste to make comedy of the deaths of so many.

This is what I was referring to: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2011/08/22/why_do_w...

Can you give any similar examples of violence against unions, say within the last 20 years and in the US?

Your constraints are inappropriate for a world where capitalism is global. If you drink Coke or wear Nike you're directly supporting the murder of workers attempting to unionize and their blood is on your hands.

But, even in the US union organizers are frequently suppressed, either violently or through indirect threats and intimidation. It takes little scholarship to discover this and the absence of such indicates that you're more personally interested in having an argument, where you fight for your side to be considered correct, than actually learning, where you observe evidence in a nonbiased way and integrate that evidence into your beliefs. So it would make little difference for me to give any "similar examples" of the (utterly biased and as other commenters have pointed out, incorrect) source you've provided.

As another aside, it takes a special sort of person to, in the struggle between the powerful and the powerless, side with the powerful as you have here. I hope you contemplate this as you decide what person you are in the future.

Let me first say, I appreciate the spirit in which you're keeping this going; we're civil, we're responding to things, it's great! It's how online chats should be.

I read that article, you're right, at first glance, it's pretty troubling. Seeing the source (one of the oft-propagandistic, oft-badly-sourced Real Clear sites) made me want to follow up on the claims inside.

The Ohio man who was shot, it isn't clear from any authoritative reporting what actually happened--the only people who explicitly link his attacker to a union are secondary sources. It also looks like the authorities were in fact working on it, though I couldn't find any sort of follow-up reporting.

The rest is all so vague that I can't really make a lot of sense of it.

That said, of course I don't condone violence, neither petty vandalism (like leaving debris in the Verizon driveways), nor the economic destruction left behind when multinationals bend laws in favor of offshoring, and then do so, and leave entire towns with no source of employ.

Neither of those is right, but I don't think we'll get to the right place by trying to come up with one "right" set of laws that every person and every business must abide by--I think we'll iterate closer and closer to "right" when people and groups work together to make their slice of the world better.

It's just that, the entire time I've been alive, the working folks and the poor have been under the bootheel of a variety of--excuse the language, I can't really think of another way to be succinct about it--oppressors both large and small, whether it's the people who ship factories overseas to save some bucks (and bend laws in their favor), or the managers who willingly accept just-in-time staffing solutions that leave their workers with unpredictable work schedules, or the managers who cheat workers out of overtime by classifying them as "salaried," or the managers who try to normalize 100-hour work weeks, or ... on and on and on. We work a lot harder for a lot less, and we're still on course to work even more, for even less.

If a union's a way to bend that downward slope a bit, I'm all for it. No historical evidence suggests that less regulation would do it.

Anyway, thanks again for keeping the discussion going in a courteous, engaging fashion.

Unfortunately I don't have time to go into this more, but I also appreciate the tone of your reply.

A very brief summary of my position is that there is a set of "right" laws, and that is the free market with redistribution through taxation. This is not an arbitrary choice, but one justified by classical economics. Anything good for the poor that you would want to accomplish would be better done by redistribution than by unions. Except, of course, pleasing the members of a particular union, who might stand to benefit at the expense of other workers if they could increase their power.

Outsourcing a great example of this. It is actually good for people in the countries where work is outsourced to. They get more for their labor than they would otherwise, even if they get less than what a Western worker makes. If they showed "solidarity" and demanded Western wages, they would get nothing.

I think the problem is that in this case the "market system" is not a free market system, since the ILWU has a monopoly protected by regulations, which they somehow managed to get implemented.

Is that a good thing? Consider that the handling of each container costs $300, about double what it does in say Rotterdam. Who pays for the difference? The American consumers.

Or suppose all the fast food work was, by law, under the Fast Food Worker's Union. They demand that their members pay is equal to the ILWU, $227,000 inclusive of benefits per annum. Now a Big Mac meal cost you $15. Does your argument still hold?

And consider also this: such unions are often cesspits of nepotism and corruption, usually manifesting as union not admitting new members without some special considerations.

My issue with union shops is that getting things done is unnecessarily difficult. Case in point: sitting around for half a day waiting for the unionized cable puller to sling a single cat5 connection between two racks on the same row in a data center. Then the guy doesn't show up until after 1600, so he forces overtime.

Funny you mention that. When I was a teenager I earned pocket money by running cat5 cable through buildings. In this case it was professional licensing, not unions, that made what I was doing illegal. I think professional licensing is even more pernicious than unions, since it operates entirely through manipulating the legal system.

This is especially true when unions are actively sabotaging the introduction of new technology in order to maintain their high wages or inflated numbers (introduction of containerization to Oakland).

Unions aside, there was the same butt-hurt regarding blue-collar oil field workers making 100k+. The New York Times ran endless articles complaining about the shale oil boom.

Non-elite flyover whites making good money seems to really upset a certain segment of the population. How dare they make a better living them me doing physical labor!

Most people have been taught to look down on blue-collar manual labor. Seeing them makes good money upsets them. Even the OP expressed his distaste for the oil-field workers.

Fair point, I thought you were saying before that critiques of union workers earning too much were really driven by this white vs blue collar issue, while now I see that what you were really saying is that the OP wasn't necessarily even talking about unions, just complaining about rich blue collar workers.

In fact, before I saw the rest of the thread I was going to ask for clarification about the original oil-field worker point.

I agree that manual work can have a high market rate even without unions, e.g. if it physically requires a very fit man to do the job, in addition to the right personality, dexterity, intelligence and reliability.

Indeed. I don't disagree with you about the Unions at all.

You do realize the sentiment behind the second clause of your last sentence contradicts the assertion of the first one?

Could you flesh that idea out? It's not clear to me what parts of the sentence you're referring to.

> So the issue isn't that blue collar workers are "beneath" white collar workers, but that (at least to an industry outsider) it's not clear what special skills these workers have that would command high market wages.

You say the issue is not one of considering blue collar workers to be inferior ("beneath"), but your second clause implies that if blue collar workers do not possess "special skills" "that would command high market wages" then something is "not clear", i.e. the blue collar workers would be "lower" without those "special skills".

This presumes blue collar work and workers are inferior to white collar work and workers because blue collar workers need "special skills" to be equivalently compensated/regarded.

EDIT: qualifying condition for last sentence.

Ok I get it now. I think a natural reading of my statement is that the original post was claiming some cognitive bias, in which white color workers felt themselves to be inherently better than blue collar workers, vs my own view that white color workers on average are actually worth more in the market.

My claim is that there is no cognitive bias, but that white collar workers in general are worth more (because they possess a rarer set of skills).

I think the difference is the seemingly artificial restriction on the supply of labor, and the assumption that if there are qualified individuals willing to do the work for less cost, they should be allowed to do so. If the employers are blocked from hiring these others by those who are currently employed, this strikes many people as unfair to both the employers and to those willing to do the work for less, as well as to the public who in the end bear the extra costs of the inefficient labor market.

The presumed difference with white-collar work is the assumption that this pool of willing and qualified workers exists. Maybe it doesn't? I'm guessing that while there are many people who could be trained to be excellent computer programmers, but I doubt there is a significant pool of ready-to-go programmers in Oakland who are being blocked from employment by the current programmers currently holding a limited number of positions.

Lots of people don't like that engineers are well compensated in the tech industry also. Look at all the company shuttle protests in San Francisco.

And yet they never protest at the homes of the executives who decide how much tech workers are paid.

Earlier discussion (different article, but same subject): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10306204

(Other article at http://priceonomics.com/why-arent-americas-shipping-ports-au...)

How is there an article about the costs of using containers without automated infrastructure on Hacker News and nobody's made a Docker/Kubernetes joke yet?

Why didn't you do it?

This basically only shows again what the tiny Netherlands can achieve. I dont think there is a single country that threatened by a force of Nature. But instead of giving up, you basically become the best Worldwide in construction in, on and around the water. Basically, if you have any problems with water at any Kind of level, just ASK the dutch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com