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Comment by dustinmr | Hacker News Reader

In the US, you already have to report the cargo’s arrival date before it leaves its origin port. So the information is there.

Graduate the port fees based on average speed for arrival.

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It's hard to visualize, but a ship's engine speed is only one factor in its overall speed across an ocean, even with powerful engines, wind and especially current will improve or degrade a ship's overall speed as measured by satellite. So a naive port fee based on time of departure will not exactly work.

I thought all ships have some kind of international tracking system now?

You should be able to accurately estimate all ships's speeds, using basic high school physics, from a site like https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/cent...

Speed != to fuel burned.

It's a roughly accurate measure though. If there's a storm that slows them down, it would be perfectly acceptable for them to burn more fuel to arrive in port on time.

I think you are wrong about this, there are so many variables and sea conditions can affect things, for example older engines and maintenance at sea. AIS data is also known to be wildly inaccurate.

Source: built an engine performance model at a maritime company.

Require reporting engine run times and performance stats to regulatory bodies, along with fuel loading data from fuel providers.

Too easy to fake. Maybe instead base it off of fuel consumption. At the end of the day, they can't fake a full tank of gas -- Require it to be documented when they buy fuel and use that to approximate what they're using for a cross-seas voyage (giving appropriate margin so that in case of storm/emergency they can still make it, but perhaps tax them if they eat into buffer)

Actually laughing at this, you have no idea, the people onboard type in the engine data and usually they type the exact same thing as the last reading with some decimal points changed and 0 if they were stopped (even though ships use plenty of fuel even if stopped usually).

Or just put a carbon tax on the fuel.

"It's a roughly accurate measure though"

It's the ships speed relative to the water what causes any fuel consumption. For the purposes of saving fuel, if you don't know the water surface speed, you know nothing.

Precisely! You could be going slowly against the tide or current or weather and using loads more fuel - you ask anyone who has been at sea about weather and localised conditions that don't show up on satellites are common enough for me to believe the on ship reports.

Not gonna happen. Even if you implemented this, port capacity dictates that a docking time slot is always going to trump a speed incentive.

There are steep contractual penalties for missing your time slot.

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