Container Logistics
lesswrong.com
lesswrong.com
If you book at a shipping line, there is really a tree of companies being engaged to work. There are two empty depots involved for empty pickup and delivery. The container is usually owned by the shipping line, but stored at various third party locations. Then there is the two sea side terminals, who need to do 4 billable operations usually called Terminal Handling Charges or THC for short. These are in order gate-in land, out onto ship, in from ship, gate-out landside. Then there is the temporary storage at the sea side terminals on either side. For you as the shipper you can usually deliver the full container a few days before the cargo closing for outbounds, and you get a few days to pick up the full container once it is discharged off the ship. Failing two meet these time windows will result either in your container getting rejected at the gate, which is expensive because you have to pay for the hinterland transport 3 times instead of once (try #1, return after fail, retry). Alternatively you pay the storage costs, these are often called demurrage charges. In addition to these all there are restrictions on the time you as the shipper can take to stuff or strip (fill/empty) the container, going over this you're going to get charged something called detention charges (a late fee or "renting" free for the container, you get X days included in the transport).
The tricky part comes in when the ETA of the ship shifts. Say you already picked up the container from the empty depot to stuff it, but then the shipping line notifies you the ship is delayed by a week. You now have to store it somewhere, and if you're not careful, the shipping line will try and charge you detention fees. If you deliver it "early" to the terminal (e.g. in time for the old ETA, but early according to the new ETA) you've created a problem for the terminal (high yard utilization), you're going to get charged a demurrage fee, or the terminal will not accept the container and send the trucker on their way again, causing you to have to pay for the transport. Notice how in none of these cases the shipping line is impacted, and sometimes they even profit off of it.
One of the ways to avoid this might be to book more door-to-door transports (or 'carrier haulage') as opposed to arranging the hinterland transports yourself (or 'merchant haulage'). This is often not ideal because it requires shipping lines to have specific knowledge of the hinterlands they serve, but also puts the onus on them and them only to fix this. It also does put even more power into the hands of shipping lines, which is something the sector should probably avoid.
The removal of the 2-high stacking limit only helps to relieve pressure on the 'hinterland' storage equation of it all, it does nothing for the sea side terminals which are already running at capacity.
But I might draw out a few diagrams and write a blog post some day :)
It's pretty specific to terminals, but it's a decent introduction.
But inland terminals are an entirely different beast from sea terminals due to the scaling I mentioned. Area scales quadratically, but quay side or rail length scales linearly. This means larger sea terminals have lots of trouble managing an efficient flow of containers onto and from the ships. Inland terminals, both barge and rail, are often not constrained by this in and out flow, but have more natural constraints like the total amount of containerizable goods transported in the geographic area they serve.
The biggest difference is probably what parts of the transport inland terminals are responsible for. In The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany I've noticed that often inland terminals act as hinterland operators, also taking responsibility for the barge or train leg, and usually also last mile trucking to the customer. Sea side terminals tend to not do this nearly as much.
So TL;DR: yes, rail is the dominant form basically everywhere except the area where I happen to live and work. But no, both rail and barge inland terminals are very similar in many respects, but are quite different from sea side terminal operations.
EDIT: Actually, just to clarify, I have a lot more experience with inland terminals than sea side terminals. But because the typical container terminal problems (berthing, stacking, equipment assignment etc.) are so much less of an issue with the smaller scale of inland terminals, they only get a very short mention in my document. There really is no berthing problem if you handle 2 barges a week, there is no equipment assignment problem if you have a single crane and a single reachstacker, and there is no real stacking problem if you can ask a trucker to walk around and spot their assigned box between the ~300 boxes you currently have. Typically the biggest issue for inland terminal operations is the transport planning from and to the sea side terminals, and that is similar for both barge and rail terminals.
The more industries I start to get deeper into, the more I realize this applies to almost every single industry, no matter size or for how long it's been around. Industries seems get into "extract as much money from as many parties as possible" really quickly.
If you don't like what you see, then you shouldn't look into advertising and ad tech.
The fees are not usually due on collection, but as part of the contract between shipping line and shipper. Not picking up the container probably does nothing to get you out from under that contract.
More smaller ships would give a bit more flexibility, but I don't think it's an easy fix for the current problems.
Doesn't averaging already handle this exact problem?