And it seems that root cause is ships bring more containers than they take with them.
So maybe, part of the solution could be a mandate of ships to take an amount of empties?
No, that's not the root cause. The root cause seems to be a combination of cascading events that causes a deathspiral: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...
"ships bring more containers than they take with them" is a symptom, not a cause. Mandating "ships to take an amount of empties" doesn't really fix the problem because shipping companies already want the ships to fill with empties, but can't because of other factors (see chart). Forcing ships to fill ships with even more empties presumably also makes things worse, by causing ships to occupy dock space.
Abd what about toys when everyone is talking about saving Christmas ? You'll make triple sure you have one, maybe even buy several from several sources.
I've seen myself do that with difficult to import goods, and price is always a lower factor than need. Price would eventually push me out, but there s a twilight zone when it's just right to panic buy stuff that werent supposed to be rare.
The surge demand has suddenly depleted the free spots is removed until its a trickle. Then you get this result. The ships are stuck because the ports had no incentive to reserve space for empties.
Or, something like bufferbloat.
It does seem that they people who have control over this situation don't have much on an incentive to improve it.
In particular fixing any piece of this loop would fix the others... eventually they just ran the port cranes longer and opened up the hours that trucks could go in/out. Is it "solved"? No, but the local pre-Xmas crisis is averted, which is basically peak for the year.