US West Coast delays hurting reliability

Congestion issues at US west coast ports contributed to lower on-time containership reliability in November, according to Drewry’s new Carrier Performance Insight report.

With waiting times at anchor outside of USWC ports reportedly running to one week in some cases, carriers’ schedule reliability has understandably taken a big hit. The report indicates that transpacific ships were on average 2.4 days later than scheduled in November, more than twice the normal deviation.

Inevitably, the main culprits were ships scheduled to dock at the most affected ports with the on-time percentage for ships calling at either Los Angeles or Long Beach down to only 41% in October and 46% in November, when it had been around 90% in July.