Carriers Are Engineering Their Own Congestion — and Importers Should Take Note

When dwell times spike at six major container ports simultaneously while freight rates are in their fifth consecutive week of decline, the instinct is to reach for comparisons with 2021. That instinct is wrong, and acting on it could lead supply chain planners to misallocate both budget and attention.

The congestion anomalies detected by WTCP Intelligence this week — the Port of Los Angeles at 91% above its four-week average, Long Beach at 61%, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Rotterdam and Tilbury all above 30% — are real. The operational disruption they cause is real. But the mechanism producing them is fundamentally different from the pandemic-era crisis, and understanding that difference matters for anyone making procurement or routing decisions in the weeks ahead.

The blank sailing trap

In 2021–22, congestion was demand-driven. Record import volumes, fuelled by pandemic consumer spending and inventory restocking, overwhelmed port infrastructure that had not been designed to process that quantity of cargo. Ships queued. Rates soared. The system broke because too much cargo was chasing too little capacity.