Inside the 91% Spike: What Terminal Data From Both San Pedro Bay Ports Reveals About the Real Cost of Blank Sailings

The Port of Los Angeles had nine container vessels at berth on 18 February. Across the channel, the Port of Long Beach had five. Together, the San Pedro Bay complex — which handled more than 20 million teu in 2025 — was servicing 14 vessels.

Terminal operations data obtained by Container Management from both ports, reveals the full extent of the scheduling disruption behind the 91% vessel dwell time spike at Los Angeles and 61% at Long Beach that this publication reported on 17 February using WTCP Intelligence AIS analytics. The data shows a port complex that is simultaneously underpopulated by vessel count and operationally strained at every link in the intermodal chain.

The Port Optimizer picture: Los Angeles

Data from the Port of Los Angeles updat18 February shows nine container vessels at berth with an average berth time of 4.0 days on a 30-day rolling basis. Zero vessels are awaiting berth. Only seven container vessels are currently inbound to the port, with none within 40 nautical miles — an unusually thin near-term pipeline for North America’s busiest container gateway.

The inbound vessels range from CMA CGM Mexico (15,128 teu, due at Fenix Marine Services on 21 February) to Porto and Posen (2,790 and 2,742 teu respectively, both due at West Basin Container Terminal on 19 February). A total of 94 vessels are planned further out, carrying an estimated 254,908 containers.

Import volume forecasts show a weakening trajectory heading into March:

Week 7 (15–21 February): 109,862 teu across 20 scheduled vessels, down 14.5% year on year and 5.2% week on week.

Week 8 (22–28 February): 116,557 teu across 21 vessels, nominally up 39.8% year on year — though the comparison flatters, as the year-ago period coincided with the 2025 Lunar New Year trough.

Week 9 (1–7 March): 98,533 teu across 17 vessels, down 15.5% week on week. This is the lowest weekly forecast in the current window and the point at which the March blank sailing programme — 15 cancellations at Los Angeles — begins to bite.

The inbound container metrics by mode tell a parallel story. Week 7 total inbound stands at 60,697 teu (39,453 local truck, 15,781 on-dock rail, 5,463 off-dock rail). Week 9 drops to 54,438 teu — a loss of more than 6,000 containers, with on-dock rail falling from 15,781 to 14,154.

Gate success: 53%

Appointment data from Port Optimizer shows an average success rate of 53% across all Los Angeles terminals. The terminal-by-terminal breakdown:

APM Terminals Pier 400: 74%. TraPac: 61%. Yusen Terminals: 48%. West Basin Container Terminal: 46%. Fenix Marine Services: 45%. Everport Terminal Services: 45%.

A 53% average means that roughly half of all truck transactions on a given day fail to complete as planned. Each failure carries a cost: a driver paid for unproductive hours, a chassis dispatched and returned empty, a container that misses its delivery window. The 94% booked-versus-fulfilled rate from a separate gate throughput report confirms this is not a trucker no-show problem — appointments are being made and honoured. The failure is terminal-side, driven by vessel schedules that no longer align with the operational plans built around them.

Truck turn times for February reinforce the picture. The Port of Los Angeles is averaging 65 minutes per transaction (14 minutes gate, 50 minutes dock) versus 54 minutes at Long Beach (11 minutes gate, 43 minutes dock). Within Long Beach, TTI is the slowest performer at 50 minutes day shift and 57 minutes night.

What is sitting on terminal

Container inventory at Los Angeles stands at 33,115 import loaded units. The dwell distribution tells two stories. The headline is acceptable: 25,827 containers — 78% — have been on terminal four days or fewer.

The tail is not. A total of 4,244 containers — 12.8% — have been sitting for 13 days or more. That is cargo nobody is collecting, sitting on terminal space that could otherwise be used for working inventory. The causes are multiple — receiver delays, documentation issues, chassis shortages, cargo holds — but the concentration of nearly 13% of imports in the 13-plus-day bucket signals systemic friction, not individual exceptions.

The empty container picture is worse. Of 41,026 empties on terminal, 12,511 — 30.5% — have been there 13 days or more. Nearly a third of the port’s empty container inventory has been sitting for over two weeks, representing stranded equipment unavailable to the broader repositioning market.

Rail operations show 6,941 containers awaiting on-dock loading, with 413 dwelling nine days or longer. Yusen Terminals accounts for 297 of those 413 long-dwell rail containers — 72% of the port’s worst-performing rail inventory at a single facility. Among containers that have cleared the rail system, 7.1% — 3,278 containers — took nine or more days from arrival to outgate.

The Wharfinger record: what actually happened between 12 and 18 February

The Port of Los Angeles Wharfinger Division’s historical vessel activity data provides a day-by-day account that fills the gap between WTCP’s AIS detection on the 15th–16th and the current berth snapshot.

The port was not empty mid-week. On 12 February, 14 vessels were at berth with one at anchor — 15 total, the busiest day in the current dataset. On 13 February, 12 were at berth with two at anchor. The port had a substantial vessel population and was working through it.

Then the bottom fell out. Between 13 and 17 February, 10 vessels departed. Their average berth dwell was 4.9 days — well above the January average of approximately 3.3 days. Those vessels had sat longer than planned, worked their cargo, and left in a cluster. On 18 February, nine vessels remained with one departure averaging 4.0 days at berth.

The individual vessel data from the in-port manifest confirms the elevated dwell pattern among current occupants:

CMA CGM J. Adams at Fenix Marine Services: arrived 10 February, estimated departure 21 February — an 11-day berth occupancy, extreme by any standard for a container vessel. Maersk Candor at APM Terminals: arrived 11 February, departing 18 February — seven days. Gunvor Maersk at APM Terminals: arrived 15 February, departing 20 February — five days. YM Unanimity at WBCT: arrived 16 February, departing 21 February — five days. Ever Forward at APM Terminals: arrived 17 February, departing 21 February — four days.

The WTCP AIS dwell spike is measuring exactly this: vessels that arrived in the pre–Lunar New Year window sitting significantly longer than the four-week rolling average before departing. The 91% figure is not an artefact — it reflects the real operational experience of the vessels that occupied and then vacated the port during this period.

Long Beach: five vessels and a forward schedule

The SCIH dashboard for the Port of Long Beach lists five container vessels at berth on 18 February:

Matson Waikiki at SSA Pier A, arrived 8 February — 10 days at berth, though as a Jones Act domestic vessel its operational profile and cargo working pattern differ from international services. HMM Ruby at TTI Pier T, arrived 12 February — six days at berth. YM Wonderland at ITS Pier G, arrived 14 February — four days. OOCL Violet at LBCT Pier E, arrived 15 February — three days. MSC Trieste at TTI Pier T, arrived 17 February — one day.

HMM Ruby’s six-day dwell at TTI is notable. This is the same facility that set a world record of 36,388 lifts on a single vessel call in August 2025 and currently moves more than 50% of its containers by rail. A six-day berth occupancy at a terminal with that operational capability suggests the constraint is not crane productivity but scheduling and downstream connectivity — consistent with the blank sailing disruption pattern visible across the complex.

Long Beach container dwell data from the SCIH dashboard shows a spike in 4-to-8-day containers that peaked at approximately 7,000 around 6–8 February before declining. Containers dwelling nine or more days for local delivery rose from roughly 800 in late January to approximately 1,400 by 8–10 February. On-dock intermodal containers at nine-plus days tripled from around 200 to 600 over the same period. Both metrics have since eased but remain elevated above the January baseline.

Gate activity collapsed through the week: loaded truck in-gate volumes peaked at approximately 3,500 on 13 February before falling to near zero by 17 February, tracking the Lunar New Year shutdown and the cargo gap created by blank sailings.

The forward schedule offers partial reassurance. The SCIH dashboard lists 34 named container vessels due at Long Beach through 15 March, with the largest being Cosco Shipping Yangpu at 16,136 teu on 14 March. Projected weekly vessel calls show a dip to 16 in Week 11 (8 March) — down 20% year on year — before recovering to 18 in Week 12 (15 March). Projected weekly teu volume drops to 57,112 in Week 11, a 19% decline from the 70,000-plus levels of Weeks 8 and 9, before rebounding to 68,257 in Week 12.

Long Beach’s blank sailing tracker shows three cancellations for March with 25,100 teu of capacity loss — modest compared with the 15 cancellations and estimated 187,500 teu loss forecast at Los Angeles, but contributing to the same scheduling disruption across the shared terminal complex.

The trade context

The volume decline is not purely seasonal. The Port of Los Angeles processed 812,000 teu in January 2026, a 12% drop year on year — what executive director Gene Seroka described as the port’s lowest monthly output in nearly three years. Loaded imports fell 13% to 421,594 teu. The comparison is distorted by the tariff frontloading that produced a record January 2025, but the decline is real. Port Optimizer forecasts predict 254,908 total planned containers, with the near-term trajectory pointing downward through early March.

As CM reported on 18 January, Long Beach’s 2025 record of 9.9 million teu was driven substantially by front-loaded imports, with the port losing 2.2 percentage points of West Coast laden import market share to Los Angeles during Q2 when the post-frontloading contraction hit. The trade rebalancing away from China is structural: Los Angeles reports China-origin cargo declining from 60% to 40% of its business. Long Beach’s parallel shift, detailed in its January data, shows China’s share dropping from 70% to 60% over six years. The agricultural trade is most exposed — soybean exports from Long Beach to China fell 95% in 2025 while Indonesia became the port’s top soybean destination.

Long Beach’s January 2026 throughput figure has not yet been published. It will be a critical data point: a significant year-on-year decline would confirm that the volume softening visible at Los Angeles extends across the full complex.

Three signals to watch

The March blank sailing programme. Fifteen cancellations at Los Angeles approaching the historical worst of 17 in May 2025. Three at Long Beach. Combined, they will remove substantial capacity from a complex that is already operating well below peak levels. The question is whether post–Lunar New Year cargo flows — visible in Long Beach’s Week 10 projection of 19 vessel calls, up 36% year on year — provide enough volume to normalise terminal operations or whether the pattern of scheduling disruption persists.

The Vincent Thomas Bridge. The bridge connecting San Pedro and Terminal Island, located within the Port of Los Angeles, will close for 18 months later this year. The closure will redirect truck and commuter traffic through alternative routes, with potential implications for terminal access across the complex — particularly during any period of elevated call volumes.

The inventory cycle. Despite the volume softening, the inventory-to-sales ratio trended downward through 2025, suggesting a restocking cycle may be necessary in the second half of 2026. The timing and scale of any restocking will determine whether both ports’ full-year projections — 9 million teu at Long Beach, with Los Angeles yet to formally guide — hold.

The terminal-level data published here provides what the headline metrics cannot: the operational cost of carrier scheduling volatility, measured in failed gate transactions, stranded equipment, elevated dwells and compressed volume forecasts. Understanding that cost matters for anyone making capacity, routing or investment decisions across the San Pedro Bay complex.

Data sources: WTCP Intelligence AIS Analytics; Port of Los Angeles Port Optimizer (18 February 2026); Port of Los Angeles Wharfinger Division Historical Container Vessel Activity (January–February 2026); Port of Los Angeles Container Vessel In Port Activity (18 February 2026); Port of Los Angeles Vessels in Harbor (18 February 2026); Port of Long Beach SCIH Dashboard (18 February 2026); Port of Long Beach Container Vessels at Berth (18 February 2026); Port of Long Beach Blank Sailings Tracker; Pool of Pools Chassis KPI Report; Port of Los Angeles Blank Sailing Forecast; Port of Los Angeles January 2026 Cargo Statistics (17 February 2026); Drewry World Container Index (12 February 2026). Historical throughput context: Container Management, 18 January 2026.