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revealing analysis of container !affic by National Ports Council
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ZECENT YEARS there has been a me increase in the amount of statistinformation published about transport Worts in general and road haulage in eular. The advent of containerization be expected to increase the flow of maim. A precise, regulated flow of Liners through the ports is implicit with ,ystem and operators, and others, will for detailed information on traffic By the same token bottle-necks in the m whether caused by physical inadeies or poor organization will be subjectsearching criticism.
flie of us have grave doubts that )th flows of the great numbers of boxes ng will happen—as theory dictates it Id happen. To bring in and take away a port as many as 1,000 containers way within 24 hours will exercise ;five management's power to orga-for it cannot, in my view, be done one management centre. Mr. I. C. Lwny, general manager and director of Port. of Felixstowe, said recently that imported containers were still awaiting ction five days after being landed from itainer ship.
uch of the information now available, gh very useful, is less complete than is able. The recent report of the National 5 Council Port Unit Transport StallsGreat Britain 1968 contains in sum, form a mass of information but on matters it is less precise than it should lecause of reluctance of particular ports. veal in detail their throughput of traffic DII-on /roll-off or other unitized services igures are lumped together for groups torts, viz. Thames and North Kent [don); Wales and Severnside; North t; Scotland; North East and HumberEast Midlands and East Anglia. Perwhen the National Ports Council bees the National Ports Authority this knee will be blown away.
ppier ransport managers would be much hapif individual port statistics were tied in the NPC annual analysis. The .e of ports to be competitive is untandable; there is, no doubt, a good ment for grouping of figures from the dpoint of preserving commercial inforon of particular value to individual port
managements. But the inquisitive, persistent transport manager could probably get a good idea of the breakdown of traffic pass ing through particular ports from direct inquiry of the port managers concerned. (If one port in an estuary or country has the lion's share of traffic it has no commercial motive in hiding its light under other ports' bushels!) Another criticism of the NPC report is that "empty units"—containers or road vehicles—are not reported by port authori ties. I understand that the cost of moving an empty container by gantry crane from or into a container vessel is only Is 9d less than the handling cost of a full container—around £9—so this omission by the port authorities is rather strange.
To be fair, this has not prevented the NPC from making some shrewd estimates. Road haulage operators with experience of Anglo-Irish or Anglo-Continental operations will not be surprised to learn that in 1967 there were no fewer than 137,000 empty units in the foreign trades and 53,000 in the coastal trades, "representing approximately one-quarter of the total numbers of foreign loaded units and well over one-sixth of the total number of coastwise loaded units".
The difficulty of all compilers of general statistics is to make them of interest and value to all the many parties involved. In the case of port traffic flows what interests a Customs administration may be very different from the concern of road transport operators. The NPC divides unit transport traffic into two classes: "roll-on /roll-off and other units carried on foreign and coastwise services". Roll-on /roll-off traffic "on wheels integral to the transport unit" includes not only road vehicles and trailers but railway wagons carried on train ferries. In 1967 traffic carried on roll-on/roll-off units in creased by about one-tenth, almost wholly on the carryings of road vehicles and trailers rather than railway wagons.
The rapid growth of unitized traffic is obvious from NPC's statement that in 1967 it amounted to just over 6m tons compared with 4+rn tons in 1966 and an estimated 3+rn tons for 1965. The main increase has been in containers.
Also noteworthy was the increase—by about 1.2m tons—in traffic from the Irish Republic to foreign countries. Because of this, diversification of trade traffic across the Irish Sea no longer accounts for over half the unit transport traffic at British. ports. In 1966 this traffic amounted to 54 per cent in tonnage terms; by 1967 it had fallen to 45 per cent.
It might be thought that, excluding bulk traffics passing through British ports, unit transport movements would preponderate in both foreign and coastwise trade. In fact, unit transport accounted in 1967 for twofifths of the country's coastwise traffic, for two-thirds of the traffic with the Irish Republic and for one-tenth of the foreign traffic. These figures illustrate the enormous scope, especially in foreign export traffic, of unitized movements by pallets or containers. How many thousand vehicle-days of unnecessary delays at British ports would be avoided if cargo moved in full vehicle loads, after consolidation of small loads at inland terminals!
In 1967 five port authorities reported unit transport traffic through their ports for the first time. During the year at these and other ports 23 additional specialized unit transport berths were completed or brought into operation. These comprised II rollon/roil-off and 12 lift-on/lift-off berths.
What is the distribution of unit transport traffic passing through British ports? The NPC report gives the answer. Nearly twofifths of such traffic passed through ports in the North West and about one-fifth through East Midland and East Anglian ports. Most of the latter traffic was with foreign countries and roll-on /roll-off type units predominated. The report notes that in 1967 there was no roll-on /roll-off traffic with the Irish Republic—a situation that has now changed due to the construction of such berths at ports in South Wales and the North West_ It has always seemed strange to me that the Lancashire flats, amounting to less than one-fifth of the total number of all loaded units and about one-quarter of the units excluding roll-on units in all trades, are not used more for the short sea routes to the Continent. They were used for about onethird of all loaded units and about 40 per cent of the units excluding roll-on units in the trade with Northern Ireland. Incidentally, bulk liquid containers accounted for nearly one-third of the loaded units in the trade with the Irish Republic.
Nationally, these bulk liquid containers represent quite a problem with inwards traffic flow outnumbering the outwards flow by no fewer than eight to one. The report contains much valuable information on the matter of balanced—or unbalanced —traffic. For example, the inwards traffic with Northern Ireland except for tanks was just over three-quarters of the outwards traffic in both numbers and tonnages, while the imbalance in the traffic with the Irish Republic, excluding the tank containers and Lancashire flats, was in the reverse direction. In other foreign trades, the inward movements of road vehicles and the outward flows of other freight containers outnumbered their corresponding reverse flows.
The directional imbalance at individual ports was much more pronounced. "Seven ports with unit transport traffic in the foreign trade and four ports with coastwise trade had traffic moving in one direction only. At another eight and four ports in the foreign and coastwise trade respectively, the tonnage of unit transport traffic inwards and outwards was more than three times the reverse flow at the same ports." These imbalances were appreciable in particular areas such as the English Channel, South Coast and the North East and Humberside coastal groups.
As regards the units which return empty the report rightly points out that some may not always be available for carrying cargo on the return journey. Some vehicles, it notes, are limited to use by the C-licence holder—a limitation that will not always persist. Some containers /trailers are specially designed for a class of commodity which is itself a one-way traffic, such as stout, or bacon (in the latter case health regulations may prohibit the return carriage of other commodities). Our old friend King Sol is responsible for much imbalance of traffic! The seasonal imbalances in such commodities as fruit and vegetables may contribute much to the annual imbalance at any one port.
Some understatement
I gave above some NPC estimates of the empty units moving through British ports. The council says of its method of estimation that it may overstate the true numbers to the extent that the units may return loaded through other ports, but it "more probably understates the numbers of empties due to the weakness of the underlying assumption that no empties move through a port in the direction of the maximum flow-.
On this point the report says: "When the method was checked with actual figures for empty road goods vehicles and trailers at two ports which together account for over 20 per cent of the total loaded movements for this type of unit, the estimate of 1,571 'empty' units very much understated the true figure of 13,696 road goods vehicles and trailers which actually moved unloaded through these two ports. The empty units were in one case nearly one-third and in the other case over half of the number of loaded units through the port. A similar check for containers showed the estimate of 2,689 'empties' to be an understatement of the actual number of 3,385." Unfortunately only five ports analysed the goods carried solely in containers as distinct from other types of unit transport. To the limited extent that a judgment can be made on the basis of only 200,000 tons of traffic the NPC says the evidence confirms the predominant employment of containers for certain classes of commodities, especially dairy produce, fruit, vegetables and beverages.
In the future as cellular ship and other lift-on type vessels become more numerous it seems likely that more ports will be able to provide detailed commodity analyses from ships' manifests. But the NPC points Out that the documentation specifically relating to traffic in containers as well as the charging systems in use by both shipping operators and port authorities are not yet finalized. Obviously, if ports merely recorded the passing of x number of boxes, the information would be less valuable to the rest of the transport industry. Ultimately the NPC says that the main source of a detailed commodity analysis will depend upon the full classification required for Customs purposes, provided that analysis is possible for readily identifiable specialized vessels. What will happen, I wonder, if we ever reach the Utopian state of affairs when free trade is universal?
Especially useful is the analysis of container size and tonnage of cargo loaded into containers. On the North West coast in a sample period in 1968 port authorities found 21 different sizes in a batch of 8,000 loaded containers, with no fewer than 14 different lengths in the various trades. The 20ft ISO container size comprised only a third of all containers checked and even then some of them were of 8ft x 811 fin. section. In the Irish sea trades non-standard containers especially in lengths of 19, 8 and 711 were mainly used.
In a sample of traffic made by six port authorities of 37,000 loaded containers measured some 19,910 fell into four specific sizes (3511 x 811 x 8I11; 30ft x 8ft x 8ft; 2911 x 8ft x 8ft; and 2011 x 8ft x 8ft external dimensions). These containers offered in total some 32.57m cu. ft. of internal space and carried a total of 267,474 tons of freight which thus occupied 122 cu, ft. per ton.
Details given of average loads carried in containers are illuminating. For example, standard ISO 30ft containers carried 14 tons on average—only 56 per cent of their rated maximum gross load and about 63 per cent of their net load without the container itself. The ISO 20ft containers carried on average only 10.3 tons each, 52 per cent of their rated maximum gross load.
Averages, of course, conceal a great deal. Professional transport managers will be grateful for the NPC's admission that almost 20 per cent of 20ft containers each carried less than 4 tons, while 28 per cent each carried less than 6 tons of goods. The picture is similar with 30ft containers where 13 per cent carried under 6 tons and 23 per cent less than 8 tons.
These figures may be some comfort—though I doubt it!—next time you are faced with a grossly overloaded container with most of the weight in one corner.