About
About The Dwell
The plain-English congestion board for importers: vessel dwell, the ship queue, monthly TEU and one friction read per complex, from the public record, with no routing or fee advice attached.
What this is
The Dwell is a weekly brief plus a set of always-current data pages on US port congestion: vessel dwell at berth by port, container ships awaiting berth by complex, the monthly TEU volumes, and a rules-based import-friction read per complex. It is built for importers, including the e-commerce and FBA sellers who live and die by whether their containers are moving, along with drayage fleets, third-party logistics operators, and freight forwarders' clients, who would rather read one board than check a port authority page, a federal indicators page and an anchorage report by hand.
Who writes it
The Dwell is published by Alex Willen, who runs an import business and tracks these numbers for his own containers. The data pages are generated from the public record on a fixed schedule; the weekly brief reads what moved and writes it up in plain English. Every number traces back to the government or port-authority source that published it.
Where the numbers come from
Vessel dwell comes from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics open-data portal, derived from AIS ship-position data. Ships awaiting berth, the truck planning-time index and rail terminal dwell come from the BTS port and supply-chain freight indicators, which draw on MARAD, the Marine Exchange and the Surface Transportation Board. The monthly TEU volumes come from the port authorities' own container statistics. Nothing here is estimated or sourced from a private vendor.
The metric-precision promise
Three different clocks get called dwell in this trade, and confusing them produces wrong conclusions. Vessel dwell at berth is a ship metric. Container or box dwell is a yard metric. Ships awaiting berth is a queue. This site labels every number with which of the three it is, every time, and defines each one on the methodology page. That precision is the reason the board can be trusted.
Where we sit
There are paid container-visibility and supply-chain-intelligence tools. The Dwell is the free, public-data layer beneath them: it reads the government's and the ports' own numbers and packages the cross-port picture no single port authority publishes.
What we will and will not do
We report public congestion data and a descriptive friction read on it. We do not track ocean rates. We do not forecast congestion. We never tell a reader which port to route through, when to book, or how to handle a demurrage or detention charge. A complex that is congested this week is reported as exactly that, a current fact; what to do about it is the reader's call. This is not routing, booking, or fee advice.
New here? Start with how to read this, or see exactly how each metric is defined and how the friction read is built on the methodology page.