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How to read this
Every page is built the same way, so once you read one you can read all of them.
The import-friction board
Start here. The board gives each major port complex one plain label, flowing, some pressure, or congested, built by a fixed rule from where its vessel dwell, ship queue and truck index sit against their own trailing-12-month normal. It is a snapshot of where the friction is right now, not a forecast. The methodology page spells out the exact rule.
The port complex pages
Each major complex, LA/Long Beach and NY/NJ, has a hub page: its friction read and the component metrics behind it in one place. Read the complex page for the whole picture at a gateway, then the metric pages for the detail.
The vessel-dwell pages
Each port has a vessel-dwell page: how long ships are sitting at the berth, over time, against the port's trailing-12-month normal. This is a ship metric, AIS-derived. It is labeled vessel dwell everywhere, because it is not the same number as how long a container sits in the yard.
The TEU pages
Each port has a monthly TEU page: loaded imports, loaded exports and empties, with the month-over-month, the year-over-year and the change against the 2019 pre-pandemic baseline. Loaded imports are the demand read. A TEU number is the latest month available, not the current week, and the page says which month it is.
The ship-queue pages
Each complex has a page for ships awaiting berth: the count of container ships waiting offshore for a berth to open. This is a queue, not a dwell time. When the queue is empty the page says so plainly rather than showing a zero as if it were a wait.
The normal, and the band
Where a page shows a reading against normal, the normal is the median of that series over the prior twelve months, with the band being its recent range. A reading well above its trailing-12-month normal is elevated. We use a trailing window rather than a five-year one because the AIS-derived series are young, and we would rather show an honest recent normal than a thin five-year one.
What we do not say
We do not tell anyone which port to use, when to book, or how to handle a fee. We report where the congestion is from public data. Demurrage, detention and the routing call are the reader's, made with their own bookings and contracts in front of them. This is not routing, booking, or fee advice.
New to the vocabulary? The glossary defines every term the brief uses, and the methodology page defines each dwell metric exactly.