Traffic Building at Container Ports

March 8, 2007  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in on March 2007 Traffic at the nation’s major retail container ports is beginning to climb out of the slow season and could top last year’s peak as early as July, according to the monthly Port Tracker report released today by the National Retail Federation and Global Insight.

“The slow season is on its way out,” Global Insight Economist Paul Bingham said. “February was the slowest month of the year, as usual, but volume is starting to pick up now in March and we think July could top the peak for all of last year. We saw some weather disruptions in February, but U.S. ports are operating without congestion, and truck and rail performance has been sufficient.”

All U.S. ports covered by Port Tracker – Los Angeles/Long Beach, Oakland, Tacoma and Seattle on the West Coast, and New York/New Jersey, Hampton Roads, Charleston and Savannah on the East Coast – are currently rated “low” for congestion, the same as last month.

Nationwide, the ports surveyed handled 1.26 million Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) of container traffic in January, the most recent month for which actual numbers are available. The figure was down 0.35 percent from December but up 3.4 percent from January 2006