BY MARK B. SOLOMON, SENIOR EDITOR

MARITIME/PORTS

GOLFERS LIVE AND DIE BY THEIR PUTTERS. A bad green game will waste all the good that came before it. So it goes with drayage, the job of hauling ocean containers between seaports, intermodal yards, and shippers’ facilities. If the dray isn’t properly executed, nothing else matters. Imports won’t leave the terminals when they’re supposed to. Exports won’t get loaded aboard vessels in a timely manner. And mile-wide seams start to appear in an otherwise perfectly synchronized supply chain.

Unfortunately, the drayage business is in a world of hurt. Base rates for drayage services have been stagnant for about a decade, according to drayage executives. In an extreme example of rate hemorrhaging, Greg Gorno, owner of All Points Noncompensatory rates have a negative cascading effect through the pipeline. Drivers, mostly owner-operators responsible for their own expenses, are generally not well paid. To make matters worse, increasing congestion at the nation’s ports forces drivers to wait for hours to either pick up or drop off their loads, cutting into their productivity and earning power. Drivers that are paid by the load can stew for two, four, and sometimes six hours at a marine terminal to offload a box, take on another one, and leave the facility. A study of 1,600 trucks serving the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s busiest port complex, from October 2012 to May 2013 found that 20 percent of all truck moves took more than two hours; as a general rule, waits of more than one hour are considered unacceptable from both an economic and environmental stand-