Most of the stacks are already at 6 high https://www.tiktok.com/@stanimal18/video/7019310183545376006. The automated storage & retrieval system cannot go higher. Peel pile would be great if the empty containers did not have to be taken to Dallas. It is questionable if this is a government failure to zone empty buffer yards out in desert as there would be even less of an incentive to return the empty containers; changing the zoning at the secondary yards does not fix the underlying incentive issue and should only be put in place once the ratio of the rate at which new containers are being received to the rate at which containers are leaving begins to decline to accelerate the removal of the bottleneck. The storage fee needs to be raised to a point at which it is justifiable to move the empty containers out over processing fully loaded containers until the storage bottleneck is removed. Changing the zoning before figuring out the rate problem almost surely will just make the bottleneck worse. It would also be interesting to know if it would be feasible to make the containers able to be disassembled and multi-packed into an empty container.
Those 6 high stacks are the ones at the port. From the thread, there are plenty of smaller secondary lots outside the ports where empties are being stacked, because the ports won't accept them, and there's room. The zoning based stacking limit affects those secondary yards, but not the port yards. A real question is if the secondary yards have equipment to stack higher or if they can really only go two high, because they were limited by zoning anyway.
> It would also be interesting to know if it would be feasible to make the containers able to be disassembled and multi-packed into an empty container.
Not really; everything's welded together, and if you unweld and reweld, it's not going to be as strong. Plus that's a lot of labor. There are some collapsible containers, but those tend not to have sides or a top, which is not ideal for ocean shipping.
Each of the yards have unique constraints. Hopefully, the 2 to 4 increase is to be some sort of test such that the ability to stack 6/9 high is still within reason given it as the limit of the higher end stackers. Additionally, these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSn-dT4EMcM do not require welding to transform; are quoted with the same strength, a quarter of the original size, and 20% more expensive in early 2017.
Okay, but fancy collapsible containers does nothing to solve the problem with all the containers piling up right now. That's a longer term solution at best.
It's definitely a long term thing. Some guys from my university founded a company around foldable containers in 2008 (https://4foldcontainers.com/). It's still not common.
The way I read the linked article, the idea is to use peel piles for drayage only. That is, for goods that is due for shorter trips within the same urban area, not for long-haul freight. I think it seems like a part of the solution by virtue of having some potential for lowering drivers’ waiting time and maximizing the speed of emptying out a fully stacked terminal.
