From ship to your warehouse: the import chain

An import container follows a fixed sequence from the ship to your warehouse, and every congestion number you read sits at one point on it. The box arrives on a vessel, gets lifted off at the marine terminal, sits in the yard, leaves the terminal by truck or rail, and rolls to a distribution center. Knowing which step a given metric measures is the difference between reading congestion and guessing at it.

The steps

Berth. The ship ties up at the terminal, and it waits offshore if the docks are full, which is what the ship queue counts before this step even starts. Discharge. Cranes lift the boxes off, the work that vessel dwell timed while BTS still published it. Yard. The container sits in a stack waiting to be called, and the clock on that wait is box dwell, the number that decides free-time exposure. Gate or rail. The box leaves by drayage truck through the gate or gets loaded to a train, the point the truck planning-time index speaks to on the road side. Delivery. A short-haul truck carries the box to a nearby warehouse or rail-served facility, and the last leg runs to the distribution center.

Where delays actually pile up

The sea leg is rarely where an import stalls. Ships cross the Pacific on a schedule, and even a long offshore queue moves as berths open. The costly delays cluster on land, in the yard and at the gate. A box that discharges on time but then sits in the stack because the terminal is jammed, or because a truck cannot get an appointment, is the box that runs up storage charges. That is why box dwell and the truck index carry more weight for an importer than the ship's own timing does.

The chain, read as one board

The board above puts a plain read on each complex, built from where its ship queue, its truck index and its loaded-import volume sit against their own trailing-year normal. Read across a row and you are reading the chain, offshore pressure, road-side pressure and volume in one line. A complex flowing on all three is moving boxes cleanly end to end. A complex flagged congested has pressure stacking at one or more of those points, and the row tells you which. It is a rules-based summary of the public metrics, not a prediction of what your specific container will do.

The Dwell maps each public metric to its step on the import chain and reports it dated to its source. It does not forecast and it is not routing advice. For the three dwell clocks kept precisely apart, see dwell, explained precisely.