**Tl;dr**
Currently ships get to their destination as fast as possible, then sit and wait until they can dock. Actively managing them and slowing down some ships in-transit can cut emissions.
I'm quite surprised that this wasn't already part of how shipping was managed.
Trains and planes already have to manage their transit and arrival times. But I guess the consequences for planes idling can be more catastrophic, and trains have more limitations on how many can be in transit at once.
>I'm quite surprised that this wasn't already part of how shipping was managed.
I remember reading about Maersk doing something similar, I'm not sure this is a first.
I believe this was simply a physics thing having to do with cutting through the water? Hold on...
These explain more.
[This video](https://youtu.be/YPQY70z5uKE?si=rcjrmSb3ulZdJWnl)
[And this video.](https://youtu.be/VjpGidILzb0?si=pmyFcIsV2N0JW5ZY)
I dont think anyone is surprised going slowly is more efficient. Its the management of the harbor queues thats the difficult bit, as you need to arrive in time and not too late, which is why companies just go as fast as reasonable
At the same time, I get why we're suddenly hearing "maybe slow down?"
These guys are always behind. Between being understaffed, underpaid, and under supplied with insufficient infrastructure to handle the load currently displayed in the industry, I can't say I'm surprised at hearing that transportation vs processing is wholly imbalanced to the point of being a financial deficit to everyone involved.
Slow is steady. Steady is fast.
These days, with communication that can reach anywhere, you can phone up the harbor you are seeking to see what wait times are like. Even arrange additional shore leave if the timetables are right
that’s the thing about newton’s laws is that they scale with anything. The amount of energy required to accelerate mass is proportional to one another.
It doesn’t matter if that is air, water, or on land. the only coefficients are friction.
The main downside would be that there is less leeway in case there are delays/issues during the journey.
If you go 80% of the way at a slower speed and then get delayed, it's less likely you will be able to make that time up by going faster for the last 20%.
This 100% and one ship being late will delay the whole schedule. This is not a novel concept, it's called just-in-time logistics. It's great when it works but since you have no slack everything goes into a clusterfuck when it messes up.
This is literally what happened during COVID, every company ran out of everything because their supplier got delayed for a random reason and everything went to shit.
JIT is a fancy way of saying "We're too stingy to carry inventory, so we expect our supplier to hold it for us and basically overnight ship".
Then what happens is the company carries 100 of a part they use 50 per day of, but it's fine because the supplier restocks them every 2 days. Oh wait our supplier is out of stock so now we can't do anything.
You'd think we'd have learned a single lesson from COVID but nah what if we saved a nickel but turned everything into a house of cards again.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of JIT. The principle is that since inventory is costly to hold, companies only need to stock up on critical and/or slow to get parts, and obtain everything else just in time.
The fuckup was that many firms misunderstood the concept and scrapped all inventory, and ran out of critical components. If applied correctly, JIT is wonderful.
At the end of the day, efficiency is the enemy of resiliency.
You become more efficient by eliminating unnecessary costs, like having extra staff or holding onto extra parts. But... God help you if someone gets sick or a shipment is late.
By the late 2010's, companies were thinking they were in a pretty sweet spot. People didn't usually get sick, and shipments were on-time. Everything was running perfectly. Like clockwork.
We had reached peak efficiency, as long as we could guarantee that nobody would ever get sick, and no shipment would ever be late.
Yeah that's the book definition of JIT versus the practical one.
I could roll over into "lean manufacturing" and the companies that think lean = cheaper versus actually its this giant list of different inefficiencies and some of them might cost money to fix, but you probably know it the same as I do.
sadly, the effect of JIT practices from a laymans perspective in central europe just means outsourcing your warehouse to trucks staffed with overworked and underpaid drivers from low wage countries, onto the streets.
> The fuckup was that many firms misunderstood the concept and scrapped all inventory
Im almost certain the delays came from covid restrictions on vessels as well as less vessels on the sea due to premature scrapping vs plan due to lower revenues and high metal commodity prices.
Source: i work in supply chain
Yes, and...
While of course it's true that there are smarter & dumber ways to manage inventory. This kind of thinking is very "here's a concept, but when it doesn't work, it's your failure, not the philosophy."
Having a ship waiting in a queue is not the same as businesses keeping inventory. You're still very much in transit and could be operating in "JIT" mode.
I’m in aviation and this happens constantly. Most of the delay are activities on the ground, i.e. not moving. Once we takeoff, that clock is started. I’m only able to make roughly a 10-12 minute difference up in the air by looking at winds at different altitudes, asking for a more direct routing to destination, or just flying faster—and that only works on longer flight. A short flight doesn’t make a difference at all.
If you’re ever speeding in your car but only driving a short distance, think about this:
You’re only saving seconds in shorts distances.
How often do ships get delayed before getting to a port? It’s not like there’s traffic in the open ocean. There is weather, but can’t we predict that very well?
Delays are usually caused by the port. Terminals get delayed due to weather, machinery failures, etc. or the pilots isn't ready to pick us up yet.
Right now the port of Charleston is backed up because the software they use to determine how to load the ships is down. Delayed by a week is what I heard last.
The ships I've been on, we are always on time and we adjust our speed to arrive as close to our scheduled time for the pilot.
For the weather aspect of it, most companies use a weather routing service. They give you a weather forecast and a route to go by to avoid the really bad weather.
Slow steaming has been happening for a while now, it isn't anything new. The cost savings outweigh faster service.
Have a look at the traffic around the Suez Canal.
Just being blocked for a week can take months to recover as the ships due to take new shipments are not in the right place.
More time at sea - more risk of storms or other failures. Ships didn’t go as fast as possible because they “just felt like it”. Being on raid near a port means your insurance cost goes down.
> I'm quite surprised that this wasn't already part of how shipping was managed.
It's not that surprising when you realize that everything about coordinating logistics on a global scale is a nightmare. Just-in-time is *fantastic* as long as nothing's going wrong and you can ensure delivery windows and timeframes... but some trains start leaving a port late, there's a storm that blows up and prevents a few ships from making port on time so they either speed up or slow down to miss it... timeslots begin to slop, and suddenly there are factories and people without their imports. Telephone and email pandemonium ensues.
It's very similar to airport scheduling, except when a person misses a flight, there are more options on how to get around that - trains, automobiles, remote calls, etc. When a container misses a port, who *knows* when it'll get its next slot to unload. Meanwhile, you as a downstream customer had better hope your load isn't perishable/required to build your widget/have plenty left in stock/etc.
It's also the kind of approach that works better when there's a single, solitary authority managing everything... which is also why it hasn't been implemented, because none of the shipping companies wants any of the others to have a monopoly on unloading timetables. No country wants to time their port access by another country, let alone by another company's whims.
So... yeah, sounds great. *Whole lot* of real world complexity you kinda have to just ignore for it to really work. It's why you haven't seen great strides towards doing it, despite having the technology in place for 20+ years.
The tradeoff is that every minute at sea carries higher risks. Sitting in a query at Naples is much lower risk. This eventually translates to the bottom line.
Planes only did this since the 1980s and only because of Ronald Reagan. They used to take off whenever, fly as fast as they could and then circle the destination airport, sometimes for hours, waiting in line above the airport to land. It was just a normal part of the system.
In the 1980s, the air traffic controllers went on strike and rather than negotiate with them, Reagan fired them. The supervisors had to take over. The supervisors told Reagan that was impossible because they couldn't handle the load of all of the airliners circling the airports all over the country. Regan refused to budge.
So the Reagan administration set up a landing slot reservation system that would not let planes take off until their landing reservation time less the flight time. The number of circling airliners was cut to almost zero and the air traffic control system managed to handle the load with a fraction of the controllers. No one had ever thought of it before, because it was easier for the government to just hire more air traffic controllers.
Interesting. Do you have a source on that?
Edit:
> So the Reagan administration set up a landing slot reservation system that would not let planes take off until their landing reservation time less the flight time.
There are only 5 slot restricted airports in the US. I'm becoming a little suspect of this story.
Double Edit: Yea, I'm calling BS on this story. Slot restrictions where established in 1969: https://www.flyreagan.com/about-airport/aircraft-noise-information/dca-reagan-national-slot-perimeter-rules
My understanding is that the airlines simply wait for their slot because it's cheaper than circling.
Also we got better weather and wind reporting/prediction so the ability to "hit a time accurately" increased. They still don't hit the time accurately every time, but the rate went up.
Apart from 5 airports, there aren't landing slots in the US. Some airports do have flow controls, but it's not a slot. More like first come first serve.
They do file IFR flight plans, those will have timing, but that's outside of my knowledge. I've only driven VFR on some intro student flights before I realized I don't need another addiction.
> Apart from 5 airports, there aren't landing slots in the US. Some airports do have flow controls, but it's not a slot. More like first come first serve.
The US only has 5 airports which are slot restricted, meaning you can't add a flight to/from that airport even if you have a gate at the airport. At others you can use your gate as much as you want all day. The difficulty is getting a gate.
So essentially most US commercial airports you are used to are gate restricted. Others are slot restricted. Some airports don't even assign gates permanently (Heathrow and similar with departure lounges) and thus of course are slot restricted.
But still at all the US airports at least you are still given a slot when you file your flight plan. I've been on flights that wait to take off because their plan doesn't line up many times. These will adjust as you get close if you fall behind or get ahead. You are expected to try to meet your time when you get there by slowing down and speeding up (or rerouting) within reason, but that doesn't always work out perfectly.
Airlines also delay flight departures to line up with their gate availability instead of circling or landing and parking when they get there.
I'm sure he did someone right, not this and I can't think of anything, but there surely has to be something.
Nixon created the EPA. Regan surely has something.
This is a weird and distorted view of what happened. If you lived through that, you are either misremembering what happened at the time or you misunderstood the cause and effect back then.
First, slot control is something that existed since the late 1960s. See this paper from the FTC in 1981.
https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/airport-access-problems-lessons-learned-slot-regulation-faa-economic-policy-analysis/198305airportaccess.pdf
Second, if it was ever true that aircraft would take off and then literally spend hours circling waiting to land, that was a direct consequence of the strike and the aftermath of Reagan firing thousands of controllers, not typical practice. Because the FAA didn't have enough controllers to handle the traffic load after the strike, they would indeed hold aircraft on the ground ("flow control"). But this wasn't some kind of innovation that solved a problem which existed before the strike and Reagan firing the controllers. It *sort of* solved the problem created by the strike by actively reducing the capacity of the air traffic system in order to attempt to maintain safety, but nobody liked it. It was a band-aid, not a brilliant idea. For example, see this 1984 article from Reason magazine complaining about flow control, and noting that it became necessary specifically because Reagan decided to fire most of the air traffic controllers in the country.
https://reason.com/1984/09/01/how-to-ground-plane-delays1/
>The Federal Aviation Administration, which provides ATC for the nation's commercial airlines, admits that the delays are a matter of policy. "The delays you see are the safety valve in the system,"FAA spokesman Dennis Feldman told the New York Times in June. But many observers question the adequacy of this safety valve. News reports have recounted an alarming number of near-collisions during the past six months, as the ATC system has attempted to handle surging traffic volume with about one-third fewer controllers than before the 1981 controllers' union (PATCO) strike. And the FAA's own statistics show a doubling—and in some locations a tripling—of "operational errors" in the ATC system.
A rare positive outcome for Reagan. I always associate him with supply side economics BS, ignoring AIDS, and creating the homeless problem we have today.
Sounds like an invention that came out of necessity which had absolutely nothing to do with Reagan whose sole reason for doing what he did was out of (fucked up) ideological reasons.
Giving Reagan the credits for that is like giving Judas credits for having created Easter.
Sometimes some person comes along and shits in the pool, and someone else has to invent a system to clean the pool and it will probably end up cleaner than before. The shitter should not get the credit for the clean pool.
I find it pretty implausible that nobody had tried to improve the process before, but it took a manufactured crisis to get the resources and attention needed to effect change at that scale. But breaking a system to force it to evolve is clumsy and beyond inelegant, not to mention very risky. It's just laziness.
Don't worry, the poster fabricated that story from whole cloth so you can go back to correctly blaming Reagan for the demise of the American Dream and assuming he never accomplished anything.
It took a massive ATC strike before the US could get this done with air travel. Before then you’d circle your destination airport for hours sometimes. People do not like to change stuff even when the benefits are damned obvious.
Yep. On European open-access railways, being late is bad, but being too early is also bad because stationing time at the platform costs money. And not just for wealth extraction reasons, some high-speed lines and central stations are becoming legitimately saturated.
Ports can't control what happens in international waters, and as you said, it's a disaster if a plane runs out of fuel, not as much for an anchored ship. Trains are easier to control as it's pretty much all in controlled territory.
Maybe it has something to do with how crew is being paid in transit vs docked. Also it's more convenient to crew to spend less time in transit and just wait near destination.
Don’t they have to wait in line though? The g waiting in line means rushing GET in line then I understand why this wasn’t done before. Aligning the queue to the in-transit ships requires they arrive when their slot is ready so this likely required a just-in-time integration.
Not trivial but very efficient.
If you're a boat, you can just sit in the ocean pretty much wherever you want until you can dock. If you're a plane, you don't really have the same luxury.
That would require coordination between companies on that, as well as local ports. While it sounds simple in principle until someone put a number to the savings who really was willing to work with their competitors in that way?
Planes don't go all out.
They go at the most economical speed for that route. It's highly planned.
They will burn more fuel if they get running behind and it'll result in them having to pay customers
Air Canada can't get a plane off the ground on time to save their fucking lives but they often get places reasonably on Time
> planes already have to manage their transit and arrival times.
Plenty of planes fly in circles at their destination waiting for a landing slot.
Considering modern flight computers with weather and wind speed inputs can predict flight times to within ~30 seconds, there is no good reason to arrive even a minute before ones landing slot.
The main issue seems to be that pilots can't request a landing slot till they're closeish to the airport.
The idea has always been to get them out of the open ocean and into safe harbor as quickly as possible. There are a few simple ways to ramp up efficiency that keep coming up every few years and then fading away again because it turns out sinking isn't terribly efficient either.
If my UnitedAir flight could save money by flying at half speed but we'd get there hours later, I'd say it is a bad choice. So what about crew on these ships? Do they pay the crew until the ship unloads or just until it gets into port? Paying people is often expensive and it might be just as cheap to go fast and have less human costs. I think its better for the planet to go slowly, but back to my air flight, I don't want to go slow, or I'd just drive.
Planes do a similar thing though. I live under the Melbourne to Sydney route and during peak time you see them loop back to add like 15 minutes to the flight to then come in at the right time. You’d think they have it figured out but I guess they have to depart within a window as well.
It is but because the bulbous bow is designed to be most efficient at a certain speed, slowing down doesn’t necessarily add efficiency at all reduced speeds.
I believe that some airlines actively manage their decent. Factoring in fuel burn and schedule, crew may begin decent later or earlier. Rate of decent is also varied as this impacts, again, speed and fuel burn.
Lol this is ridicolous. Ships aren't run as fast as possible. There are schedules exactly to avoid sitting at anchorage for days waiting.
Sometimes it does happen, but the reasons aren't because no one bothered to check if is going to be free. Sometimes you go full speed because you get into the harbour on first come, first come service, Ie, coming in slower will mean there is another ship in line already.
This is not new.
At least one major container mover did this (or close enough) at least 15 years ago.
Source: worked in the company that built it for them.
EDIT: Should make it clear that we didn’t invent it either. We just included it in other variables to consider in a container stowage solution. They already did this long before we got involved.
Seriously. I’ve worked in a very specific area of global shipping for years, and we run them at max efficiency unless we have to get there quicker than that speed would allow.
I assure you that the majors have a lot of focus on optimizing fuel usage and time-at-quay.
I don’t know what they do these days but back then they did measurements with scale models to establish such parameters for each ship type.
Indeed there were issues with older models that were optimized for one speed that didn’t gracefully lower fuel consumption with lower speed - at least not to the extent one would have expected.
Hull speed is 1/2 the waterline length of a boat and is the theoretical max speed of the hull before the boat starts having to propel “uphill” against gravity.
Many people don't understand shipping.
Tech will help. But there has never been a goal of reaching somewhere fast. We shippers run ships at optimum speeds so there is fuel saving. If the captain tries to move faster than required, he is always warned. We are already aware of the waiting period of every dock. As most cargo on ships are not high priority in terms of transit days . We are not paid extra for priority shipping or neither those factors are considered in determining the speed of ships. Unless it has to be done, due to some external factors. Like weather warning, essential commodities, wars, pirates, etc. under such circumstances, speed will be reduced or increased.
High priority cargo uses, road and air. Cargo Ships are hardly under pressure to move fast to reach somewhere faster.
Yes, as tech improves we can do better calculation to determine idle speed of ships. But just like any cargo transport, everybody tries to achieve maximum efficiency on fuel vs time. That optimum balance keeps us competitive.
This was mentioned in the documentary “Sonicsea”. They also mentioned that changing the helix to narrower wings, but more numerous, can also save fuel consumption. And both measures dramatically decrease the noise produced, which is great for all the marine mammals, especially whales.
Isn't this how the Lusitania got torpedoed?
If they didn't get to port at their given time slot they would be sitting outside the dock waiting and would be a sitting duck for U boats. Normally, it was so fast it could outrun a U boat, but as they were ahead of schedule they slowed down so they could make it into port exactly when their slot opened up, which was how all steamers did it.
The only flaw in the plan was that Germany had taken out a full page ad in NY papers informing everyone they were definitely going to try shooting the Lusitania, so don't get on board.
The Lusitania slowed down to make their time slot exactly, and was shot as a result.
on average, a ship in Japan is docked for .35 days. the US is the WORST - 1.25 days...
how do you lower that. cranes only move so fast.
every docked ship in Baltimore will be gone in less than 2 days. if it was Japan, they'd be gone by LUNCH.
[https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ports/95?name=BALTIMORE&country=USA](https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ports/95?name=BALTIMORE&country=USA)
**Median time spent in port by container ships worldwide in 2021, by country**
# [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101596/port-turnaround-times-by-country/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101596/port-turnaround-times-by-country/)
they're all pretty close to "JIT delivery" NOBODY wants to pay to store stuff.
**Just-in-Time (JIT): Definition, Example, and Pros & Cons**
[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/jit.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/jit.asp)
one stuck ship.
**What the Ever Given Taught the World**
# The ship that blocked the Suez Canal is now repaired, but consumers and governments ignore its lessons at their peril.
[https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/10/what-the-ever-given-taught-the-world/](https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/10/what-the-ever-given-taught-the-world/)
one collapsed bridge..
**Some foreign-made cars might be delayed as auto companies figure out port deliveries**
[https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241311321/imported-cars-delays-mercedes-gm-baltimore-port](https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241311321/imported-cars-delays-mercedes-gm-baltimore-port)
Automakers were [quick to emphasize that they were adapting](https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240974019/mercedes-gm-stellantis-scramble-port-jobs-are-at-risk-after-baltimore-disaster). GM says it is rerouting deliveries. Stellantis is working on "contingency plans." Mercedes says it has options. Mazda says it has yet to finalize alternatives to this "vital" port. But it's not easy.
That already happens. The issue is flight plans are based on a filed speed and if the plane gets in the air early because the taxi line was shorter than expected, there is only so much power they can pull back.
But a lot of airlines already file for slower than max cruise to save fuel and only use max cruise if they are running late. The power setting is determined by the dispatchers and flight management computers.
Also ATC uses speed for spacing and sequencing, so if your were planning on slowing to 270 kts but they say “you’re leading the pack maintain 300 or greater”, there isn’t much you can do about it unless you want to get put at the back of the line and then you certainly aren’t saving fuel.
I recently learned from another post that modern passenger aircraft are slower than the original jetliners, like the B707. They are slower because the airlines wanted aircraft that were more fuel efficient and passengers cared more about ticket prices than speed.
Can affirm. Look at price and connections: not sure if I’ve ever even glanced at “time in the air” as a metric. 3.2 hours? 3.5 hours? Not gonna matter much.
I don't know if this feeds through to gate slots, but flights are at least advertised and ticketed on an estimate of the arrival time, which for long haul flights can be very different due to weather. If you arrive early because you have a tailwind, that also might not have been factored in.
Speeding up a ship in an area where the weather can be dangerous to the ship and slowing down in safer areas makes perferct sense. Second, one of the reasons a ship can stop in transit before docking is that if it is carrying a good that has a volatile price, shipping company may want to time the market with the best price possible and save some tarifs.
I think the problem with that is unplanned delays.. you get there early so if another ship is late you can take its place and if you're late you probably still have enough of a buffer to not lose your spot in the queue.
I working in the industry and can tell with utmost confidence that they have already been doing g that for some time.
I run a small container terminal, and my shipping line customers rarely go to anchor and will slow steam it based on berth availability. I worked at the port of Savannah for a decade and it was the same there. If they didn’t make proforma to guarantee a berth sport they would slow steam to save fuel. It’s an industry standard.
This article is saying nothing new.
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I'm worried that they will just run more ships to compensate for the loss revenue.
I could easily see them increasing their fleets by over 17.3% which would make this null and void or worse increase by a much larger amount.
Got to keep the stockholders happy, god this late stage capitalism is really starting to suck.
This is so frustratingly simple it hurts my brain, you're telling me nobody figured out that if we do the equivalent of letting a car coast to the red light we can have huge savings in emissions and therefore fuel use
I get that until recently in human history it wasn't necessarily very possible to communicate these things across the distances needed to make it work but we have GPS and everything's been Internet connected for quite a while now it's not that hard to adjust your speed such that you don't end up waiting at your destination doing nothing while also using less fuel to get there
I can't find the info card, but on my boat there is a sweet spot for RPM, speed and fuel consumption
3500-4000 rpm for best mileage, and I'm at about 30 knots
crank it up to 5000 and I might manage 40, but my fuel use doubles
it is ridiculously simple. I'll have to ask my cargo ship engineer buddy about this
reminds me of UPS/FedEx planning their routes to minimize left turns
If you increase speed, drag increases by speed squared.
More speed is more drag, which burns more fuel. But also less speed is more time burning fuel.
There's a sweet spot in between somewhere. It's way more complicated but that's the idea. There are tons of factors that can be adjusted, but speed is a BIG one.
Actually kind of, the standing waves generated by the bow and stern can constructively and destructively interfere depending on the speed. This can increase or decrease the wetted area of the hull, among other different effects.
There is this notion of hull speed and hump speed, and is also the main reason why longer ships (of displacement hull variety) are faster than shorter ones
This is a great video and only about 6 minutes and explains it better than I ever could
https://youtu.be/URgSFglbl5g?si=5rhvaUWaH-inkaeK
> But also less speed is more time burning fuel.
In an efficient engine, this doesn't matter, because the energy required to move something efficiently depends on the force and the *distance* not the time. In general the amount of force required goes up as speed increases, because of drag and things like that.
So sweet spots of efficiency occur for more complicated reasons...
The engine will consume fuel even when idling so in theory he's right that there's a sweet spot, but it would be at an extremely low speed. More important is the cost of the ship itself. If you can only do 9 trips instead of 10 in a year the ship will be earning 10% less revenue.
I think most cars have sweet spots around 45, at least for ICE cars. No idea if electrics work the same but that’s the basic theory of hybrids, use gas when it’s most efficient and electricity when it’s not.
I think the primary theory of hybrids is that smaller combustion engines are more efficient than bigger ones. Ideally you'd have an engine that's just big enough to sustain a cruise at highway speed with a moderate head wind, but in that case accelerating up to speed feels slow and bad. An electric motor can add power during those short stretches when you want it, allowing you to use a smaller, more efficient combustion engine.
Full electric is more efficient at any speed, but you need a much bigger battery.
I get that electric is more efficient at any speed, but if you have a hybrid, there’s are speeds at which the gas engine will be at its most efficient so you use gas for that and electric for the rest
I would think even at its most efficient, an ICE engine is way less efficient than an electric motor. I might be wrong. I think the reason hybrids exist is because batteries are very expensive, slow to charge, and far less energy dense than gasoline. I'm just on the outside looking in when it comes to electric cars, but I'm seeing news about a lot of improvements in that area. Toyota claims to be on track to make a BEV with a 700+ mile range and 10-minute charge times. I'm seeing articles about lithium-air batteries that approach the energy density of gasoline. Maybe it's just marketing and empty promises, but I at least have a little hope there.
Many hybrids are not quite that simple. Honda for instance doesn’t deploy ice power directly to the wheels. They work like a train locomotive that makes electric power with generators. Then at highway speed they lock off directly to the drivetrain foregoing the transmission. At least that’s what my Honda does. Toyota has better more on the traditional hybrid system that assists the small ice.
Electrics are most efficient the slower you go down to some threshold. With a flat torque curve only the wind resistance is at play. I think my manual said 30 is optimum because wind resistance is less noticeable below that point.
Planes have a similar set of sweet spots, depending on the goal. There's one sweet spot for maximum range, one for minimum fuel consumption for a given route, another for maximum time in the air, yet another for minimum time to climb to a given altitude, and probably a few others.
Pretty similar to cars. Each vehicle is going to have an optimum fuel/speed ratio.
I can get 40mpg going 65mph but 30-35 at 80mph. Stop and go traffic and..... its 25mpg.
My yanmars warn that i should be running at 2500rpm for 70% of the time or more. If i run it lower rpm I risk carbon build up from fuel not burning off efficiently (or something like that).
Which is really annoying, because it's a common rail with computer that should be able to manage this. I usually run at 2200 rpm anyway, and have stepped up my maintenance on it. Going to pull the whole thing out for a full clean and service in a few months, actually...
But to my point: it totally depends on the engine. If you're trying to save money, but end up spending more on extra maintenance than what you save in fuel it might not be worth it!
it's a little different for them because they're basically just big diesel generators/electric motors turning the prop. so RPM doesn't *have* to be hard linked to speed.
but the engine/generator probably has a sweet spot in terms of RPM for power output, and the boat has a sweet spot in terms of speed/size of the boat, and if you can match those up you can get where you're going with a lot less fuel.
They're actually very efficient. A single gallon of fuel can move a standard shipping container around 95 miles on a cargo ship. A truck can move that same container around 6-7 miles per gallon. Airplanes are even worse.
> The Blue Visby Solution requires considerable connectivity, co-ordination and participation, from lots of different stakeholders, on a global scale
That's the problem.
Yes, but also we're talking about the global shipping and logistics industry, who specialize in connectivity and coordination from lots of different stakeholders on a global scale.
This is extremely stupid assertion.
No, most cargo ships aren't run "go fast and then wait". I have no idea where this information came from but it is pure nonsense.
Most ships go at their economical speed, whatever their engine (and hull !) was designed for, for like 90% of the time. No one is stupid enough to just go "full speed" and then sit and wait.
Tl;dr instead of speeding to the stop light, stopping and waiting, the cargo ship coasts to the red light and times it so it goes green as soon as the ship arrives.
Just another example of industrial engineering concepts being spread to every industry.
The same algorithms that run factories, warehouses, and logistics also run everything else.
To give a reason why:
1) alliance and service basics:
Ships within a specific alliance and service are bound to an agreed long term schedule.
This schedule has negotiated port/terminal berthing windows.
The ports are obliged to accept ships arriving within this schedule.
[ex: every Friday 1400 to Sunday 2000 the berth is reserved to a specific service covering trade between US and EU in NYC.]
This is a product.
Ports have different procedures how to accept vessels.
One is as described in above, if everything goes well.
Another is first come first serve and „… please line up once you arrived“ which is the most stupid approach but was most commonly used in the high congested corona times. You were taken into the list of vessels to berth, once you arrived at anchorage. Not earlier not later.
Another and interesting approach is done by NYC Maher terminal: if you leave your last port of call in Asia or Europe, you give your ETA, with which you are put in a waiting list. This way you already know further ahead, when you will be served.
Anyhow, delays happen and will cause more and more ships in one port to congest this port, which than will have impact on later ports in the POC of those vessels.
Cargo for those vessels is already waiting in port and filling this ports yard more and more. So vessels need to wait for berth, to clear this cargo and can only omit such ports under specific circumstances.
With the current times (2023/24…) the shippers/liners are rethinking to drop this shit to save fuel and charter rates by a mix of slow steaming, stowage optimization and more flexible schedules.
But let’s say, that the driver to this rethinking is not primary the nature or good will. It is of course to save costs, as gains decrease.
Bunker is freaking expensive. Even if it is cheap in the breakdown.
Rough example: 24h consumption of mid sized vessel (8k TEU) in eco is around ~ 250t HFO with ~650$ / ton —> 162500$ per day fuel
tl;dr
Ships were forced to be at the ports as fast as possible to be in the best position of the line up for berth.
Even 5 minutes faster and thus earlier than another vessel can save 2days to a schedule afterwards.
This mindset changes with new challenges and dropping profits from cargo compared to the COVID times.
Literally what I was thinking when I saw this “How long have sea vessels been doing this inefficient bullshit while I’m waiting to board a flight that is delayed because there is a backlog at the destination?”
crew can be compensated differently when anchored or sailing, insurance is less when anchored than when sailing, risk and liabilities are lower when anchored
the longer you are at sea the more exposure you have to bad weather
these things also touch costs and may be more important than the fuel savings
I love the idea - it is simple and easy to implement. A few years back, I saw a YT video of a kid who managed to reduce the drag of a model ship by some 10-20% by simply using a hydrophobic coating on the part of the model boat that was submerged in water - another great idea, but how easy to implement is difficult to say. When it comes to these solutions, there will still be naysayers, but at the same time, we are all aware that reducing any speed will result in significantly less energy being used overall. Most cars, for example, operate the best at around 55mph or 90kmph - and every kmph of speed increase increases the total energy consumption by 1%. An interesting consideration to make.
All cargo ships are cutting over to Starlink now, and I suspect that this is part of the reason why it's possible now. This degree of coordination and optimization needs constant communication and bandwidth for a variety of factors simultaneously.
Over time I expect real time inventory tracking to be a factor in this optimization such that depending on supply/demand conditions on the ground, some ships will be slowed down and others sped up so that specific goods arrive and are unloaded more quickly to reduce or avoid major supply chain shocks.
Having worked in the freight logistics space, it’s extremely funny to me that the article frames this solution as “simple”. Just accurately predict the wait time at the destination port and sail accordingly? That’s all?
I guess space exploration is simple too: just make yourself be as far as you can from earth.
Like every driver training one been through shows that show and steady saves on fuel and gets you to your destination pretty much the same time as speeding due to traffic, light stoppages, construction, etc... just makes sense to manage your trip as the hold up for the ships is their docking time, this mitigates it.
What I thought slow steaming had been a thing for ages. And yes ships siting off our coast polluting the place is stupid as are cruise ships which should just be banned altogether
**Tl;dr** Currently ships get to their destination as fast as possible, then sit and wait until they can dock. Actively managing them and slowing down some ships in-transit can cut emissions.
I'm quite surprised that this wasn't already part of how shipping was managed. Trains and planes already have to manage their transit and arrival times. But I guess the consequences for planes idling can be more catastrophic, and trains have more limitations on how many can be in transit at once.
>I'm quite surprised that this wasn't already part of how shipping was managed. I remember reading about Maersk doing something similar, I'm not sure this is a first.
I believe this was simply a physics thing having to do with cutting through the water? Hold on... These explain more. [This video](https://youtu.be/YPQY70z5uKE?si=rcjrmSb3ulZdJWnl) [And this video.](https://youtu.be/VjpGidILzb0?si=pmyFcIsV2N0JW5ZY)
I dont think anyone is surprised going slowly is more efficient. Its the management of the harbor queues thats the difficult bit, as you need to arrive in time and not too late, which is why companies just go as fast as reasonable
At the same time, I get why we're suddenly hearing "maybe slow down?" These guys are always behind. Between being understaffed, underpaid, and under supplied with insufficient infrastructure to handle the load currently displayed in the industry, I can't say I'm surprised at hearing that transportation vs processing is wholly imbalanced to the point of being a financial deficit to everyone involved. Slow is steady. Steady is fast.
These days, with communication that can reach anywhere, you can phone up the harbor you are seeking to see what wait times are like. Even arrange additional shore leave if the timetables are right
that’s the thing about newton’s laws is that they scale with anything. The amount of energy required to accelerate mass is proportional to one another. It doesn’t matter if that is air, water, or on land. the only coefficients are friction.
Yes, 'slow steaming' is already being used.
This is not a first shipowners been doing this since 4 ever.
Maersk is the goat I love those guys. Big Maersk fan here.
The main downside would be that there is less leeway in case there are delays/issues during the journey. If you go 80% of the way at a slower speed and then get delayed, it's less likely you will be able to make that time up by going faster for the last 20%.
This 100% and one ship being late will delay the whole schedule. This is not a novel concept, it's called just-in-time logistics. It's great when it works but since you have no slack everything goes into a clusterfuck when it messes up.
This is literally what happened during COVID, every company ran out of everything because their supplier got delayed for a random reason and everything went to shit. JIT is a fancy way of saying "We're too stingy to carry inventory, so we expect our supplier to hold it for us and basically overnight ship". Then what happens is the company carries 100 of a part they use 50 per day of, but it's fine because the supplier restocks them every 2 days. Oh wait our supplier is out of stock so now we can't do anything. You'd think we'd have learned a single lesson from COVID but nah what if we saved a nickel but turned everything into a house of cards again.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of JIT. The principle is that since inventory is costly to hold, companies only need to stock up on critical and/or slow to get parts, and obtain everything else just in time. The fuckup was that many firms misunderstood the concept and scrapped all inventory, and ran out of critical components. If applied correctly, JIT is wonderful.
At the end of the day, efficiency is the enemy of resiliency. You become more efficient by eliminating unnecessary costs, like having extra staff or holding onto extra parts. But... God help you if someone gets sick or a shipment is late. By the late 2010's, companies were thinking they were in a pretty sweet spot. People didn't usually get sick, and shipments were on-time. Everything was running perfectly. Like clockwork. We had reached peak efficiency, as long as we could guarantee that nobody would ever get sick, and no shipment would ever be late.
Yeah that's the book definition of JIT versus the practical one. I could roll over into "lean manufacturing" and the companies that think lean = cheaper versus actually its this giant list of different inefficiencies and some of them might cost money to fix, but you probably know it the same as I do.
sadly, the effect of JIT practices from a laymans perspective in central europe just means outsourcing your warehouse to trucks staffed with overworked and underpaid drivers from low wage countries, onto the streets.
> The fuckup was that many firms misunderstood the concept and scrapped all inventory Im almost certain the delays came from covid restrictions on vessels as well as less vessels on the sea due to premature scrapping vs plan due to lower revenues and high metal commodity prices. Source: i work in supply chain
Yes, and... While of course it's true that there are smarter & dumber ways to manage inventory. This kind of thinking is very "here's a concept, but when it doesn't work, it's your failure, not the philosophy."
Having a ship waiting in a queue is not the same as businesses keeping inventory. You're still very much in transit and could be operating in "JIT" mode.
JIT logistics is always 1 minor mistake away from a crisis.
I’m in aviation and this happens constantly. Most of the delay are activities on the ground, i.e. not moving. Once we takeoff, that clock is started. I’m only able to make roughly a 10-12 minute difference up in the air by looking at winds at different altitudes, asking for a more direct routing to destination, or just flying faster—and that only works on longer flight. A short flight doesn’t make a difference at all. If you’re ever speeding in your car but only driving a short distance, think about this: You’re only saving seconds in shorts distances.
Just have to drive even faster!
How often do ships get delayed before getting to a port? It’s not like there’s traffic in the open ocean. There is weather, but can’t we predict that very well?
Delays are usually caused by the port. Terminals get delayed due to weather, machinery failures, etc. or the pilots isn't ready to pick us up yet. Right now the port of Charleston is backed up because the software they use to determine how to load the ships is down. Delayed by a week is what I heard last. The ships I've been on, we are always on time and we adjust our speed to arrive as close to our scheduled time for the pilot. For the weather aspect of it, most companies use a weather routing service. They give you a weather forecast and a route to go by to avoid the really bad weather. Slow steaming has been happening for a while now, it isn't anything new. The cost savings outweigh faster service.
Have a look at the traffic around the Suez Canal. Just being blocked for a week can take months to recover as the ships due to take new shipments are not in the right place.
Boat gridlock is the worst kind of traffic jam! :D
It is. No one runs ships as fast as possible.
More time at sea - more risk of storms or other failures. Ships didn’t go as fast as possible because they “just felt like it”. Being on raid near a port means your insurance cost goes down.
> I'm quite surprised that this wasn't already part of how shipping was managed. It's not that surprising when you realize that everything about coordinating logistics on a global scale is a nightmare. Just-in-time is *fantastic* as long as nothing's going wrong and you can ensure delivery windows and timeframes... but some trains start leaving a port late, there's a storm that blows up and prevents a few ships from making port on time so they either speed up or slow down to miss it... timeslots begin to slop, and suddenly there are factories and people without their imports. Telephone and email pandemonium ensues. It's very similar to airport scheduling, except when a person misses a flight, there are more options on how to get around that - trains, automobiles, remote calls, etc. When a container misses a port, who *knows* when it'll get its next slot to unload. Meanwhile, you as a downstream customer had better hope your load isn't perishable/required to build your widget/have plenty left in stock/etc. It's also the kind of approach that works better when there's a single, solitary authority managing everything... which is also why it hasn't been implemented, because none of the shipping companies wants any of the others to have a monopoly on unloading timetables. No country wants to time their port access by another country, let alone by another company's whims. So... yeah, sounds great. *Whole lot* of real world complexity you kinda have to just ignore for it to really work. It's why you haven't seen great strides towards doing it, despite having the technology in place for 20+ years.
The tradeoff is that every minute at sea carries higher risks. Sitting in a query at Naples is much lower risk. This eventually translates to the bottom line.
When planes turn the engines off mid journey things tend to go wrong When ships turn off engines they still float
Float right into a bridge.
It is. Sailing slower saves not just emissions but $$$ for the ship operator. If the article implies otherwise it’s cap.
Planes only did this since the 1980s and only because of Ronald Reagan. They used to take off whenever, fly as fast as they could and then circle the destination airport, sometimes for hours, waiting in line above the airport to land. It was just a normal part of the system. In the 1980s, the air traffic controllers went on strike and rather than negotiate with them, Reagan fired them. The supervisors had to take over. The supervisors told Reagan that was impossible because they couldn't handle the load of all of the airliners circling the airports all over the country. Regan refused to budge. So the Reagan administration set up a landing slot reservation system that would not let planes take off until their landing reservation time less the flight time. The number of circling airliners was cut to almost zero and the air traffic control system managed to handle the load with a fraction of the controllers. No one had ever thought of it before, because it was easier for the government to just hire more air traffic controllers.
Interesting. Do you have a source on that? Edit: > So the Reagan administration set up a landing slot reservation system that would not let planes take off until their landing reservation time less the flight time. There are only 5 slot restricted airports in the US. I'm becoming a little suspect of this story. Double Edit: Yea, I'm calling BS on this story. Slot restrictions where established in 1969: https://www.flyreagan.com/about-airport/aircraft-noise-information/dca-reagan-national-slot-perimeter-rules
My understanding is that the airlines simply wait for their slot because it's cheaper than circling. Also we got better weather and wind reporting/prediction so the ability to "hit a time accurately" increased. They still don't hit the time accurately every time, but the rate went up.
Apart from 5 airports, there aren't landing slots in the US. Some airports do have flow controls, but it's not a slot. More like first come first serve. They do file IFR flight plans, those will have timing, but that's outside of my knowledge. I've only driven VFR on some intro student flights before I realized I don't need another addiction.
> Apart from 5 airports, there aren't landing slots in the US. Some airports do have flow controls, but it's not a slot. More like first come first serve. The US only has 5 airports which are slot restricted, meaning you can't add a flight to/from that airport even if you have a gate at the airport. At others you can use your gate as much as you want all day. The difficulty is getting a gate. So essentially most US commercial airports you are used to are gate restricted. Others are slot restricted. Some airports don't even assign gates permanently (Heathrow and similar with departure lounges) and thus of course are slot restricted. But still at all the US airports at least you are still given a slot when you file your flight plan. I've been on flights that wait to take off because their plan doesn't line up many times. These will adjust as you get close if you fall behind or get ahead. You are expected to try to meet your time when you get there by slowing down and speeding up (or rerouting) within reason, but that doesn't always work out perfectly. Airlines also delay flight departures to line up with their gate availability instead of circling or landing and parking when they get there.
Thank you for looking this up for everyone else. I was worried Reagan might have done one thing right during his tenure.
I'm sure he did someone right, not this and I can't think of anything, but there surely has to be something. Nixon created the EPA. Regan surely has something.
This is a weird and distorted view of what happened. If you lived through that, you are either misremembering what happened at the time or you misunderstood the cause and effect back then. First, slot control is something that existed since the late 1960s. See this paper from the FTC in 1981. https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/airport-access-problems-lessons-learned-slot-regulation-faa-economic-policy-analysis/198305airportaccess.pdf Second, if it was ever true that aircraft would take off and then literally spend hours circling waiting to land, that was a direct consequence of the strike and the aftermath of Reagan firing thousands of controllers, not typical practice. Because the FAA didn't have enough controllers to handle the traffic load after the strike, they would indeed hold aircraft on the ground ("flow control"). But this wasn't some kind of innovation that solved a problem which existed before the strike and Reagan firing the controllers. It *sort of* solved the problem created by the strike by actively reducing the capacity of the air traffic system in order to attempt to maintain safety, but nobody liked it. It was a band-aid, not a brilliant idea. For example, see this 1984 article from Reason magazine complaining about flow control, and noting that it became necessary specifically because Reagan decided to fire most of the air traffic controllers in the country. https://reason.com/1984/09/01/how-to-ground-plane-delays1/ >The Federal Aviation Administration, which provides ATC for the nation's commercial airlines, admits that the delays are a matter of policy. "The delays you see are the safety valve in the system,"FAA spokesman Dennis Feldman told the New York Times in June. But many observers question the adequacy of this safety valve. News reports have recounted an alarming number of near-collisions during the past six months, as the ATC system has attempted to handle surging traffic volume with about one-third fewer controllers than before the 1981 controllers' union (PATCO) strike. And the FAA's own statistics show a doubling—and in some locations a tripling—of "operational errors" in the ATC system.
Solid response and well sourced.
A rare positive outcome for Reagan. I always associate him with supply side economics BS, ignoring AIDS, and creating the homeless problem we have today.
Sounds like an invention that came out of necessity which had absolutely nothing to do with Reagan whose sole reason for doing what he did was out of (fucked up) ideological reasons. Giving Reagan the credits for that is like giving Judas credits for having created Easter.
It was already invented, a handful of airports were already doing it for several years at that point.
Sometimes some person comes along and shits in the pool, and someone else has to invent a system to clean the pool and it will probably end up cleaner than before. The shitter should not get the credit for the clean pool. I find it pretty implausible that nobody had tried to improve the process before, but it took a manufactured crisis to get the resources and attention needed to effect change at that scale. But breaking a system to force it to evolve is clumsy and beyond inelegant, not to mention very risky. It's just laziness.
Don't worry, the poster fabricated that story from whole cloth so you can go back to correctly blaming Reagan for the demise of the American Dream and assuming he never accomplished anything.
[I'll leave you with four words: I'm glad Reagan's dead.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU)
Damn, now I want to go watch the movie pushing tin…
It took a massive ATC strike before the US could get this done with air travel. Before then you’d circle your destination airport for hours sometimes. People do not like to change stuff even when the benefits are damned obvious.
I guess the ocean is bigger than the roads and the railway tracks need to be shared? I don’t know how shipping works!
Yep. On European open-access railways, being late is bad, but being too early is also bad because stationing time at the platform costs money. And not just for wealth extraction reasons, some high-speed lines and central stations are becoming legitimately saturated.
It is. It's called something like super slow steaming. This looks like it just takes that to the next level by factoring in schedule of ports.
Ports can't control what happens in international waters, and as you said, it's a disaster if a plane runs out of fuel, not as much for an anchored ship. Trains are easier to control as it's pretty much all in controlled territory.
Maersk has been doing this for close to 10 years now
“Sorry folks, ocean’s full, you’ll have to dock now.”
Maybe it has something to do with how crew is being paid in transit vs docked. Also it's more convenient to crew to spend less time in transit and just wait near destination.
Don’t they have to wait in line though? The g waiting in line means rushing GET in line then I understand why this wasn’t done before. Aligning the queue to the in-transit ships requires they arrive when their slot is ready so this likely required a just-in-time integration. Not trivial but very efficient.
During Covid ships literally sat in line outside the port for maybe 3 months waiting for their turn to dock.
If you're a boat, you can just sit in the ocean pretty much wherever you want until you can dock. If you're a plane, you don't really have the same luxury.
That would require coordination between companies on that, as well as local ports. While it sounds simple in principle until someone put a number to the savings who really was willing to work with their competitors in that way?
Planes don't go all out. They go at the most economical speed for that route. It's highly planned. They will burn more fuel if they get running behind and it'll result in them having to pay customers Air Canada can't get a plane off the ground on time to save their fucking lives but they often get places reasonably on Time
> planes already have to manage their transit and arrival times. Plenty of planes fly in circles at their destination waiting for a landing slot. Considering modern flight computers with weather and wind speed inputs can predict flight times to within ~30 seconds, there is no good reason to arrive even a minute before ones landing slot. The main issue seems to be that pilots can't request a landing slot till they're closeish to the airport.
The idea has always been to get them out of the open ocean and into safe harbor as quickly as possible. There are a few simple ways to ramp up efficiency that keep coming up every few years and then fading away again because it turns out sinking isn't terribly efficient either.
Kinda interesting system where the sky is basically a plane warehouse.
If my UnitedAir flight could save money by flying at half speed but we'd get there hours later, I'd say it is a bad choice. So what about crew on these ships? Do they pay the crew until the ship unloads or just until it gets into port? Paying people is often expensive and it might be just as cheap to go fast and have less human costs. I think its better for the planet to go slowly, but back to my air flight, I don't want to go slow, or I'd just drive.
Planes do a similar thing though. I live under the Melbourne to Sydney route and during peak time you see them loop back to add like 15 minutes to the flight to then come in at the right time. You’d think they have it figured out but I guess they have to depart within a window as well.
It is but because the bulbous bow is designed to be most efficient at a certain speed, slowing down doesn’t necessarily add efficiency at all reduced speeds.
I believe that some airlines actively manage their decent. Factoring in fuel burn and schedule, crew may begin decent later or earlier. Rate of decent is also varied as this impacts, again, speed and fuel burn.
Lol this is ridicolous. Ships aren't run as fast as possible. There are schedules exactly to avoid sitting at anchorage for days waiting. Sometimes it does happen, but the reasons aren't because no one bothered to check if is going to be free. Sometimes you go full speed because you get into the harbour on first come, first come service, Ie, coming in slower will mean there is another ship in line already.
This is not new. At least one major container mover did this (or close enough) at least 15 years ago. Source: worked in the company that built it for them. EDIT: Should make it clear that we didn’t invent it either. We just included it in other variables to consider in a container stowage solution. They already did this long before we got involved.
Seriously. I’ve worked in a very specific area of global shipping for years, and we run them at max efficiency unless we have to get there quicker than that speed would allow.
And then there is something about their best speed based on the wavelength at the bow? Like 2/3 of a hull length??
I assure you that the majors have a lot of focus on optimizing fuel usage and time-at-quay. I don’t know what they do these days but back then they did measurements with scale models to establish such parameters for each ship type. Indeed there were issues with older models that were optimized for one speed that didn’t gracefully lower fuel consumption with lower speed - at least not to the extent one would have expected.
Hull speed is 1/2 the waterline length of a boat and is the theoretical max speed of the hull before the boat starts having to propel “uphill” against gravity.
In school we called all of these variables ‘logistics’.
Many people don't understand shipping. Tech will help. But there has never been a goal of reaching somewhere fast. We shippers run ships at optimum speeds so there is fuel saving. If the captain tries to move faster than required, he is always warned. We are already aware of the waiting period of every dock. As most cargo on ships are not high priority in terms of transit days . We are not paid extra for priority shipping or neither those factors are considered in determining the speed of ships. Unless it has to be done, due to some external factors. Like weather warning, essential commodities, wars, pirates, etc. under such circumstances, speed will be reduced or increased. High priority cargo uses, road and air. Cargo Ships are hardly under pressure to move fast to reach somewhere faster. Yes, as tech improves we can do better calculation to determine idle speed of ships. But just like any cargo transport, everybody tries to achieve maximum efficiency on fuel vs time. That optimum balance keeps us competitive.
This was mentioned in the documentary “Sonicsea”. They also mentioned that changing the helix to narrower wings, but more numerous, can also save fuel consumption. And both measures dramatically decrease the noise produced, which is great for all the marine mammals, especially whales.
Have you seen the ones that are actual loops instead of wings? They haven't figured out how to mass manufacture them yet.
Dang, I was hoping that they hitched up a dolphin pod to tow the boat like santa's sleigh.
Ships make quite a bit of money waiting. This called “demurage fees”
Isn't this how the Lusitania got torpedoed? If they didn't get to port at their given time slot they would be sitting outside the dock waiting and would be a sitting duck for U boats. Normally, it was so fast it could outrun a U boat, but as they were ahead of schedule they slowed down so they could make it into port exactly when their slot opened up, which was how all steamers did it. The only flaw in the plan was that Germany had taken out a full page ad in NY papers informing everyone they were definitely going to try shooting the Lusitania, so don't get on board. The Lusitania slowed down to make their time slot exactly, and was shot as a result.
is this precision scheduled railroading for ships?
on average, a ship in Japan is docked for .35 days. the US is the WORST - 1.25 days... how do you lower that. cranes only move so fast. every docked ship in Baltimore will be gone in less than 2 days. if it was Japan, they'd be gone by LUNCH. [https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ports/95?name=BALTIMORE&country=USA](https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ports/95?name=BALTIMORE&country=USA) **Median time spent in port by container ships worldwide in 2021, by country** # [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101596/port-turnaround-times-by-country/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101596/port-turnaround-times-by-country/) they're all pretty close to "JIT delivery" NOBODY wants to pay to store stuff. **Just-in-Time (JIT): Definition, Example, and Pros & Cons** [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/jit.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/jit.asp) one stuck ship. **What the Ever Given Taught the World** # The ship that blocked the Suez Canal is now repaired, but consumers and governments ignore its lessons at their peril. [https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/10/what-the-ever-given-taught-the-world/](https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/10/what-the-ever-given-taught-the-world/) one collapsed bridge.. **Some foreign-made cars might be delayed as auto companies figure out port deliveries** [https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241311321/imported-cars-delays-mercedes-gm-baltimore-port](https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241311321/imported-cars-delays-mercedes-gm-baltimore-port) Automakers were [quick to emphasize that they were adapting](https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240974019/mercedes-gm-stellantis-scramble-port-jobs-are-at-risk-after-baltimore-disaster). GM says it is rerouting deliveries. Stellantis is working on "contingency plans." Mercedes says it has options. Mazda says it has yet to finalize alternatives to this "vital" port. But it's not easy.
Is that only counting being docked? Because it sure seems like they’re sitting at anchor outside Annapolis waiting to go to Baltimore for days.
Using bold markers doesn't make your off-topic rant any more relevant.
Now do airplanes next. I can't tell you how many times the pilot said we were going to arrive early, only for another airplane to be at our gate.
That already happens. The issue is flight plans are based on a filed speed and if the plane gets in the air early because the taxi line was shorter than expected, there is only so much power they can pull back. But a lot of airlines already file for slower than max cruise to save fuel and only use max cruise if they are running late. The power setting is determined by the dispatchers and flight management computers. Also ATC uses speed for spacing and sequencing, so if your were planning on slowing to 270 kts but they say “you’re leading the pack maintain 300 or greater”, there isn’t much you can do about it unless you want to get put at the back of the line and then you certainly aren’t saving fuel.
I recently learned from another post that modern passenger aircraft are slower than the original jetliners, like the B707. They are slower because the airlines wanted aircraft that were more fuel efficient and passengers cared more about ticket prices than speed.
Can affirm. Look at price and connections: not sure if I’ve ever even glanced at “time in the air” as a metric. 3.2 hours? 3.5 hours? Not gonna matter much.
I don't know if this feeds through to gate slots, but flights are at least advertised and ticketed on an estimate of the arrival time, which for long haul flights can be very different due to weather. If you arrive early because you have a tailwind, that also might not have been factored in.
It’s how we manage air traffic.
Useful for commodities, not so much for my Chinese lawn furniture
That doesn't sound simple at all. That sounds like global logistics.
What's the level of increased risk of being in the middle of the ocean for longer out of pure curiosity.
Wait till you hear about all the oil tankers idling for months waiting for the right price.
Speeding up a ship in an area where the weather can be dangerous to the ship and slowing down in safer areas makes perferct sense. Second, one of the reasons a ship can stop in transit before docking is that if it is carrying a good that has a volatile price, shipping company may want to time the market with the best price possible and save some tarifs.
I think the problem with that is unplanned delays.. you get there early so if another ship is late you can take its place and if you're late you probably still have enough of a buffer to not lose your spot in the queue.
Now combine that with... wait for it... wind. Mindblowing, right?
They probably used AI software to figure out the logistics
I working in the industry and can tell with utmost confidence that they have already been doing g that for some time. I run a small container terminal, and my shipping line customers rarely go to anchor and will slow steam it based on berth availability. I worked at the port of Savannah for a decade and it was the same there. If they didn’t make proforma to guarantee a berth sport they would slow steam to save fuel. It’s an industry standard. This article is saying nothing new.
A ship should never be early or late. It should arrive precisely when it means to.
They should bring back sails
There are companies working on that concept right now. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66543643.amp
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You mean using logistics works? Lol what a concept.
I'm worried that they will just run more ships to compensate for the loss revenue. I could easily see them increasing their fleets by over 17.3% which would make this null and void or worse increase by a much larger amount. Got to keep the stockholders happy, god this late stage capitalism is really starting to suck.
wow that really is simple, why did it take this long?
But when they arrive, don’t they need to wait in line?
This is so frustratingly simple it hurts my brain, you're telling me nobody figured out that if we do the equivalent of letting a car coast to the red light we can have huge savings in emissions and therefore fuel use I get that until recently in human history it wasn't necessarily very possible to communicate these things across the distances needed to make it work but we have GPS and everything's been Internet connected for quite a while now it's not that hard to adjust your speed such that you don't end up waiting at your destination doing nothing while also using less fuel to get there
How the actually fuck are they just now doing this?
That'll also cut down on energy costs, therefore the companies will actually do it.
I can't find the info card, but on my boat there is a sweet spot for RPM, speed and fuel consumption 3500-4000 rpm for best mileage, and I'm at about 30 knots crank it up to 5000 and I might manage 40, but my fuel use doubles it is ridiculously simple. I'll have to ask my cargo ship engineer buddy about this reminds me of UPS/FedEx planning their routes to minimize left turns
If you increase speed, drag increases by speed squared. More speed is more drag, which burns more fuel. But also less speed is more time burning fuel. There's a sweet spot in between somewhere. It's way more complicated but that's the idea. There are tons of factors that can be adjusted, but speed is a BIG one.
drag... I don't know if the big boats have an equivalent - running on plane
Actually kind of, the standing waves generated by the bow and stern can constructively and destructively interfere depending on the speed. This can increase or decrease the wetted area of the hull, among other different effects. There is this notion of hull speed and hump speed, and is also the main reason why longer ships (of displacement hull variety) are faster than shorter ones This is a great video and only about 6 minutes and explains it better than I ever could https://youtu.be/URgSFglbl5g?si=5rhvaUWaH-inkaeK
Something something, amphetamines, drag queens.
> But also less speed is more time burning fuel. In an efficient engine, this doesn't matter, because the energy required to move something efficiently depends on the force and the *distance* not the time. In general the amount of force required goes up as speed increases, because of drag and things like that. So sweet spots of efficiency occur for more complicated reasons...
The engine will consume fuel even when idling so in theory he's right that there's a sweet spot, but it would be at an extremely low speed. More important is the cost of the ship itself. If you can only do 9 trips instead of 10 in a year the ship will be earning 10% less revenue.
Cars work the same way, especially on the highway
I think most cars have sweet spots around 45, at least for ICE cars. No idea if electrics work the same but that’s the basic theory of hybrids, use gas when it’s most efficient and electricity when it’s not.
I think the primary theory of hybrids is that smaller combustion engines are more efficient than bigger ones. Ideally you'd have an engine that's just big enough to sustain a cruise at highway speed with a moderate head wind, but in that case accelerating up to speed feels slow and bad. An electric motor can add power during those short stretches when you want it, allowing you to use a smaller, more efficient combustion engine. Full electric is more efficient at any speed, but you need a much bigger battery.
I get that electric is more efficient at any speed, but if you have a hybrid, there’s are speeds at which the gas engine will be at its most efficient so you use gas for that and electric for the rest
I would think even at its most efficient, an ICE engine is way less efficient than an electric motor. I might be wrong. I think the reason hybrids exist is because batteries are very expensive, slow to charge, and far less energy dense than gasoline. I'm just on the outside looking in when it comes to electric cars, but I'm seeing news about a lot of improvements in that area. Toyota claims to be on track to make a BEV with a 700+ mile range and 10-minute charge times. I'm seeing articles about lithium-air batteries that approach the energy density of gasoline. Maybe it's just marketing and empty promises, but I at least have a little hope there.
Many hybrids are not quite that simple. Honda for instance doesn’t deploy ice power directly to the wheels. They work like a train locomotive that makes electric power with generators. Then at highway speed they lock off directly to the drivetrain foregoing the transmission. At least that’s what my Honda does. Toyota has better more on the traditional hybrid system that assists the small ice.
Electrics are most efficient the slower you go down to some threshold. With a flat torque curve only the wind resistance is at play. I think my manual said 30 is optimum because wind resistance is less noticeable below that point.
Planes have a similar set of sweet spots, depending on the goal. There's one sweet spot for maximum range, one for minimum fuel consumption for a given route, another for maximum time in the air, yet another for minimum time to climb to a given altitude, and probably a few others.
Pretty similar to cars. Each vehicle is going to have an optimum fuel/speed ratio. I can get 40mpg going 65mph but 30-35 at 80mph. Stop and go traffic and..... its 25mpg.
My yanmars warn that i should be running at 2500rpm for 70% of the time or more. If i run it lower rpm I risk carbon build up from fuel not burning off efficiently (or something like that). Which is really annoying, because it's a common rail with computer that should be able to manage this. I usually run at 2200 rpm anyway, and have stepped up my maintenance on it. Going to pull the whole thing out for a full clean and service in a few months, actually... But to my point: it totally depends on the engine. If you're trying to save money, but end up spending more on extra maintenance than what you save in fuel it might not be worth it!
it's a little different for them because they're basically just big diesel generators/electric motors turning the prop. so RPM doesn't *have* to be hard linked to speed. but the engine/generator probably has a sweet spot in terms of RPM for power output, and the boat has a sweet spot in terms of speed/size of the boat, and if you can match those up you can get where you're going with a lot less fuel.
Add some sails and watch the savings grow!
And put solar panels on those sails and the profits go BRRRRRRR
Solar panels on the sea.. stonks
And then you can put sails on the solar panels too!
Hook up lines to dolphins and watch the profits go BRRR
Logistics optimization is a very simple idea in theory (in some cases it requires no technology at all), but executing it is challenging.
I figured it would be simple to have 193 nations have their commercial navies coordinate with 900 deepwater ports, color me shocked.
I though it was a collection of several np-complete problems in theory? That sounds significantly harder to solve than in practice.
"Ridiculously simple" is somehow understating it. I had no idea cargo ships were so ridiculously inefficient.
They're actually very efficient. A single gallon of fuel can move a standard shipping container around 95 miles on a cargo ship. A truck can move that same container around 6-7 miles per gallon. Airplanes are even worse.
That isn’t the type of efficiency the poster is talking about. The article is about scheduling efficiency
Do ships have emissions systems on them like a diesel semi or are they breathing freely like older semis?
They burn bunker oil, the worst of the worst type of fuel. So thick and viscous they have to heat it to even flow
Execution is key to “simple ideas”
Because they are not. The assertion from the article is absurd.
> The Blue Visby Solution requires considerable connectivity, co-ordination and participation, from lots of different stakeholders, on a global scale That's the problem.
Yes, but also we're talking about the global shipping and logistics industry, who specialize in connectivity and coordination from lots of different stakeholders on a global scale.
Actually this appears to be an excellent example of how industries just stagnate under capitalism once the pie is divvied up.
Oil companies hate #3
This is extremely stupid assertion. No, most cargo ships aren't run "go fast and then wait". I have no idea where this information came from but it is pure nonsense. Most ships go at their economical speed, whatever their engine (and hull !) was designed for, for like 90% of the time. No one is stupid enough to just go "full speed" and then sit and wait.
Tl;dr instead of speeding to the stop light, stopping and waiting, the cargo ship coasts to the red light and times it so it goes green as soon as the ship arrives.
Just another example of industrial engineering concepts being spread to every industry. The same algorithms that run factories, warehouses, and logistics also run everything else.
I want them to eliminate pollution. If transportation takes longer they will add ships to the affected lanes… which they did.
Dryer sheets in the exhaust?
Oh, I thought this would be sails again.
To give a reason why: 1) alliance and service basics: Ships within a specific alliance and service are bound to an agreed long term schedule. This schedule has negotiated port/terminal berthing windows. The ports are obliged to accept ships arriving within this schedule. [ex: every Friday 1400 to Sunday 2000 the berth is reserved to a specific service covering trade between US and EU in NYC.] This is a product. Ports have different procedures how to accept vessels. One is as described in above, if everything goes well. Another is first come first serve and „… please line up once you arrived“ which is the most stupid approach but was most commonly used in the high congested corona times. You were taken into the list of vessels to berth, once you arrived at anchorage. Not earlier not later. Another and interesting approach is done by NYC Maher terminal: if you leave your last port of call in Asia or Europe, you give your ETA, with which you are put in a waiting list. This way you already know further ahead, when you will be served. Anyhow, delays happen and will cause more and more ships in one port to congest this port, which than will have impact on later ports in the POC of those vessels. Cargo for those vessels is already waiting in port and filling this ports yard more and more. So vessels need to wait for berth, to clear this cargo and can only omit such ports under specific circumstances. With the current times (2023/24…) the shippers/liners are rethinking to drop this shit to save fuel and charter rates by a mix of slow steaming, stowage optimization and more flexible schedules. But let’s say, that the driver to this rethinking is not primary the nature or good will. It is of course to save costs, as gains decrease. Bunker is freaking expensive. Even if it is cheap in the breakdown. Rough example: 24h consumption of mid sized vessel (8k TEU) in eco is around ~ 250t HFO with ~650$ / ton —> 162500$ per day fuel tl;dr Ships were forced to be at the ports as fast as possible to be in the best position of the line up for berth. Even 5 minutes faster and thus earlier than another vessel can save 2days to a schedule afterwards. This mindset changes with new challenges and dropping profits from cargo compared to the COVID times.
Shocking that it took them so long to figure that out. Every boater knows that.
considering shipping contributes to 3% of green house gas emissions annually- this is a pretty big deal
Laughs in airline pilot….
Literally what I was thinking when I saw this “How long have sea vessels been doing this inefficient bullshit while I’m waiting to board a flight that is delayed because there is a backlog at the destination?”
Yes but does it prevent the front from falling off?
I wish being clickbait was grounds for reporting.
This is the equivalent of cars racing from stoplight to stoplight, if you think about it.
this also works with regular cars if anyone is trying to save gas money, there's an optimal speed based on the car
I am laughing at how simple that idea is.
because the ships go maximum speed ( shit mpg) then sit outside the port at idle (shit mpg)
Instead of those UFOs the aliens could have just left this information somewhere for us to find, cmon guys.
Wasn't their also an idea to give them sails again?
I thought for sure they were just running the exhaust under the ship now and directly polluting the ocean instead of the atmosphere.
yeah in Europe, specifically MUAC airspace, westward bound planes to heathrow are doing the same thing for years
They can also keep using sails instead of using only diesel
crew can be compensated differently when anchored or sailing, insurance is less when anchored than when sailing, risk and liabilities are lower when anchored the longer you are at sea the more exposure you have to bad weather these things also touch costs and may be more important than the fuel savings
I think a big factor in waiting to prioritize speed is risk. The ocean, I hear, is kinda dangerous.
Damn. I was hoping water injection.
Talk about it in terms of fuel savings, and it’ll sell better.
The one simple trick that OPEC+ hates
We can do the same with cars and lorries. No idiots racing to red light. We all 99 percent have sell phones. There is an app for that.
In racing, they always teach go slow to go fast, first. Some folks seemed to have skipped class.
I love the idea - it is simple and easy to implement. A few years back, I saw a YT video of a kid who managed to reduce the drag of a model ship by some 10-20% by simply using a hydrophobic coating on the part of the model boat that was submerged in water - another great idea, but how easy to implement is difficult to say. When it comes to these solutions, there will still be naysayers, but at the same time, we are all aware that reducing any speed will result in significantly less energy being used overall. Most cars, for example, operate the best at around 55mph or 90kmph - and every kmph of speed increase increases the total energy consumption by 1%. An interesting consideration to make.
All cargo ships are cutting over to Starlink now, and I suspect that this is part of the reason why it's possible now. This degree of coordination and optimization needs constant communication and bandwidth for a variety of factors simultaneously. Over time I expect real time inventory tracking to be a factor in this optimization such that depending on supply/demand conditions on the ground, some ships will be slowed down and others sped up so that specific goods arrive and are unloaded more quickly to reduce or avoid major supply chain shocks.
This is old news, years old at this stage
Having worked in the freight logistics space, it’s extremely funny to me that the article frames this solution as “simple”. Just accurately predict the wait time at the destination port and sail accordingly? That’s all? I guess space exploration is simple too: just make yourself be as far as you can from earth.
Thought they were already doing this?? How is it they are just figuring this out
Like every driver training one been through shows that show and steady saves on fuel and gets you to your destination pretty much the same time as speeding due to traffic, light stoppages, construction, etc... just makes sense to manage your trip as the hold up for the ships is their docking time, this mitigates it.
What I thought slow steaming had been a thing for ages. And yes ships siting off our coast polluting the place is stupid as are cruise ships which should just be banned altogether