Supply Chain Action Points
Read this first — the conclusion, and the moves to make:
- By 20 June, pull 60 days of appointment-to-gate data for each terminal you use and record the share of slots honoured within 30 minutes; treat anything under 80% as a terminal you should not build a fixed schedule around.
- Count chassis before you count appointments: contract a dedicated pool or reserve a stated number of units for the peak weeks, and confirm in writing who owns the unit when a lift is missed.
- For any cargo that must land before 1 July, book drayage with a 24-hour buffer and name a second terminal plus a second chassis source in the booking.
- Give the dispatcher standing authority to spend up to 150 dollars per container to reposition a chassis or switch to an alternate gate during the peak weeks, without escalation.
- Diary a review for the second week of July that separates delay caused by terminal congestion from delay caused by chassis shortage; the two need different fixes and one invoice hides both.
Industry executives convened on FreightWaves Today to discuss a wave of port infrastructure spending reshaping the drayage sector. Coastal ports are embarking on major expansions, including the Port of Virginia's $450M deepening, BNSF's $4B Barstow inland hub, and DP World's £60M Southampton crane upgrade. Discussions centered on how drayage carriers and short-haul trucking operators are adapting through AI-driven dispatch platforms, electric drayage truck pilots, and integrated appointment systems linking terminals, rail, and trucking. Midwestern logistics hubs are seeing innovation around cross-dock automation and intermodal connectivity. The conversation highlighted that capacity remains tight as shippers race to move peak-season cargo ahead of July 1 bunker and tariff changes. Executives noted the 'drayage squeeze' between terminal congestion and chassis availability is the most acute risk vector for the second half of 2026.
The Analysis
A port is a queue with three servers in series: the gate, the chassis, and the road. Drayage is the work of moving a box through all three. The executives on FreightWaves Today spent their hour on the first and the third, and on the software layer over both. The numbers they cited are about piers and rail: a 450 million dollar deepening at the Port of Virginia, a 4 billion dollar inland hub at Barstow for BNSF, and a 60 million pound crane upgrade at DP World's Southampton terminal. All three are upgrades to the servers at the ends. The server in the middle did not get a cheque.
That matters, because the same conversation named the constraint out loud. The drayage squeeze between terminal congestion and chassis availability was called the most acute risk vector for the second half of 2026. Chassis availability is the middle server, and it is the one nobody is building.
If you import through a coastal port this year, the useful discipline is simple: stop buying appointments and start counting chassis.
Three facts set the scene. Coastal ports are in the middle of a capital cycle, with Virginia deepening at 450 million dollars, Barstow as a 4 billion dollar inland hub, and Southampton cranes at 60 million pounds. Drayage carriers are adapting on the software side, through AI dispatch platforms, electric truck pilots, and integrated appointment systems that link terminals, rail and trucks. And capacity is tight, because shippers are pulling peak cargo forward ahead of the 1 July change to bunker and tariff rules.
Why now is a collision of two clocks. Infrastructure runs on a build clock measured in years. Congestion runs on a cargo clock measured in weeks. The capital announcements and the capacity crunch are landing in the same news cycle, which makes them look like one story. They are not. The money being announced now relieves the late 2020s. The squeeze being felt now has to be survived with the assets that already exist.
On the software side, think about what an appointment system actually is. It is a scheduler. It takes requests for terminal time and assigns slots. A scheduler is only ever as good as the resources it can actually commit. If the resource behind the appointment, a chassis, is not there, a perfect slot is a perfect reservation for a truck that will still be waiting. AI dispatch has the same shape. It optimizes the assignment of tractors to moves. If the binding constraint is chassis, then a smarter assignment of tractors shortens the queue in front of the chassis and leaves the queue behind it exactly as it was. Speeding up a non-bottleneck does not move throughput, it just moves the waiting.
Layered impact. A large importer with its own chassis pool and its own yard absorbs the squeeze as planning friction. A mid-size importer that rents chassis per use absorbs it as a rate and a delay it cannot predict. A small importer is the most exposed, because it discovers the shortage at the gate, after the box is already on the terminal clock. On the cargo side, peak-season retail and anything with a hard in-store date feel it first, because their landing windows are fixed and the drayage leg is the last thing that can give. Bulk and slow-moving freight barely notices, because a day of yard time changes nothing for it. The electric drayage pilots deserve a separate line, because a battery truck adds a charging dwell that a diesel truck did not have, and a pilot that ignores the charger is a pilot that reports a delay as a mystery.
Timing. The 1 July change is the forcing function. Anything that has to land before that date is competing for the same chassis and the same gate slots inside the same few weeks. The pressure shows about two to three weeks before the deadline, when the catch-up cargo and the ordinary peak cargo land together, and it eases when the pre-July volume clears. The infrastructure will not be present for any of it.
Here is the arithmetic, with the assumptions written down. Take the three announced numbers: 450 million dollars, 4 billion dollars, and 60 million pounds, which I convert at an assumed 1.25 dollars to the pound, giving roughly 75 million dollars. That is about 4.5 billion dollars of announced capital. Assume the Barstow hub is built over three years and the other two over two, so the package lands at something near 1.5 billion dollars a year spread across an entire coast. Now assume a mid-size importer moves 60 containers a day through one terminal, and assume that when chassis are short each box sits an extra half day at an assumed 120 dollars per container per day. That is 60 times 0.5 times 120, or 3,600 dollars a day, which is about 75,000 dollars across three peak weeks. The announced capital does not touch a dollar of it this year. The 120 dollar rate and the half-day delay are my assumptions; the capital figures are the ones in the report.
What would flip this. If terminals release chassis more freely, or if a dedicated chassis pool is stood up before July, the middle server grows and the squeeze loosens without waiting for construction. That is the single condition to watch, and it is an operating decision rather than a capital one. The counter-case is real too: if the ports clear faster than feared because the pre-July volume moves earlier than expected, the squeeze hides itself and everyone concludes the appointment system solved it. Watch chassis counts, not gate times, to know which one happened.
The trap is buying a better appointment without securing the chassis behind it. That is reserving a seat on a bus that has no bus. Count the chassis first, then book the slot.
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