US port truckers waste hours every day waiting for chassis that do not exist in sufficient quantities, and the shipper pays for every hour of delay

A container cannot leave a port terminal on a truck without a chassis — the wheeled steel frame the container sits on. At major US ports, there are not enough chassis to go around. At Savannah's Garden City terminal, chassis shortages are persistent and extend container dwell times by several days even when yard space exists. At the Ports of LA and Long Beach, drivers routinely circle between chassis depots and terminal gates trying to find matching equipment. The driver shows up with an appointment, but there is no 40-foot chassis available, so the trip is wasted and the appointment expires. Every wasted driver trip costs $150 to $300 in drayage charges that the shipper ultimately pays. But the compounding damage is worse: the container keeps sitting at the terminal accumulating demurrage. The driver's truck is taken out of productive circulation for the day. The warehouse that was expecting the delivery has its unloading crew standing idle. The retailer or manufacturer downstream pushes back their own schedule. A single chassis shortage at 8 AM cascades into a full day of lost productivity across four or five companies in the supply chain. This problem persists because of a structural split in chassis ownership. Before 2009, ocean carriers owned and provided chassis as part of their service. Then carriers divested their chassis fleets to third-party leasing pools — primarily DCLI, Flexi-Van, and TRAC — to shed capital costs. Now no single entity is responsible for ensuring there are enough chassis at any given port. The leasing companies optimize for utilization (keeping chassis rented out), not availability (having spare chassis ready). Carriers point to the lessors, lessors point to the terminals, terminals point to the truckers, and nobody invests in the surplus capacity that would eliminate the shortage because surplus chassis sitting idle is a cost center for whoever owns them.