Nearly half of all goods imported into the United States arrive at the Port of Los Angeles or the Port of Long Beach.1 Most of those goods are then placed on trucks.2 Trucks often transport goods in the same intermodal containers that ships and trains use and often serve as intermediaries between ships docking at the two ports and trains transporting goods to other regions of the country. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are located adjacent to one another and share many of the same highway and rail facilities. They also combine to generate more pollution than any single facility in the country. As the two largest ports in the United States—and the seventh largest port in the world if combined3 (see FIGURE 1)—the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach have enormous effects on people living and working nearby.
FIGURE 1: TOP 20 CONTAINER PORTS BY VOLUME 2010 (million TEU’s) Rank
Port, Country
2009
2010
2011 (preliminary)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Shanghai, China Singapore, Singapore Hong Kong, China Shenzhen, China Busan, South Korea Ningbo-Zhoushan, China Guangzhou Harbor, China Qingdao, China Dubai, United Arab Emirates Rotterdam, Netherlands Tianjin, China Kaohsiung, Taiwan, China Port Kelang, Malaysia Antwerp, Belgium Hamburg, Germany Tanjung Pelepas, Malaysia Los Angeles, U.S.A Long Beach, U.S.A. Xiamen, China New York/New Jersey, U.S.A
25.00 25.86 21.04 18.25 11.98 10.50 11.20 10.26 11.10 9.74 8.70 8.58 7.31 7.31 7.01 6.00 6.75 5.07 4.68 4.56
29.07 28.43 23.70 22.51 14.19 13.14 12.55 12.01 11.60 11.14 10.08 9.18 8.87 8.47 7.91 6.54 6.50 6.26 5.82 5.29
31.74 29.94 24.38 22.57 17.17 14.72 14.26 13.02 13.01 11.88 11.59 9.64 9.60 8.66 9.04 7.50 7.94 6.06 6.47 5.50
4
SOURCE: World Shipping Council , formatting by author
1 149