Skip to content

Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022

Did two California ports threaten to impose fines on idled shipping containers?

Austin Tannenbaum, Gigafact

yes

The threat of fines on shipping containers left waiting too long at the docks appears to have helped reduce delays at the nation's busiest cargo gateway.

In November, urged by the Biden administration to take action as shipping delays mounted, the adjacent California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach approved compounding $100-per-day fines on shipping containers left sitting at the ports for extended periods.

As of early February authorities had yet to actually impose the penalties. "Merely announcing the fee reduced the number of those idling containers by more than 60%," a port official said on Jan. 20. "The results have been phenomenal."

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.