Freight routes stop driving around the ocean
Small consignments by sea and air are now billed for the fuel they actually use, and a route can no longer use a port or airport as a stop on a road haul — so long-distance quotes are far cheaper and read like real itineraries.
Two fixes to the freight route planner, both about what a quote charges for and where it is allowed to go.
- A small shipment no longer pays for a twentieth of the ship. Every sea or air leg used to bill at least 5% of the whole vessel's or aircraft's fuel, however little you shipped. Five percent of a van is 250 kg and fair; five percent of a container ship is 2,250 tonnes. A 500 kg parcel paid ten thousand litres of marine fuel per leg, so the "cheapest" route from New York to Melbourne drove across two continents to avoid the water. The floor is now the same small van-load road freight has always used, applied to each hull. - Ports and airports are only used for what they are. A shipment that reaches a quay or an apron by road now has to leave it by sea or by air. Routes can no longer relay through an airport to string road legs together, which is what produced itineraries that named ports the cargo never sailed from. - Two seaports on one landmass can be joined by road. Where no shipping lane links their basins — the Pacific and the Gulf coasts, for instance — the planner now drives the land bridge as one honest road leg.
For roughly 500 kg of coffee from New York to Melbourne the cheapest quote fell from 18,249 USD over ten legs to 2,945 USD over five: road to Los Angeles, then sea via Honolulu and Sydney. Domestic quotes and large consignments are unchanged.