During the summer of 2019, I spent my free time doing outreach to freight and customs brokers in the greater Los Angeles Area to study potential software interventions to the freight industry. This resulted in 10 conversations and an opportunity to shadow 2 businesses in-person for 10 hours each.

I discovered that the main "data protocol" by which freight organizations communicate today is PDFs overs email. In both businesses where I shadowed, the staff received so many PDFs that they had to print them out and sort them in physical folders, and then rescan them when they wanted to email the PDF to someone else. Each employee received hundreds of emails a day and sent at least 100-200 per day. I asked someone what tools they used to handle all of these emails, and the answer was "I learned to type faster."

This inspired me to prototype some software solutions to enhance their productivity. The first was a Visual Basic script on Outlook that could be run via hotkey to write templated emails. This was because I noticed that most of the emails being written were memorized responses that always followed the same set of 4-5 patterns. The largest barrier to user adoption for this prototype was that the user needed to practice using the hotkeys until it became faster than their typing speed.

The second offering was a Python script that would login for the user on 10-20 different ocean port terminal websites and check the status of the user’s shipping containers, then report the result back into a single dashboard. The old standard procedure was for an employee to click on the 10-20 different websites every hour and refresh the page to check on container status. The only available software platforms that aggregated these data were eModal and Crux Systems, but both did not have 100% coverage of all port and rail terminals. Moreover, it seemed new features could be added, such as the ability to save a credit card and pay customs’ fees from the singular dashboard, and SMS notifications of container status changes so that a broker could go out to lunch without worrying about missing a refresh.

As both a southern California native and a freight enthusiast, I was astounded by the supply chain bottleneck at the Port of Los Angeles / Port of Long Beach complex in 2021. It was a globally, historically unprecedented backup of 100+ container ships, representing >$100M+ per day of direct lost value in goods delays, and a major contributor to inflation in the U.S. economy. Therefore, I was inspired to give 10% of my hobby time to researching the issue and lobbying for solutions.

In this project, I interviewed 5 industry experts to understand the situation better. I put out two (very small) petitions in favor of increasing the allowable container stack height on land properties in the City of Los Angeles, in order to help absorb the glut of empty shipping containers. The first petition was to my U.S. House Representative, Mike Levin, and was able to get a meeting with one of his staff after 27 petition signatures. The second petition was directly to Mayor Eric Garcetti and Council Members of LA City, but lost momentum.

This baby grassroots project had 4 members, and notably we also proposed leasing a 360 acre empty plot of land in Los Angeles adjacent to a railway to develop it into a surplus yard for empty shipping containers. This did not manifest due to lack of momentum.

Fortunately, as of November 2022, the bottleneck has been officially declared over, but this project was an insightful use of time.