From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
As Georgia pursues federal funding for the $650 million dredging of the Port of Savannah, much attention is given to competition with other East Coast ports such as Jacksonville, Miami and Charleston.
But the West Coast may be the more important rival to Savannah’s success. From McClatchy News Service:
Several factors make a significant shift from one coast to the other unlikely. The first is speed. It’s less expensive for a ship to go the all-water route to the East Coast instead of docking on the West Coast and offloading containers onto trucks or trains, but it also takes at least a week longer. For consumer electronics and other high-end goods that need to get to store shelves quickly, retailers will pay more for faster transit times.
Second, ports in Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland, Calif., and Seattle and Tacoma, Wash., are deep enough to handle the bigger ships. They have warehousing space for containers, and they have highly developed rail connections to the Midwest and Southeast….
Third, the Panama Canal authority must pay off billions of dollars in construction costs, and it’s unknown how much the canal will charge the bigger ships in tolls. Last, the Suez Canal can handle any size ship, and some cargo ships bound from Asia to North America already use it.