Movements to and from Ports

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Goods movement is the distribution of freight (including raw materials, parts and finished consumer products) by all modes of transportation including marine, air, rail and truck.

Supply Chain is a network that supplies goods or services from the source of production through the point of consumption. A supply chain is considered to include people, organizations, transportation infrastructure, information technology and physical locations such as manufacturing plants, distribution centers, and retail outlets.

Retail outlets is a group of human and physical entities including procurement specialists, wholesalers, logistics managers, manufacturing plants, distribution centers and retail outlets, linked by information and transportation in a seamless, integrated network to supply goods or services from where it is produced to where it is consumed.

Considering the operational characteristics of maritime transportation, the location of ports is constrained to a limited array of sites, mostly defined by geography. Since ports are bound by the need to serve ships, access to navigable water has been historically the most important site consideration. Before the industrial revolution, ships were the most efficient means of transporting goods, and thus port sites were frequently chosen at the head of water navigation, the most upstream site. Many major cities owed their early pre-eminence to this fact, such as London on the Thames, Montreal on the St. Lawrence River or Guangzhou on the Pearl River. Ship draft was small, so many sites were suitable to be used as ports. Sites on tidal waterways created a particular problem for shipping because of the twice-daily rise and fall of water levels at the berths, and by the 18th the technology of enclosed docks, with lock gates was developed to mitigate this problem. Because ship transfers were slow, with vessels typically spent weeks in ports, a large number of berths were required. This frequently gave rise to the construction of piers and jetties, often called finger piers, to increase the number of berths per given length of shoreline.

As terminals, ports handle the largest amounts of freight, more than any other types of terminals combined. To handle this freight, port infrastructures jointly have to accommodate transshipment activities both on ships and inland and thus facilitate convergence between land transport and maritime systems. In many parts of the world, ports are the points of convergence from which inland transport systems, particularly rail, were laid. Most ports, especially those that are ancient, owe their initial emergence to their site as the great majority of harbors are taking advantage of a natural coastline or a natural site along a river.