Like the gold rushes of the last century, the import container boom has spawned all sorts of wild dreams of riches.

The big west coast ports have dominated the import container market for a variety of reasons, and as they grow bigger their dominance is only going to continue to grow. The smaller secondary ports like Stockton, Sacramento, Humboldt Bay, Coos Bay, Olympia, etc. have simply no hope of competing against the overwhelming economics favoring the big guys of LA/LB, Oakland, Tacoma, and Seattle.

The steamship lines have moved towards ever larger vessels, which require deep drafts and large turning basins, and also try to minimize calls. They also want to call near their inland distribution points. As a result, containerized cargo is likely to get MORE consolidated at the big ports rather than dispersed out to smaller ports.

Furthermore, the big guys aren't anywhere near capacity yet. And, when they do reach the capacity limit of existing infrastructure, they can add 10x the capacity at one tenth the cost than it would take to open up some place like Coos Bay.

This is, however, an opportunity for the smaller secondary ports. As the big guys concentrate more and more on container business, this pushes out the other types of business (bulk, breakbulk, boutique cargo, etc.) out to other ports. Stockton, for example, doesn't handle containers, but is booming through attracting the kinds of business (cement, wind towers, structural steel, equipment, etc.) that the big guys are actually trying to get rid of so they can focus on containers.