When it isn’t too cloudy (weather-wise or work-wise), my office has a great view of
Elliott Bay in Seattle, where I see the ships come and go (airplanes too):

My new indispensable companion is MarineTraffic.com which
uses a network of crowdsourced receivers to pull data off the transponders most ships
have and plot them on a map.  Here is a live view of what is floating around:

You can follow specific
vessels like the Shanghai Express pictured above on their travels (and you won’t see
anything if it is out of range of transceivers in the middle of the ocean).

As yet, no enterprising and cutting
edge Somali pirate has joined the network and set up shop to track shipping traffic
in that area:

More broadly, the rise of container shipping is fascinating and a dramatic tale of
disruption.  There is a great book, The
Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger,
that tells the humble shipping container’s story. 

The story begins not so long ago in 1958 with a trucking entrepreneur who gets into
shipping.  Shipping before containers is unbelievably inefficient, with freight
being packed and repacked repeatedly over the course of a trip, getting damaged or
stolen, taking forever to get its destination and the whole industry was intensely
regulated.  Thinking end-to-end and “intermodal” was a profound breakthrough
but it still takes a couple decades to play out as the transportation business, their
customers and governments needed time to wrap their heads around and embrace the shift.

The geographic consequences are fascinating.  Ports win by offering lower costs
through volume and the ability to load and unload quickly.  The winners see increasing
returns and the losers disappear.  Some cities like New York, San Francisco and
London were the biggest ports in the world, but they bungled the transition to containers
and their ports disappeared.  Some of them like New York spent hugely to defend
the old approach and wasted tons of money.  Other cities won with their early
commitment to containers.  Some winners like Los Angeles and Long Beach are not
particularly surprising but other, unlikelier ports like Seattle and Felixstowe in
England have prospered because of their early bet on containers overcame the disadvantages
of their small local markets.  The drive towards bigger ships and bigger ports
continues today, with individual ships carrying  thousands of containers. 
Most of the world’s
biggest ports are now in Asia.

It is also a good tale of labor strategy in the face of technological change. 
The longshoremen initially fought the coming of the container (and thereby preserve
perks like the right to steal loose cargo), but ultimately the longshoremen on both
the east and west coast did deals that protected existing jobs at the expense of new
employees.  But the fact there are no longer longshoremen in New York City, once
the US’s biggest port, shows perils of flouting change.

It really took until the 1980s for shipping containers to start to significantly drive
down shipping prices, as deregulation was required in addition to both shippers and
shipping companies fully understanding the economics of containers and embracing them
on an end-to-end basis.  But costs have plummeted and in many ways shipping costs
are invariant with distance today as a result.  Our just-in-time, globalized
economy wouldn’t exist without containers and the ability to cheaply move goods, including
intermediate goods, around the world cheaply and reliably.