Fifty miles of trucking. Four clocks running against you.
The shortest leg of an international shipment is the one where importers quietly lose the most money — because every day the container sits, somebody is billing.
Tracked from the water, pulled inside free time, delivered to your dock, and the empty returned before the chassis clock costs you a dollar.
Drayage is the short-haul move of an ocean or rail container from the port terminal or rail ramp to the first dock — your distribution center, factory or transload warehouse — and the empty return that follows.The distance is trivial; the exposure isn’t. From the moment a container is discharged, it sits inside a stack of other people’s clocks: the steamship line’s free time(typically about 4 calendar days at US ports, up to 7 at some Canadian terminals), the terminal’s appointment system, CBP’s release, and the chassis owner’s own free-time window. Miss the first one and demurragestarts at $200–400 per day per container. Hold the chassis too long after pickup and per-diemruns $30–60 a day on top. Multiply by a season of containers and drayage stops being a trucking line item and starts being the place an import P&L goes to leak.
Qeep runs the leg the way it has to be run: from the water, not from the gate. Vessel-level ETA tracking starts before the ship berths; the terminal appointment is booked the moment the container shows available — working PierPASS off-peak gates and appointment systems like FlexPM instead of fighting them; customs clearance is coordinated in parallel with your broker rather than after the fact; and the chassis — line, pool or our own — is already matched to the load, tri-axle if it’s heavy, genset if it’s cold. Then the move that everyone forgets: the empty goes back inside per-diem free time with an in-gate receipt to prove it. That discipline is why the average Qeep container pays about $35 in demurrage against an industry average near $180.
Why drayage is where margin leaks
Because the costs are per-day, per-container and invisible until the invoice lands. A container that waits two extra days at LA/Long Beach for a missed appointment owes the steamship line $400–800 before a wheel turns. A chassis parked behind a slow unload accrues per-diem nobody at the dock is watching. Customs holds add days the free-time clock doesn’t pause for, chassis shortages strand released containers in the stack, and congestion programs add fees that only an audit catches. None of these are trucking problems — they’re clockproblems, and they’re solved before the truck is dispatched, not after.
Demurrage vs per-diem
The two fees get blurred together and shouldn’t be. Demurrage is charged by the steamship linefor the container sitting inside the terminal past free time — $200–400 per day, often in escalating tiers. Per-diem (detention) is charged by the chassis ownerfor the chassis being out past its own, separately counted free time — roughly $30–60 per day. Different parties, different windows, and they overlap in the worst way: out-gating the container stops the demurrage clock and starts the per-diem one. Beating both takes one plan that covers the full loop — pickup inside port free time, unload, and empty return inside chassis free time. That loop is the product we sell.
Chassis: line, pool, or your own
Unlike a trailer, the chassis under an ocean container usually belongs to someone else — and which someone shapes the rate and the risk. Line chassis, provided by the steamship line, is cheapest with no commitment but evaporates first in a capacity crunch. Pool chassis from the neutral gray pools — TRAC, FlexiVan — costs a predictable daily fee and delivers dependable supply for steady volume. Owned or leased chassis wins on per-move cost at high volume and is the only option that makes you immune to a shortage. Qeep routes all three — and keeps owned units on our densest port lanes — so a chassis is never the reason a released container spends another night in the stack.
