What are the advantages of container transport

The containers are standard size metal boxes , 20 and 40 feet long (6 and 12 m), the use of which for merchandise bundling was imagined in 1956 by a former American trucker, Malcolm McLean, founder of the Sea Land company. Wooden containers existed in Europe before the Second World War, but the use of steel, the standardization of dimensions by the ISO and the adoption of containers by the US Army for its logistics during the Vietnam War have favored its generalization from the 1970s. Their use has been extended to all modes of transport and today there are different types depending on their use: standard container, refrigerated container, tank container. Their technical standards comply with international customs conventions. Large ports, multimodal platforms have had to adapt to the standards imposed by containerization: handling systems, sufficient storage areas. The unit of measure for quantifying the transport of containers of any size is the equivalent of twenty feet (TEU). You may also like how to find vessel online. The trend has been for 30 years to containerize the transport of general cargo, but also some goods traditionally transported in bulk, with a growth rate of 7 to 8% per year. Today most of the regular lines are containerized services. In fact, containerization offers three decisive advantages: a very high productivity in port handling, economies of scale enabled by the increasing size of ships and the intermodality of transporting goods door-to-door within the same container without breaking the load. Containerization has become the backbone of globalization . In 2014, global container traffic amounted to 680 million TEUs representing 90% of the maritime freight traffic. The recent trend in architecture and urbanism is to containerization of the habitat . The modular aspect of the container allows to make housing units in a logic that would not have denied the school of Athens. Its lightness and the ease with which it can be stacked also gives free rein to the imagination of the designers. This tendency can be criticized as crystallizing the effects of the housing shortage rather than solving it.