Event one will be the extended Panama Canal opening...which ought to take at least fifty percent of the dock business on the west coast.
Event two will be the eventual Nicaragua Canal opening (probably 2025, I’m guessing), and that will cut more into the port business of California, Portland, and Seattle.
If you were a dock worker on the west coast....I’d pretty much start putting the house up for sale, and try to get the union to move me into Texas. Then I’d have to assume a forty-percent pay-cut somewhere down the line. It won’t be a happy environment, and tax revenue will be drastically affected within the next five years. California just doesn’t have much luck on jobs.
To go with the cost of living reduction moving from Los Angeles, California to Texas City, Texas.
The Panama expansion has removed most of the need for a new canal so I'd be surprised if it is even built. As for Texas, I don't recall any talk about excess capacity at the port of Houston or other ports, so unless the shipping companies start now to expand facilities then goods will continue to go to California to avoid the bottleneck in Texas.
1. Port authority officials all up and down the East Coast have been advised for several years now to take these predictions of port growth related to the Panama Canal with a grain of salt when they make their investment decisions. A big part of this is Item #2 below.
2. A customer on the East Coast who pays a shipping line to move cargo from Asia to the U.S. isn't going to jump at the opportunity to save $100 on the cost of shipping a 40-foot container by routing it through the Panama Canal if it takes 7-8 days longer than moving the same container to the East Coast via Los Angeles/Long Beach and a cross-country railroad move.
3. Early this spring, the Port of Long Beach just had a port call from one of the newest container ships that is used in the shipping industry today. That ship is too big to fit through the Panama Canal -- the expanded Panama Canal, that is.
4. When you put all of these factors together, what you find is that a trip from Asia to the eastern U.S. through the West Coast and on the U.S. rail network is still going to be faster and more cost-effective even with the wider Panama Canal.