that s the widest gap we ve seen. america s trade gap with china surged 11% in august, pushing america s total trade deficit up 34% from a year ago, that s reflected in california s jam packed warehouses with only 2% vacancy. the main reason, there aren t enough truckers to move it. industry wants washington s help. at 18 you can go fight for your country in the military, you can fly a plane. but the idea that you can t drive intrastate in a truck really limits the capacity for the industry. to put this initiative in context, this week administration officials said long beach had gone 24/7 and the port of l.a. would, quote, meet that effort. in fact, only one out of six terminals in longbeach added that 3:00 to 7:00 a.m. shift and only four, not seven days a week. so it would be misleading to imply that the task force immediately doubled capacity. true, the port and other
truckers don t have enough chassis or tractors or enough drivers to manage the flow of goods that continues to bottle neck at the port. it s going to begin respect onning 24 hours a day, seven days a week. but officials admit the president s ambitious target isn t happening soon at scale. we ve been mostly focused on the next 80 days or so. we ve got work happening at the port seven days a week today. but we want to make sure we re in sync with the other plays in the supply chain. we re certainly trying to move to more effective 24/7 operations. i m not sure how much of that we re actually going to get done in the near term, but it s a good goal. a major choke point? the ports of la and long beach, where 77 ships are waiting offshore, and 25 more are arriving in the next three days. today we re at six imports for every sport container, that s the widest trade gap we ve seen. america s trade gap with china surged 11% in august,