They often are. The use of the term “small” in the article is really deceptive. We are talking about that as being a ship likely under 1000 feet long. Then there is a big difference between traveling at maximum speed and traveling at the most efficient speed. Most of the time, container ships have to work within the schedule produced by the shipping company, but within that, there is a constant effort towards efficiency.
The issue of giant, inefficient ships has happened before. Sea-Land built a fleet of giant, super fast ships in the mid 1970s, just in time for the gas crunch. Those ships were all sold to the USN, and are now known as the Algol-class. I had a hellish experience as the navigator aboard one of those.
The major shipping companies have to try to make predictions well in advance. There has been a move towards gigantic ships with the expectation that most of the container business will be happening at gigantic port facilities that had not yet been built. At the same time, slightly smaller ships that could carry different types of cargo to many more places were sold and scrapped. The sort of business where we would take a voyage that sent us to six or more medium sized ports, moving a hundred or so containers in each, cannot be done with a humongous ship that cannot even fit in some of those ports. Having those smaller ships was good, because you could do the big dedicated runs between major ports most of the time, then break out and do a multi-port trip when things slowed down a bit. Flexibility. To keep things working with the giant ships, you need to have exactly enough business between the major ports to fill the ship each time. Too many or too few ships, and either ships or containers just sit there.
There is another part of this as well. There are miles of diesel locomotives sitting on rail spurs in Arizona and other places. I don’t know anything about trucking, but I bet there is a slowdown there as well.
I am pretty pessimistic about our economic future in general. Everything is so interconnected,and bits of the system are faltering.
