Few habits in global shipping reveal the industry’s structural contradictions as clearly as the race to anchor. A ship knows congestion is building ahead, the berth is unlikely to be free on arrival, and yet the voyage continues at a speed that belongs to a different reality. The vessel burns fuel to protect queue position, only to convert that effort into waiting time outside the port. What looks like diligence at the individual ship level becomes waste at the system level. The industry already has the language to describe a better alternative. GreenVoyage defines just in time arrival as reaching port with the least bunker fuel consumed while still arriving in time, and DCSA’s Port Call Standard starts from the same diagnosis, namely that without synchronization between carriers, terminals and ports, vessels arrive before berths are available and wait at anchorage. The problem is not that ships move too fast in isolation. The problem is that they move fast in a system that still shares information too late.
That is why the race to anchor persists even when everyone in the chain can see its inefficiency. It survives because it is supported by fragmented incentives. If berth sequence is uncertain, if charter obligations are interpreted defensively, and if the commercial penalty of arriving later feels more immediate than the fuel penalty of arriving early, then speed becomes a hedge against ambiguity. BIMCO’s Just in Time Arrival Clause says as much in legal language when it requires owners and charterers to use best endeavours to obtain and share arrival information and allows charterers to request speed optimization toward an agreed time. In other words, the market already recognizes that speed cannot be optimized properly unless information is shared early enough to make slower steaming commercially safe.
The economic waste created by the race is not subtle. The IMO’s own work on just in time arrivals found that containerships could reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by about 14 percent per voyage when speed is optimized across the full voyage, with measurable benefits even when optimization begins only in the final 24 or 12 hours. That matters because the extra speed used to reach a congested port sooner rarely creates productive transport work. It simply shifts consumption forward in time. A fast passage followed by idle waiting is not operational performance. It is misplaced energy. Under the current carbon regime that energy is even harder to justify, because higher fuel burn worsens CII exposure and, on EU linked voyages, also increases ETS liability.
Weather makes the problem more difficult, not because it cancels the logic of coordinated arrival, but because it constantly changes the route toward it. GreenVoyage notes that wind, waves and currents influence the power needed to propel a ship at a given speed over ground and stresses that the most fuel efficient route must be balanced against the safest route, the quickest route and any charterer requirements. That is the heart of the combined optimization problem. A vessel does not sail through congestion on one side and weather on the other. It sails through both at once. The correct speed today may be wrong tomorrow not because the ship changed, but because the sea and the berth window did.
This is why static voyage planning fails so easily near congested hubs. A departure speed chosen on day one may have little relevance by mid voyage if the forecast changes, terminal productivity slips, pilot capacity tightens or an earlier ship in the sequence is delayed. Once congestion and weather interact, the voyage becomes dynamic by definition. The master and operator are no longer minimizing only time or fuel. They are balancing fuel burn, schedule confidence, safety margins, emissions cost and contractual exposure in real time. The real inefficiency of the race to anchor is that it treats a moving problem as if it were fixed.
The encouraging part is that the industry is no longer starting from zero. Singapore’s digitalPORT@SG just in time platform is designed to facilitate optimal arrivals and departures while reducing dwell time at anchorages, and it explicitly uses AI in the optimization and scheduling of port resources. In March 2026 the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore said that more than 150 port users and service providers across container, general cargo and bulk had already come onboard the platform since its 2024 launch. Rotterdam has taken its own practical step by introducing a geofence system as part of the first phase of its just in time sailing project, aimed at improving ship movement efficiency and reducing CO2 emissions. DCSA, meanwhile, updated its Port Call Standard to version 2.0 in December 2025 to make implementation more practical across organizations exchanging operational port call data. The technology story is no longer theoretical. The bottleneck is no longer whether digital coordination is possible, but whether commercial behaviour will trust it enough to act on it.
That trust depends on contracts almost as much as on software. If the port can give a credible berth window but the charterparty still rewards defensive early arrival, the ship will continue to steam toward uncertainty rather than toward efficiency. BIMCO’s just in time clause was designed precisely for voyage charters where parties agree to operate a just in time scheme, and it can work alongside the Port Call Data Exchange framework. Sea Cargo Charter has also moved toward a standardized schema for exchanging emissions related voyage data between carriers and charterers, which matters because transparent data exchange is what turns decarbonization from a slogan into an operational method. A coordinated arrival is not just a navigational act. It is a data and contract act.
The environmental case is now impossible to separate from the commercial one. IMO carbon intensity rules have been in force since 2023, and the EU ETS has covered CO2 emissions from large ships calling at EU ports since January 2024, with 50 percent of emissions on extra EU legs and 100 percent between EU ports and in port in scope. Methane and nitrous oxide join the ETS scope from 2026. In that world, every unnecessary knot burned on the approach to a known queue carries a larger penalty than it did a few years ago. The race to anchor used to be an operational inefficiency. It is now also a carbon priced inefficiency.
The long term solution is not to moralize against masters or operators for making rational decisions inside an irrational structure. It is to redesign the structure itself. Better berth forecasting, shared port call data, weather aware voyage adjustment and contract clauses that protect coordinated arrival can move shipping away from competitive early arrival and toward synchronized port calls. Rotterdam and Singapore’s corridor work points in that direction through port to port data exchange on vessel arrival and departure times. The future of port efficiency is not a faster ship approaching a slower port. It is a voyage and a berth plan finally speaking the same language.