Unless you work in the logistics or shipping industry, I’m willing to bet the term drayage has never entered your vernacular, even as instances of it play out every day on America’s roads and freeways, rail yards and ports, to the tune of sixty million movements a year. 

What Is Drayage?

Drayage means containerized cargo trucking within the international shipping environment - sometimes referred to as "port drayage.” When  containerized cargo flows through the intermodal shipping environment, it probably proceeds through more than one mode of transportation. For example, goods may go by ocean from one port to another, transferred to another port to a rail yard or airport and continue transport, or it may simply be trucked to the destination point. When logistics companies offer these services, they refer to short-distance only movement by truck between modes of longer distance transport.

A large steel box might not seem revolutionary, but global trade now depends on ISO-standard shipping containers. Shippers pack these rectangular metal boxes with everything imaginable from raw bulk goods to shelf-ready retail packages. Containerized freight rides on ships, over rail, or gets towed by a truck all while safely packed inside the same heavy metal box. This system is known as intermodal shipping, and it involves Drayage Transportation.  

Savannah Drayage: What it means

Most of us are familiar with the idea of shipping freight around the world on a container ship and across the country by train or truck, but it’s easy to forget one integral step in the process: drayage. In the world of international shipping, the term refers to the transport of freight containers over short distances, usually from the dock where cargo is unloaded to a warehouse some distance inland.

Delivering goods is a hard business to comprehend in simple terms. It's even more challenging now that there are security issues, privacy information challenges and big data that has to be addressed to avoid the noise in the transport of goods and services. These problems in transportation are what's making companies do their best to provide the best drayage services in the market.