⏲️Dwell time

How long freight sits still at one point in its trip: a container in the terminal stack, a lorry at a gate, a pallet on a dock. Clock starts on arrival, stops on departure.

Heard a dozen times on the harbour tour at dusk, second day of the ✈️ Rotterdam customer visit. Nobody defined it. Everybody had a number for it.

Origin: Old English dwellan meant to lead astray, hinder or delay. To linger came next, and to live somewhere only after that. So freight that dwells is using the word in its older sense.

An example from my work, added in September. Dwell is one of the measures on the table in 📂 Carrier Scorecards discovery, and the awkward one. A carrier's collection can be late because the carrier was slow or because the terminal sat on the box.

A score that blames a carrier for someone else's dwell is not a fair score. Whose clock it is has to be settled before the number goes anywhere near a ranking.