Exciting Opportunities for Change in Container Terminal Gates

This paper focuses on three interesting elements of modern gates: options for arranging Radiation Portal Monitors, new uses for optical character recognition equipment, and the case for separate entry and exit gates. Early Radiation Portal Monitors (RPM) installations primarily involved "shoe-horning" these gate systems into existing gate layouts. Totally new gates consider the best way to sequence and integrate the RPM control steps with terminal-specific control steps. Early optical character recognition (OCR) portals often stretched out gates and wasted space on funneling traffic. New alternatives integrate OCR into the truck interchange/pedestal lane. Finally, a relatively new West Coast longshore clerk agreement has made separate entry and exit gate areas more practical. This gate type can provide a more efficient truck flow through a terminal with its reduced cross traffic and reverse flow. The change in the clerk agreement made this possible because it allows increased automation, and the option to remove clerks from truck lanes. Gate clerks can now control gate lanes from a single office using cameras and intercoms. This paper explores these concepts in the context of several recent conceptual plans for North American container terminals.