5 Curiosities about transportation and logistics

The world of distribution and transportation is highly professionalized. Crossed by terms such as efficiency and margins of error, it is a field ripe for thoughtful and rigorous articles. But it seems less inviting to texts on curiosities. However, eye-catching, shocking and even amusing facts can also help us understand the importance and size of logistics.

• Trucks in the world: Have you ever played a game on the road to count the trucks you see? This is becoming increasingly difficult to do since in the USA alone there are about 15.5 million trucks circulating daily. With this data we realize how complex it is to keep an entire country supplied. Millions of shelves filled every day with basic necessities or entertainment products.

• The invention of pallets: As simple and even obvious as a pallet may seem to us now, the truth is that our wooden friends have not always been there to make things easier for us in distribution and transportation. We had to wait until 1920 for it to be invented. The two most common models are the European (120x80cm) and the American (120x100cm).

• The king of the seas: The HMM Algeciras, the largest container ship in the world with a capacity of 24,000 TEU (20-foot equivalent unit). The ship measures 399.90 meters in length and 61.03 meters in beam and has a deck area of more than 24,000 square meters, roughly the size of three and a half standard soccer fields. If the 24,000 containers were connected end-to-end they would reach a total length of 150 kilometers.

• Containerized distribution and transport: After talking about the world's largest cargo ship, it is only fair to talk about the staggering numbers of containers. It is currently estimated that there are more than 20 million containers in the world. Approximately one-fifth of them are currently being transported either by sea, road or rail.

• From the past to the future: Early transportation methods were far removed from what we understand today as logistics. Before the invention of motor vehicles, things were not easy and most of the effort fell on animals. About 6,000 years ago, two animals were domesticated for transportation that have accompanied man in his work ever since: the horse (in Mesopotamia) and the donkey (in Egypt). But the explosion of motor vehicles has changed the landscape radically. In 1900, Americans owned 8,000 cars. Twenty years later the figure had reached 8 million. By 2000 there were 220 million cars, more than one for every person over the age of 18.