Ryan Petersen, the founder and chief executive of the freight forwarding startup Flexport, wanted to understand the situation at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. So he rented a boat last week ...

After Petersen learned that the docks were too crowded to accept empty containers — which in turn meant truckers couldn’t collect their new shipments — he tweeted a thread filled with suggestions.

Perhaps that was a touch optimistic. Implementing Petersen’s suggestion about stacking containers certainly has helped, and the $17 billion for port improvements contained in the recently passed ...