In each year since the Port of Prince Rupert’s container facility came online, the volume of containers moved through the port has increased. Based on data from January to September, it appears that this trend will continue in 2011. The amount of container traffic through the port, measured in TEUs,¹ expanded 45.8% between 2008 and 2009, despite the global economic downturn, and surged a further 29.5% in 2010. Over the first nine months of 2011, traffic has increased 10.0% compared to the same period in 2010.

The container facility is still operating at only about 75% capacity, so there is still room for further improvement over the next couple of years and there are plans to eventually quadruple the terminal’s capacity from the current 500,000 TEUs to two million TEUs. To put that into perspective, Port Metro Vancouver handled 2.5 million TEUs of containers in 2010.

The growth in container traffic through Prince Rupert has helped propel the port up to a rank of tenth in terms of containers moving through ports on the Pacific Coast of North America.

¹ A TEU is a twenty-foot equivalent unit, which is the standard measure of container traffic based on the length of a container (e.g., a 40-foot container would be two TEUs).