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WTF is a TEU?

"The twenty-foot equivalent unit (often TEU or teu) is an inexact unit of cargo capacity often used to describe the capacity of container ships and container terminals."

It's crazy how many different size containers they have nowadays. That's why it's an inexact measurement, I guess.

The vast majority of shipping containers come in 3-4 different lengths. For international shipping, 20-foot and 40-foot containers are typically used because it's easy to stack them in a modular fashion. The term "TEU" is used to measure the capacity of a container ship. This works well with the two standard sizes of international shipping containers: one forty-foot container is the same "size" as two twenty-foot containers.

Here in the U.S., containers that are transported only on trains and by truck are usually 53 feet long. This coincides with the maximum length of a trailer for a tractor-trailer combination on almost the entire U.S. interstate highway system.

You may also find some 48-foot containers out there. China tried using them in international shipping for a while, but it was just too unwieldy to stack them with 20-foot and 40-foot containers. So they are generally used as smaller versions of the 53-foot containers you see here in domestic U.S. shipping.

"The twenty-foot equivalent unit (often TEU or teu) is an inexact unit of cargo capacity often used to describe the capacity of container ships and container terminals."

One part of this statement isn't exactly correct. The TEU is used to measure the capacity of container ships as well as the cargo volume at a container terminal or port (i.e., "The Port of Savannah handled [X] TEUs in 2015"), but not the capacity of a container terminal. The capacity of a container terminal is dictated by a combination of factors, including ship loading/unloading rates, storage capacity on the pier and nearby container storage yards, gate capacity at the terminal gates, and the speed at which containers are picked up and dropped off by customers. Capacity is usually posted in terms of container lifts (one container lifted on or off a ship), and is measured in terms of lifts per acre for a unit of time. For example, the capacity of Terminal [X] at the Port of Long Beach might be measured as: "4,500 lifts per acre per year."