Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (18 page)

Century-old water mains lie beneath the streets of American cities, that crucial but hidden transportation system that grows more fragile every year. The University of California, Los Angeles, campus and parts of affluent West LA were flooded in one epic break in July 2014, when the principal area water supply line burst, spouting a geyser thirty feet high and spilling 75,000 gallons per minute for nearly four hours during the height of a statewide drought. Other communities, from Flint to Chicago to Toledo to the nation's capital, have made residents ill with aged and contaminated water supply lines; the American Society of Civil Engineers' annual Report Card for America's Infrastructure found that America's water supply systems had reached the end of their useful lives in most locations, grading the system with a D. The underground pipelines delivering oil and gas have suffered similar catastrophes. And the electrical grid that transports our power is sustained by hardware so old, fragile, and lacking in backup systems that a Pentagon commission concluded in 2011 that six well-placed rifle shots could take down the entire East Coast grid serving more than a hundred million people. A similar attack could cripple the West Coast, not only blacking out the grid but also shutting down most of Los Angeles's water supply.
No special access or phony ID would be required to accomplish such epic sabotage of America's power transportation system. Just as ominous: the nearest company that could manufacture the obsolete, truck-size replacement parts for those damaged in such an attack is located where all our stuff seems to come from—China. Estimated manufacturing and delivery time via cargo vessel would be four months.

America in the twenty-first century is uniquely cursed: nearly every major method of moving people, resources, energy, and goods faces overload. The lone exception is the 140,000-mile national freight rail system, America's door-to-door superstar. Its unique status as a system run by privately funded virtual monopolies helps explain how it is better able to cope with overload. Deregulation in 1980 allowed the freight rail companies to abandon less profitable lines, including almost all passenger service, to set their own rates, and to expand capacity only where there is a clear return on investment. To be fair, that investment has been substantial—$575 billion since 1980 and $29 billion in 2015 alone
¹⁹
—but freight rail does not offer a model that can be replicated throughout the transportation system of systems. Government has no such flexibility to close costly major roads, water mains, or bridges that serve whole communities, or to charge higher user fees at will so that roads can pay for themselves like rail freight. It's akin to the difference between private schools that pick and choose students and set their own tuitions, and public schools charged with educating everyone with no tuition at all. The White House, the Congress, the state transportation bureaucracies, the city transportation departments, and the advocates for every mode from bus to bike to car to feet agree there is an urgent need to face up to the resulting overload that infects every other method of transport. But as yet no clear vision of what comes next has emerged in America's door-to-door conversation
beyond adding a lane here or a bypass there—the traffic equivalent of going on a diet by loosening your belt.

M
y Lyft driver, Tom, is talking about the string of cargo vessels visible up and down the coast, all waiting to berth, each piled high with containers like floating ziggurats. The line extends twenty miles south of the port, all the way down the coast to Huntington Beach, forming a grim backdrop for the surfers and beach walkers. What should have been a source of well-paid work for Tom has turned into a need to moonlight as a rideshare driver.

Of all the transportation headlines and behind-the-scenes developments, the port slowdown has dominated the news of Friday the thirteenth, as it had for many days before, this crippling backlog at this most important hub in the goods-movement universe.

With the port so backed up, farmers with citrus to ship to Asia are watching their produce rot, or they're forced to sell domestically for far less than cost. Beef exports are down, as are nuts and alfalfa. Total lost farm sales are running about $1.75 billion a month. Target stores can't get their normal supply of Easter baskets. Apparel maker Nature USA is running out of yarn. Tommy Bahama had to stock last season's shirts instead of the new fashions in transit from Asia. Levi Strauss is missing a third of its products. Softline Home Fashions, a leading importer of home decor, can't get its new line of curtains to its main customers: Walmart, JCPenney, and Bed Bath & Beyond. They all have payrolls to make, investors to satisfy, bills to pay. They need their products.

And then there's the disaster of Valentine's Day. Tomorrow.

“My Valentine's business is destroyed and my Easter season is on the verge of being destroyed!” laments the CEO of Megatoys, a Los Angeles–area business that normally hires six hundred seasonal workers to assemble Valentine's Day gift baskets.
²⁰
But now
his eighty shipping containers of hearts and toys and all the trappings of prepackaged romance are stuck as sea. As are his competitors'. They are all within sight of the port—some are even berthed—but they cannot get unloaded. They might all as well still be in China. No products means no jobs for those workers, no baskets for the sweethearts, no profits for Megatoys.

Guys like Tom, banking on their lucrative longshoremen's salaries, now can't pay their mortgages with far smaller earnings from Lyft and Uber. For all the media celebration of the sharing economy and the “gig economy,” the pay is low and the benefits nonexistent. The regional and national economies could suffer long-term damage as some shippers have threatened to shift to ports in Mexico or to traverse the Panama Canal and go with East Coast ports only too happy to scoop up the business. The system that always “just worked” is not supposed to creak and stutter like this, and the usual power brokers and lobbyists haven't helped.

In desperation, the White House dispatched the secretary of labor to Los Angeles to broker a deal—or, as my Lyft driver Tom puts it, to “knock some heads” before the damage to jobs and the economy escalates from a Valentine's Day massacre to a full-blown recession restart.

Only later, when this intervention actually works and a settlement is reached before the end of February, does it become clear that the labor dispute was not the main problem, and that the other factors overloading the system could not be so easily solved.

“It's a great job, working here,” Tom says of the port. “But who knows what the future will bring? How do we handle the overload?”

W
ho rules the seas? Does the power lie with the great national navies and their mighty warships? This is certainly where the United States is the undisputed big dog. America has the impressive firepower of the U.S. Navy, which also bears an even more impressive cost: $168 billion a year to keep the biggest guns in the water on standby, just in case of threat or attack.
¹

Or should we look to a different type of sea power, the arena of cargo ships? Their purpose is not intimidating enemy targets but actually stocking Target stores, along with every other retailer, business, and home in America. Along with all their thousands of other customers, those cargo ships just happen to deliver 80 percent of the components the U.S. Navy and the rest of the American military relies upon. The Pentagon outsources as much as everyone else. When it comes to the superpowers of global shipping, the U.S. barely ranks as a bit player.

In a concentration of power unlike any other sector of the transportation system, six steamship companies, none of them American, control more than half the goods in the world.
²
Twenty global companies—most of which have joined forces in four immense ship-sharing alliances—control almost every product traded on earth.

This has been the quietest conquest and surrender in world history, one in which the entire United States happily and somewhat obliviously participated because consumers love above all else low prices at the cash register, and there is no question that globalization has delivered that part brilliantly. The miracle of modern logistics and ultra-efficient global transportation technology has made achieving those low prices possible, although beneath the gleaming tech lies the crudest of foundations. All it took was two things: divesting America of its once-mighty cargo fleets and shipyards; and outsourcing a major chunk of consumer goods manufacturing to countries with pay, benefits, environmental practices, standards of living, and working conditions that would never in a million years be tolerated on American soil. The thrill of the checkout-line bargain masks the reality that Americans pay elsewhere for those low prices in the form of shuttered U.S. factories, lower wages, a shrinking middle class, a growing inability to pay for roads and bridges, massive public subsidies of the health and environmental costs of transportation pollution, and a nation—including its armed forces—that can no longer function without massive amounts of Chinese imports shipped aboard Korean-built vessels owned and operated by foreign conglomerates.

Of the six cargo powers that control a majority of global goods movement, Denmark-based Maersk Lines is the leader, at the top in numbers of ships, in cargo capacity, in revenues, in profits, and in constructing the biggest and most advanced cargo ships in the world. Maersk (with subsidiaries in oil platforms, oil drilling, trucking, and port terminal operations) handles nearly 16 percent of the world's cargo all on its own. That's the equivalent of one out of every six items for sale at Walmart, making the globe-spanning Danish shipping company the undisputed world superpower of ocean commerce, based in a country with a population
slightly less than the state of Maryland's. And if that's not enough, Maersk has partnered in a mega ship-sharing alliance with the Geneva-based Mediterranean Shipping Company—the world's second biggest container ship line. Together the two companies' “2M Alliance” control a combined fleet of 1,119 vessels capable of hauling 29 percent of the world's goods.
³

Not a single missile, cannon, or gun bristles from this container ship fleet. Yet, when this shipper—or any one of the other handful of powerful alliances—wants something, entire transportation systems fall over themselves to accommodate. Billion-dollar projects are launched. Port terminals are torn down and rebuilt. Freeways are expanded, railroads rerouted, trucking companies meekly accept backbreaking new costs and delays—all because the shipping lines are so good at playing country against country and state against state, always ready to move their business to a more obliging port or partner if they don't get what they want. Is Los Angeles not giving shippers such a good deal? Well, there's always Houston or Savannah, Mexico or Canada. It's been that way for decades now, the hidden price tag on those inexpensive goods America once made onshore but now outsources abroad: 97 percent of our clothing, 98 percent of our shoes,
⁴
two-thirds of our home furniture,
⁵
most consumer electronics, toys and bikes; they're all everyday products, and they all come from abroad. There's a reason why the global container fleet's cargo capacity has jumped from 11 million tons in 1980 to 169 million tons in 2010
⁶
—because the growing consumer-driven economy demanded it and then became dependent upon it.

Seventy percent of America's gross domestic product takes the form of consumer spending,
⁷
much to the delight of those big shipping lines that connect Chinese factories to American stores and closets. The big steamship lines, both metaphorically and quite literally, have been driving the train for decades, one of the
greatest forces, if not
the
greatest, propelling the transportation system of systems.

Still, the shipping domain is not entirely a one-way street. The shipping superpower rule book was rewritten—at least a bit—when a most unlikely port director took over the gritty docks of Los Angeles. Unlike the shipping industry insiders who usually take charge of big ports, this director was a marine biologist with a vintage pink Thunderbird, a penchant for baking, and little regard for the glass ceiling that made her one of only two female directors of the nation's eighty-five major ports. Before she left her post in 2014, she would take on the shippers, the truckers, and every other entrenched constituency at the nation's biggest port complex. On her watch, the dirtiest harbor with the dirtiest ships—a major source of air pollution in America's smog capital, Southern California—would transform into an international model of greener transportation even as her port continued to be number one on the continent. She would become a charter member of an unofficial group of transportation movers and shakers, the Ladies of Logistics—the LOLs, as they call themselves. The LOLs not only buck the tide in a boys'-club industry but their influence demonstrates that, for all the impersonal immensity built into the global transportation machinery, a few brilliant or dedicated or determined individuals can have an outsized impact on how we move ourselves, our stuff, and our world. And, before her term was up, she would see the current congestion crisis coming, she would plan for it, and her legacy just might help find a cure.

“Good times” is how Geraldine Knatz recalls her eight years at the helm of one of America's most vital transportation hubs—the most desirable and difficult job in the port business. “Not bad considering my first job here was to study life in the port waters back in the seventies—which wasn't easy, because there was
no
life in the port waters back in the seventies. I suppose I've come full circle. And so has the port.”

T
una, not containers—that's what the Port of Los Angeles was most famous for back when Geraldine Knatz's forty-year career at the twin-ports complex began. The evolution that followed is a microcosm of the transformation of the entire global supply chain as local industry dominance gave way to offshore supremacy, canned tuna included. This was long before the container revolution created a Southern California mega-port dominated by superpower shipping lines. Fishing fleets and canneries were the shot callers back then in the Los Angeles harbor—sardines in the early twentieth century, led by the French Sardine Company, then tuna once the sardines were depleted and French Sardine rebranded itself as Star-Kist.

Imports were a relatively small piece of the port puzzle even when Knatz arrived in the mid-seventies for her graduate studies in marine biology at the University of Southern California. At the time, Star-Kist and its cat food brand, 9Lives—along with Chicken of the Sea, Bumble Bee, and every other tuna enterprise in the country—operated out of Los Angeles, which had become the biggest tuna production site in the world after World War II. The fishing fleet and canneries employing thousands occupied the wharf space now filled by container ships and terminals. Just by the smell on the morning breeze, the locals in San Pedro overlooking the harbor could tell if it was a human food day or a pet food day. That distinctive aroma of an open sack of dry dog or cat food would permeate the waterfront on pet days, distinct from the briny, heady fish scent of regular tuna canning. And no matter the day, human or pet, the canneries dumped their waste from fishing, cooking, and canning into the harbor as they had
done for more than half a century. It was into this miasma that young Geraldine and her wetsuit were quite literally thrown, as the port launched a belated effort to cleanse its polluted waters.

Paddling around in cannery waste had not been her dream job. She grew up watching the prime-time TV specials starring Jacques Cousteau aboard his intrepid research vessel, the
Calypso
, as he played with the dolphins, spoke rhapsodically in his melodic French accent of the shy intelligence of the gentle octopus, and advocated for ocean preservation. The scuba-diving adventurer's broadcasts inspired thousands of baby boomers to pursue a career in the ocean sciences, Knatz among them. She had grown up in the northern New Jersey township of Wayne, where her father worked as a factory die cutter and her mother kept the house, both of them forced by the Great Depression to take jobs as teenagers rather than finish high school. They maintained a hard-times work ethic all their lives, requiring their daughter to get a job and start paying room and board at age sixteen in addition to her high school studies. She didn't dare complain, as she had been given a better deal than her brother, who had to start earning his keep at age fourteen. But it did drive her to covet a career she could love rather than merely endure.

In her spare time, young Geraldine collected pond samples while walking home from school or work, using the microscope her brother had received one Christmas to identify the protozoans within. While at college, she landed a research internship studying port pollution near Fort Hancock, New Jersey. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists working on the project at the army base took pity on her when she confessed that, on the way there, she had to pretend she dropped her quarter on the ground at every other toll both on the Garden State Parkway. That way she would be waved through without paying, a tactic she adopted because she could afford to pay only
every other quarter. Her supervisors ultimately let her move into a disused old barracks at the base to avoid the tolls, then finally gave her a paid position. At night she used to lie on the beach and watch the big break-bulk cargo ships go around the Sandy Hook point en route from New York Harbor. It was the beginning of her fascination with cargo ships and ports.

After graduating from Rutgers University and winning admission to USC's postgraduate program, she drove to California and found a little apartment in the Silver Lake area of town, not far from Dodger Stadium—a fashionable, eclectic neighborhood now, unfashionable and very affordable back then. She left for class or the harbor early every morning, exchanging greetings with her elderly neighbor, Maria, who spoke to her with a thick Russian accent. Only after Maria died did Knatz learn she had been living next door to Rasputin's daughter. The unusual and the strange often seem to follow in Geraldine Knatz's wake. (The root meaning of her Germanic surname, she says, is “troublemaker.”) One of her employers, she recalls, made the entire port staff undergo handwriting analysis to reveal their personality traits, an expression of this particular port director's fondness for fringe science and psychic phenomenon. She thought it was a bit weird at the time, but as she was promoted immediately after the analysis came back, she never complained. That director, a local businessman whose expertise was not in ports but in amusement parks and hotels, left after a mere year in office. The most important legacy of his tenure would turn out to be Knatz's promotion.

Knatz began her long career at the port as a student researcher attached to a water-quality project funded by the tuna canneries. The canneries hoped that science could show that their dumping of fish waste into the harbor was actually a beneficial “bio-enhancement.” It wasn't. The harbor had been stripped of life and the oxygen that supports life, and the canneries were a big part of the problem.

“We'd go out and if we found a little bit of oxygen in the water we'd celebrate,” Knatz recalls. “Back then, there was basically nothing living there. The water was dead.”

But it was not irredeemable. Knatz spent the next three years researching and diving with USC as she earned her master's degree, then took a job as an environmental specialist at the Port of Los Angeles while pursuing her doctorate. Her work then focused primarily on improving the abysmal water quality in the harbor. This was not altruism or good corporate citizenship at work. Air pollution, water pollution, and extinction threats to such signature species as the national symbol, the bald eagle, had become so grave that a Democratic Congress passed and Republican president Richard Nixon signed a series of sweeping, powerful, and publicly popular bipartisan environmental laws in this era, among them the Clean Water Act of 1972. Under the law, canneries had to start treating their waste and dispose of it properly. Leaking oil and fuel infrastructure had to be repaired or replaced throughout the port. One of Knatz's first tasks was to dive the port to assess the damage caused by leaking oil after a docked tanker ship exploded. She dove with a bunch of white sticks in hand, measuring the toxic gunk that had accumulated on the harbor bottom by plunging the rods into the sea bed like dipsticks into a car engine.