Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (20 page)

Solving this traffic miasma with a single rail mega-corridor that darts above or below street traffic—an expressway for trains—may sound obvious in retrospect, but formidable barriers deterred it for many years. There was cost to consider, and property rights, community fears, the engineering challenge of building an immense trench in a dense urban area, and the sheer “It's
the way it's always been” inertia that keeps bad transportation systems in place for decades. The railroad had lucrative monopoly control of the right of way and no incentive to ease the pain to the populace or the rest of the goods movement system by investing billions—which is why the idea originated in government, at a regional planning agency where a transportation visionary by the name of Gill Hicks worked.

One of Knatz's first big hires was Hicks, whom Knatz stole away to spearhead the project. The port could do what the private sector could not accomplish on its own. Although it's a publicly owned asset, the Long Beach port receives no funds from the city but runs off its earnings, where it acts as landlord to all the businesses that operate there. Every decision has to make business sense at the port, and investing in a better rail connection—though a financial nonstarter for Southern Pacific—would be a customer magnet for the port, drawing cargo with the promise of far faster goods movement. Hicks would lead the project and go on to be the director of the corridor program after it opened for business as its own quasi-public agency. Knatz, meanwhile, partnered with her old employer, the Port of Los Angeles, becoming the chief negotiator for acquiring the Southern Pacific rail lines, stations, yards, and rights of way. This ended up being a hard-fought $235 million deal for control of the corridor that the bullying Collis Huntington got for free through threats and intimidation. Still, the deal transformed goods movement at both ports while relieving one of the worst traffic-jam generators on that end of Los Angeles.

Completed in 2002, the Alameda Corridor project isolated the rail lines from street traffic with a series of bridges, underpasses, overpasses, and the centerpiece of the project, a ten-mile trench three stories deep and fifty feet wide, a man-made canyon for trains. This enabled freight trains to zip downtown from the
port in a half hour or less instead of the two hours plus it used to take, without slowing car traffic a single minute. Some of the trains run nearly two miles long, but there are no flashing lights and no crossing gates. On average, each train hauling cargo out of the port takes three hundred trucks off the road, and there are nearly fifty such trains a day. That's 15,000 truck trips a day removed from crowded freeways and smoggy air.
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About a third of the goods coming into the twin ports now moves out through the Alameda Corridor rail system. Without it, the growth of cargo flowing into the port would have had a crippling impact on freeway traffic and smog in the region long ago.

In 1999, Knatz was elevated from planning director to the number two job at the Port of Long Beach: managing director. She thought she might be in line for the top job eventually, but when a leadership change left her future uncertain, Knatz sought to return to her old employer, the Port of Los Angeles, when a new mayoral administration was voted in and the top job at the port opened up. The application process devolved into the sort of odd turn of events that seems to crop up wherever Knatz is involved. It started when she received a form-letter rejection in the opening round of the port job search. This seemed odd, given her long career and relationships on both sides of the harbor, not to mention her position as second in command at America's number two port. But she was prepared to shrug it off and move on. Her husband, however, insisted that the letter had to be a mistake. Knatz loved him for his faith in her, but she said there was no way the top headhunting firm hired to recruit a new port director would be so bumbling. She couldn't call back and say,
Gee
,
did you really mean to reject me?
How foolish would that look? When he wouldn't relent, Knatz finally placated her husband by reluctantly placing the call, only to be flabbergasted when, after a long silence, the headhunter exclaimed, “We sent you the wrong
letter!” Then Knatz learned she was already scheduled for an interview at an airport hotel that Saturday evening—the last one scheduled.

When she arrived for the one-on-one, however, the apparently exhausted headhunter dozed off in the middle of Knatz's interview. Mortified, she returned home and complained, “There I was at a hotel on Saturday night with a man who's not my husband. And he falls asleep!”

The ridiculous interview, like her errant rejection letter, turned out to be an unreliable indicator of Knatz's job prospects. She soon learned she had made it to the next round, then on to a meeting with the mayor. The next thing she knew, Knatz had been tapped to run the most important port in America.

It turns out her background as a biologist and environmentalist left her uniquely qualified for the times. The port complex was under siege as the worst air polluter in California. Virtually every major project to improve the LA docks, the terminals, and the surrounding infrastructure sat frozen by lawsuits and protests. Her predecessor had worked for two decades for steamship line giant Maersk before coming to lead the port, an insider status perfectly suited to dealing with the shipping industry. But he was perceived as insensitive to the concerns of the surrounding community by such organizations as the Natural Resources Defense Council, which had targeted the port as a leading threat to health and environment. Knatz, who had come to the port as the scientist-outsider so many years before, was uniquely positioned to settle the skirmishes with environmentalists and surrounding communities and get the port modernization back on track before overload paralyzed operations. The new mayor made the new port director's mission very clear, she'd later say: Fix it.

Knatz, in turn, told her staff they would be adopting a new in-house motto to describe goals to simultaneously grow the port
with massive new infrastructure while radically cutting pollution at the same time: “It's impossible. It's difficult. It's done.” This had been the progression on the Alameda Corridor project, she said, and the same approach would fix the port. At first these apparently conflicting goals would seem impossible, she said. Then achieving them would seem very, very difficult.

“And then we'll be done.”

T
he environmentalists' claims were not wrong. The port had been identified by state scientists as the major source of air pollution in the region. The ships were a big part of the problem.

There are about 6,000 container ships in the world (out of a total of 90,000 cargo vessels of all types). These behemoths move 120 million container-loads a year, worth $4 trillion.
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They are also prodigious consumers of one of the dirtiest fossil fuels on the planet. The growth of maritime shipping and the giant container ship has powered an unprecedented explosion in world trade, but also an environmental disaster.

Bunker fuel, it's called: the cheapest, dirtiest form in common use is up to 1,800 times more polluting than the diesel fuel used in buses and big rigs,
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and little more than a waste product left over after everything else useful is extracted from crude oil. It has the consistency of asphalt; a person can walk on it when it's cool. The big cargo ships burn so much bunker fuel that they don't measure consumption in gallons but in
metric tons per hour
, with the really big ships consuming two hundred to four hundred tons a day. One large container ship burning this type of fuel spews out more sulfur and nitrogen oxides—the precursors of smog and particulate pollution, as well as a major contributor to the ocean acidification that threatens fisheries and coral reefs—than 500,000 big-rig trucks or roughly 7.5 million
passenger cars.
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That means just 160 of the 6,000 such mega-ships in service today pump out the same amount of these pollutants as all the cars in the world. New regulations that took effect in 2015 compel shippers to use a cleaner, less polluting type of bunker fuel when they cross the two-hundred-mile limit at the edge of U.S. waters, which has reduced ship emissions close to shore. But the cleaner bunker fuel is more expensive, and so many shippers hover just outside the limit when waiting for a berth opening at their next port of call, then race in at the last possible minute, thereby maximizing their use of the dirtiest, cheapest fuel.

The cargo fleet is also a prodigious source of carbon emissions—about 2 to 3 percent of the global total.
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Although that's only between a third and a fifth of the global-warming gases emitted by the world's cars,
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it's still a big greenhouse gas footprint for such a relatively small number of vessels. If the shipping industry were a country, it would be in the top ten drivers of climate change, and its billion tons of carbon dioxide and equivalents put it ahead of Germany, the world's fourth largest economy. At current rates of growth, the shipping industry that hauls 90 percent of the world's goods will be two and a half times its current size by 2050; absent a serious effort to become more energy efficient, it could be generating a staggering 18 percent of global greenhouse gases by then.
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Through a very deceptive accounting loophole, none of these big ship emissions “belong” to any one country. They happen in international waters for the most part, and so for the purpose of calculating the greenhouse gas emissions of nations, they simply don't exist—on paper. They very much exist in terms of their impact on climate, oceans, and health. As the world's biggest consumer, America is the beneficiary of a substantial portion of container shipping, as well as the manufacturing of the products on
board. The United States is the per capita world leader in global greenhouse gas emissions, and second only to China in absolute volume of emissions. Much has been made in the U.S. Congress and press of China's overall lead in greenhouse gas emissions, but about half of the growth in Chinese carbon since 1990 is the result of offshoring and globalization—China's explosive growth as a manufacturer of products for export, with the U.S. the biggest customer. Those emissions, in other words, are as much ours as China's. We haven't outsourced just jobs and manufacturing; we've outsourced our carbon. Even with that accounting trick making the U.S. appear greener than it really is, the average American produces about twice the carbon emissions of the average European, and 3.5 times the average Chinese citizen.

When these ships approach the port and dock, the practice in the past was to keep the engines running as they burn through tons of bunker fuel to maintain power aboard the ship. The bunker fuel emissions made working at the port unhealthy and polluted neighboring communities.

Within five years of Knatz's arrival, pollution at the port dropped so dramatically that even the most ardent critics were dishing out praise: emissions, particularly those related to diesel and ship engine exhaust, were down as much as 76 percent even as container traffic increased.
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Several big changes in the handling of ships and cargo led to this startling turnaround, which initially made the twin ports of LA and Long Beach outliers, then world leaders in a growing green ports movement.

The Port of Los Angeles became the first U.S. commercial port to install cold ironing for docked container vessels. “Cold ironing” is the industry term for the use of giant power plugs to connect ships to the shoreside electrical grid while docked. This allows them to shut down their engines (thus the “cold” part of
the term, which harkens back to the days of red-hot coal-fired engines) and still keep their essential electrical and refrigeration systems operating without spewing fumes and toxins.

Work on the very first shore power plugs in LA started before Knatz's tenure began, as part of a settlement of a massive lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council that had halted construction at the port for years. But the new port director turned that grudging acquiescence by a predecessor into a port-wide asset, touting zero-emissions ship power as a solution to the single biggest pollution source on the coast. The shipping industry initially objected to the cost of the new shipboard equipment, but Knatz argued that they'd benefit from a combination of fuel savings and community goodwill—and the likelihood that an investment in clean tech and good corporate citizenship on this point could make future projects the shipping industry desired more palatable to the public.

The Port of Long Beach undertook similar reforms. By the end of 2014, half the cargo ship calls at the ports were supposed to be with engines off and shore-based power engaged. That goal was not quite achieved—at Los Angeles, it was closer to 35 percent, as the shipping lines stalled on installing the necessary equipment. Even so, the pollution reductions from ship exhausts were dramatically reduced, exceeding goals that were not required for another three years.
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Other U.S ports at first tried to capitalize by positioning themselves as cheaper, easier, and less regulated alternatives, and a few shippers did shift some cargo. But even with the new green requirements, few ports in the U.S. could match LA or Long Beach on the time and costs of shipping. Economics and geography ensure this: to ship a container from Asia to America via Los Angeles or Long Beach takes twelve days on average at a cost of about $1,800. It's another five days' transit time by rail or truck to
Chicago or the East Coast, a total transit time of seventeen days. By comparison, bypassing the West Coast in favor of an all-water journey from Asia to the East Coast via the Panama Canal takes twenty-seven days at an average cost of $4,200 per container, not counting the time and expense of shipping from the port to its final destination. Shipping via the Suez Canal takes even longer: thirty-seven days.
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As long as the twin ports kept modernizing and preparing for larger ships and container loads, the shipping lines would not abandon them over a green initiative that other ports around the world had begun to copy anyway.