Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (28 page)

This is how the latest model of the Apple iPhone gets from the factory to your home. The black market is just too lucrative to take chances. When phone-making rival Samsung fetches its new phones by truck, it sometimes goes even further, sending decoys out to fool and possibly catch organized phone thieves.

Welcome to UPS's regional air hub in Ontario, California, the crown jewel in Noel Massie's empire—and one of the big potential beneficiaries of an expanded 710 freeway. In many ways, it serves as the air version of the Los Angeles and Long Beach port complex, a vital link in the movement of goods between America and Asia.

One of six regional UPS air hubs in the continental U.S., Ontario is strategically located in the goods-movement capital of the West, the freeway-rail-air desert nexus of wide-open space and cheap real estate known as the Inland Empire. Here the warehouses seem to stretch to the horizon, a vista that boosters call a vital source of jobs and critics decry as a wasteland of pollution and poor pay. Most major retailers and manufacturers, from Walmart to Skechers, maintain enormous distribution facilities here, with freight coming to them from the ports, then moving out again through UPS and a host of rival carriers. As a result, Ontario has also become UPS's largest ground operation as well as an air hub.

This is where the smartphones bound for America from Asia first come. This is where planeloads of perishable fresh flowers land one after another in time for Mother's Day. This is where the ancient Terra Cotta Warriors museum exhibit first landed from China. Ontario is a place of constant motion and constant cargo both exotic and mundane—an installation where, in one form or another, everything a delivery company can do is on display.

UPS has 539 cargo jets flying nearly 2,000 trips to 728 airports worldwide every twenty-four hours. (Federal Express has an even bigger air presence, but UPS's ground operations dwarf its chief competitor, making it the larger carrier overall: $11 billion more in annual revenues than FedEx's $47.1 billion.) About twenty UPS flights arrive and twenty depart every day at Ontario, with the first touching down at 4:00 a.m. with overnight deliveries to all over Southern California. Because time is so short, the containers on this plane are presorted so they can be loaded directly onto feeder trucks without cracking them open—one truck for San Diego, another for downtown LA, another for the South Bay, or wherever the parcels are bound. The entire plane load—thirty-eight containers; more if it's a 747 jumbo jet—are out of the airport and on the freeway in less than an hour. “In LA traffic, you're sunk if you're not on the freeway by 5:00 a.m.,” says Don Chubbuck, hub planner and industrial engineer at Ontario. “That's why we do the sort on the other end.” The overnights will get to the local UPS operating facilities by 7:00 a.m., 7:30 at the latest, for a quick load onto brown box trucks in time for delivery that day.

Air shipping containers look nothing like the big steel cans used on oceangoing cargo ships. Air cargo cans are made of lightweight plastic, portions of which are transparent, and are shaped into semicircular cylinders with flat bottoms—mirroring the shape of a stripped-down jetliner's interior. UPS jets are basically
passenger airliners stripped of seats, carpeting, overhead bins, and every other accouterment other than seats for the pilots and a very tiny airplane galley for snacks and drinks. The echoing cargo area has rollers embedded in the floor so the containers can be pushed quickly into place without need of heavy equipment. When unloading, crew members roll them to the cargo hatch, which is much wider than the doors on passenger jets. Then a motorized contraption called a K Loader, which looks like a gigantic scissors jack used to change a flat tire, reaches up to the two-story-high hatch and grabs two containers at once. An entire aircraft with 200,000 pounds of cargo can be unloaded in minutes this way.

Except for the direct loading of the presorted 4:00 a.m. overnights, the air containers are trucked into a 750,000-square-foot hub center adjacent to the runways, where they are lined up next to banks of massive conveyor belts. At the time of this writing, the containers were unloaded by hand onto the belts, but an automated facility to do this robotically was being set up. The belts carry the packages past overhead scanners that read their delivery bar codes and route each one to the proper trucks, which are backed up flush to the opposite side of the conveyor belts. Rivers of packages are sorted to their destinations this way at high speed. International goods are first diverted to a special U.S. Customs post that's manned in the late-night and early-morning hours before they, too, hit the loading conveyors.

Multiple flights of lightweight, high-value products from electronics to jewelry fly in daily from Asia, usually via Anchorage for refueling. The incoming planeloads are unloaded at Ontario if the contents are bound for one of the seventeen Western states. The rest continue on to UPS's main “Worldport” air hub at Louisville, Kentucky, where the sorting facility is big enough to house eighty football fields and can ship more than 400,000 packages an hour.

On the other side of the Ontario hub, incoming ground-shipped packages from homes, businesses, and the Inland Empire's hundreds of product distribution centers—amazon.com, target.com, nordstrom.com, macys.com; the list goes on—are disgorged into a football-field-sized sorting area. Teams of sorters pull goods from fifty enormous aluminum chutes, each tagged for a different part of the country. Once sorted, those packages are placed on feeder trucks bound for other Western states, or shorter-haul trucks to one of the local railheads for transcontinental rail shipment.

A parallel operation—the “small sort”—gathers documents and small packages bound for the same destinations into large bags that are scanned as single parcels and sent on their way (bagging them makes for more efficient handling and less damage). A third sort—“the irregulars”—uses trains of motorized dollies moving through the hub to deliver to the proper outbound trucks such large or oddly shaped items as tires, machine parts, heavy crates, works of art, and refrigerated containers carrying perishable prescription drugs or medical samples. And yet another area—a long line of truck bays facing away from the runways—is filled with brown box vans being loaded overnight with package deliveries to local homes and businesses.

The single most common product type shipped by UPS is—perhaps unsurprisingly in this age of e-commerce—the consumer retail product category. The next most common in order are car parts, medical supplies and drugs, professional services (mostly legal and real estate documents), and industrial supplies and products. UPS workers at Ontario see the economy in real time: which companies are shipping more stuff, which products are moving slowly or exploding in popularity. Massie keeps careful track of such data, but guards this proprietary information with a level of secrecy appropriate to the confessional—an apt metaphor,
because his customers, from small businesses to Fortune 500 titans, give him critical information they share with no one else, and that their competitors would love to possess.

In such a ceaseless hive of goods movement, there are occasional errors—“miss-sorts,” UPS calls them. This is what causes a package to be lost or late or sent to the wrong destination. It is something Chubbuck and his industrial engineer colleagues at Ontario have been working on since he arrived there in 2007, when the error rate at the hub was one in 250. That works out to a 99.6 percent accuracy rate, which sounds good until you apply it to millions of packages. Then it's 4,000 misdirected packages per million, and Chubbuck calls that “completely unacceptable.” In 2015 he said some of the sorting belts in the Ontario sort achieved one in 20,000 miss-sorts, a vast improvement—a 99.95 percent accuracy rate (50 misdirects per million packages). But Chubbuck says that is
still
too many errors, and he and his colleagues are working to bring the rates down even further. “It is fine for shipping candy bars—maybe. But how about for medical? When somebody needs X-rays for surgery, one out of 20,000 just isn't good enough.” And so the work on errors continues.

Noel Massie believes that automation will ultimately solve, or at least manage, such problems as sorting errors, just as it has helped with route optimization. Robotic aircraft—jetliner drones, in other words—will be coming soon, he says. If you ask the pilots, they'll tell you the robot planes are already here in all but name. UPS's cargo planes can automatically approach the airport, lower the landing gear, land the plane, taxi off the runway, and then park and shut down the engines—all without the pilots touching a single control. In fact, when weather and visibility are poor, it's the
only
way to land the plane. Driverless trucks will be next, Massie says; if not the delivery vans, then certainly the feeder trucks plying the freeways. Safety, efficiency, lower cost,
and the ability of trucks to drive nonstop without the need for sleep make the rise of the robots inevitable. But none of that is going to help him sleep soundly at night, he says.

“Technology's not the problem. Traffic's not the problem. The problem is infrastructure. That's what's going to stop us.”

Many people will shrug it off as just traffic jams and inconvenience, he says, but the view from Massie's office on the fifth floor of the Olympic Building reveals more. If overload causes the delivery drivers of UPS to take a mere ten minutes longer on the average route, the company's costs go up $125 million. That means cost goes up for
everybody
who sells and buys stuff. And then multiply that a thousandfold, or ten thousand–fold, for every other business that has to move things door to door, which is virtually every business. Massie can feel the pressure of those mounting minutes gathering, an inexorable glacier of time. “We are already overloaded. And the fact is that the world is going to go from 7 billion people to 9 billion people by 2050. That's a million more people a week, every week for thirty-five years. If we don't have infrastructure keeping pace with that, what's our world going to look like?”

Massie sighs. He is on his soapbox a bit, but trucks and goods movement are his fascination and his livelihood. He is a problem solver in his own shop, and it frustrates him to see the larger problems that he cannot control hurting his business and his country. He finishes his thought: “And just to be clear, we are
not
keeping pace.”

Then he glances at the clock, and the minutes passing, ready to move on to the next cycle.

T
raffic engineer Ted Trepanier's career-altering epiphany hit him like a ten-car pileup that long weekend of July 15, 2011, better known in Los Angeles as Carmageddon. That's when he finally noticed America's transportation revolution hidden in plain sight.

Not that Carmageddon's planners sought revolution. All they wanted was to fix the soul-killing traffic on Interstate 405, and to do it the old-fashioned way: by adding lanes, the go-to gridlock solution for generations.

Trepanier watched with interest from his home in Seattle, then incredulity, as Carmageddon turned into Carmaheaven and the worrisome lane closures made traffic, however briefly, better. Traffic planners had bedrock beliefs about how to fix things and how things worked on streets and highways. Now, in Trepanier's view, those assumptions went out the window.

Ted Trepanier had embraced a vision handed down long before he was born, a vision of ever more cars, trucks, lanes, and parking spaces. Roads and streets were, first and foremost, for drivers, and their free movement was everything. Such car-centrism had been wildly controversial a century ago but has since taken on the staying power of Moses's tablets. That's how the world worked. Until now.

His colleagues viewed Carmageddon as a curiosity, but Trepanier saw a turning point—a shift from a world dominated by car ownership to one of mobility by any means. Just a few years ago, Carmageddon might have been more like the nightmare everyone had feared, but something fundamental had changed, and the bewildering trends Trepanier and his colleagues had been trying to ignore since the start of the new century now made sense. That's why app-enabled car and ridesharing were displacing traditional cab and car rental companies (who were resorting to lawsuits and lobbying to stave off the future) and why carmakers and computer companies were investing billions in perfecting driverless cars that were best suited to a sharing economy, not a three-cars-for-every-household world that Detroit longed to foster. That's why the country had hit peak cars, peak shopping trips, and peak roads years before while online giant Amazon was in growth mode, homing in on robot warehouses, 3-D printers, drones, and that Holy Grail of online shopping, same-day delivery. Why drive to the store when someone will drive your purchases to you? Next-gen Amazon computers have even begun predicting customers' orders and shipping
before
the orders are actually placed—all to make personal driving unnecessary, even unattractive.

And perhaps most important this switch from a focus on car ownership to an embrace of a smorgasbord of mobility options that played out during Carmageddon explains why so many Millennials, America's largest demographic, are losing interest in driving and buying cars. The number of “zero-car families” has been steadily climbing every year since 2007, after shrinking year after year with dependable regularity since 1960. One in ten American families has no car at all. Detroit would have sold another half million cars in the past decade if not for car-sharing smartphone apps. The transportation world had been passing him by, Trepanier realized, and, like all revolutions, the new trends could be seen either as dire threat or golden opportunity.

Trepanier, a baby boomer who grew up believing that his car's pink slip was the key to freedom, suddenly understood his twenty-seven-year-old son who has never owned nor wanted a car, who sees car ownership as a cost and burden and a parking nightmare that limits rather than unleashes his mobility. His son just wanted to get door to door simply, easily, cheaply. “Why would I want to blow all my money on the care and feeding of a car, Dad?” he had once said. “So I can pay to park it all day at work, or outside places I can get to just fine without a car?” Carmageddon didn't surprise Ted's son at all. From his point of view, LA had simply, finally wised up.

And so, says Trepanier, had he. He left the government and joined Inrix, a Microsoft spin-off that created a free smartphone app that gathers real-time data on traffic worldwide better than all the billions spent by government on sensors and traffic cameras. Inrix is a major player in crowdsourced, cloud-stored traffic mapping that it uses to enable mobility rather than just offer GPS driving directions. BMW is deploying it first, as is the New Jersey Department of Transportation. Its technology tells drivers how to get places not based on the shortest distance but on real-time traffic, congestion, construction, public transit, and parking data. Your BMW will be able to tell you to pull off the freeway at the next park-and-ride and hop on an approaching commuter train or bus because it will get you where you want to go faster and without parking hassles and the congestion that results from drivers circling in search of parking. Carmakers are actually building technology that tells people to do the unthinkable:
to get out of their cars.

M
onorails. Flying cars. Nuclear-powered cars. A helicopter in every garage. Subway bullet trains traversing the country. Moving
sidewalks. Magnetic highways to guide vehicles so drivers can relax and play board games with the kids. Rocket planes that go suborbital to cover long distances quicker.

We were supposed to have all these by now, or so the predictions of the future went a couple generations ago. Traffic was supposed to have been solved. Energy and pollution, too. All you had to do was go to the World's Fair back in 1964 to find that out.

The problem with predicting the future is that what seems to make sense today often doesn't match up with future reality. Computer networks and the Web were imagined years before they were part of daily life, but no one predicted how networked smartphones would impact transportation, enabling ridesharing, traffic avoidance, and e-commerce that displaces trips to the store, the bank, and the post office. A hundred years ago, streetcars were predicted to last forever as America's most popular form of mobility because they were clean, efficient, cheap, and easy. Fifty years ago, the idea that bicyclists and pedestrians would want to reclaim lanes from cars would have sounded absurd. Or rather, having local governments allow and encourage it would have sounded preposterous. And no one would have predicted that doing so would improve traffic flow and safety. Yet efforts in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and cities around the world have seen a reduction in congestion after they “calmed” traffic by forcing cars to slow down and share the space. Many drivers and civic leaders remain unconvinced by the data that supports the value of traffic calming, and the political battles over such ideas have become yet another front in the culture war. It is one of the perversities of the era that, in the political arena, bikes and trolleys are deemed “liberal,” while cars are “conservative,” even though in real life all political persuasions use these various modes of travel equally. Or that cars are by their very nature the least conserving form of personal transportation.

Surprisingly for a car-centric community, almost all the official traffic studies and plans for the Los Angeles freeways, going back to the 1920s and continuing on into the sixties, called for mass transit embedded in the freeway medians: heavy rail early on, then light rail, then lines to connect to and revitalize the existing Pacific Electric street car system, and finally, in a fit of Disneyland inspiration and envy, monorails with quiet rubber tires cruising up and down the centers of freeways. Many of these plans were supported by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and other prominent business leaders. Yet all were eventually discarded, either by voters who rejected extra taxes, or by politicians angry that their city wasn't on some proposed route, or simply because the age of the motorcar had arrived and Los Angeles saw itself as ground zero. Let San Francisco build its sixties-era Bay Area Rapid Transit System trains to connect all the cities up there. LA wanted freeway lanes, not rails.

And so Los Angeles's privately owned trolley and interurban rail system—once the largest such system in the world—was shut down, the rights of way sold off. My streetcar suburb of Seal Beach marketed its real estate in the early 1900s with newspaper ads pointing out that Pacific Electric's Red Car Line of electric trolleys could get prospective buyers there from downtown LA for a nickel. Now the last Red Car is a rather forlorn single trolley parked on the last twenty feet of track next to the Seal Beach town library, converted into a small museum with scant hours and even more scant visitors. There are no more trolleys to the beach cities and ports of Southern California, which once delivered both passengers and freight in the region. The lines that served the areas of the city now occupied by Los Angeles International Airport disappeared, too, although air travelers today would give much to be able to take such a conveyance instead of the 405 Freeway. Meanwhile, San Francisco constructed what is now considered to
be one of the more cost-effective mass transit systems in the U.S. built since World War II. Travelers can land at the airport there and take a BART train almost anywhere in the Bay Area.

Most of the nation followed LA's lead.

Not until 1990 did Los Angeles embark on an ambitious light rail and subway building project in an attempt to re-create some of the mass transit service so blithely abandoned a generation ago. The city could have kept all that for pennies on the dollars now being spent.

It's tempting to judge those earlier decisions harshly, to condemn the shuttering of a valuable transportation asset and the refusal to build a new one when it would have been so much easier and less expensive to lay those tracks when the freeways first went in, rather than trying to shoehorn them into a built-out urban landscape today. But were those decisions wrong? Mass transit ridership was dying in the region even before World War II. And for all the money being spent on new light rail and trolley systems now, ridership is only a fraction of what it was a century ago. Cars won. And the decisions made to reject those multimodal freeways were rational at the time. People wanted cars. They didn't want to see America from the train. They wanted to see the U.S.A. in their Chevrolets. They wanted to drive to work in air-conditioned comfort, not walk to the streetcar or train station, then wait around on crowded platforms.

All the billions spent on mass rail transit in LA in recent years, the most ambitious build-out of multiple routes anywhere in the country, has not reduced car traffic jams as hoped. It helps somewhat, but the reductions make it hard to justify the expense. This mirrors the experience nationwide, even as about 25 percent of surface transportation spending goes to fund mass transit. Mass transit use has picked up a bit in recent years but still is lower than it was a quarter century ago and far below its absolute peak in the
1920s, when it was the best and most desirable way to get around the nation's cities and suburbs. Indeed, suburban development followed the extension of mass transit lines back then in the era of streetcar suburbs, because the trolleys were considered a prerequisite for suburban development. Most streetcar suburbs have been absorbed into cities proper since then, and suburban development after World War II eschewed following mass transit and instead relied on car accessibility. The new mass transit spending is not enticing waves of new riders to abandon their cars and ease road traffic. The convenience of the car parked in front of the house trumps the inconvenience of getting to a train or trolley or bus. In the 1920s, Americans were not deterred by this last-mile problem. People walked to the stop—no big deal. Now it is a very big deal. We are conditioned to expect service door to door, and mass transit just doesn't do that.

Public transit has become yet another tussle in the culture wars. Critics say mass transit spending, at least on the federal end, should be shifted to highways in order to deal with traffic. But that strategy can provide no more relief for congestion and overload than the mass transit projects. The $3.6 trillion in unfunded maintenance and repairs on the nation's roads and bridges would barely be scratched by slashing transit spending. The hidden subsidies for drivers, who have never borne the full cost of the roads they use and who now barely pay half through gas taxes, are just too great. Besides, what would the money be used for? The strategy of adding new lanes—even boosting that highway in Texas to twenty-six lanes—just doesn't work. Traffic is worse on the 405 after the Carmageddon lane addition. It's been shown time and again.

Los Angeles and California have spent millions on traffic control centers with state-of-the-art monitors, street and freeway cameras, computer algorithms that let traffic lights and freeway
on-ramp meters be timed and adjusted to alter and maximize the flow of traffic. In truth, these systems are amazing pieces of technology, wonderful in emergencies and for disaster response—and making sure celebrity limousines get to the Oscars on time. But they really aren't very good at “controlling” everyday traffic, at easing congestion significantly and keeping ordinary cars moving at ordinary times. Their effect is negligible on that score, perhaps shaving a couple minutes here or there off a trip. Traffic congestion in the city and region remains some of the worst in the country.

The old approaches, experts such as Trepanier say, just aren't working. The old predictions are failing. The old rules are wrong. Building for speed in dense urban landscapes—laying down stroads where there should be streets—kills people more than it eases congestion. And the old way of paying for roadbuilding and maintenance based on gasoline purchases isn't paying for nearly enough. The fact that Americans are driving less per capita than in years past has only exacerbated the chronic underfunding of transportation in America.

No one was predicting any of this ten years ago. No one.

T
he Millennial generation is, statistically, somewhat less interested in cars and driving and suburban living than older generations. How much of that is due to a bad economy and a tough job market is hard to say, and there is a tendency in the popular media to overstate the Millennials' divergence. Plenty of them still drive, plenty of them want cars, plenty of them would jump at a nice home in the suburbs if they could afford it. The divergence is real, however, and measurable: Americans between the ages of sixteen and thirty-four drove 23 percent fewer miles in 2009 than in 2001—a greater decline in driving than any other age group.
¹