Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (9 page)

Meanwhile, on the plant floor, where Martinez had fired up the two roasters for preheating at 3:30 a.m., the roasting is well under way. Five- and six-hundred-pound batches are being roasted in the big imported German Probats, each of them bought for a million dollars. The roasters work like big clothes dryers: a baffled cylindrical drum rotating, heated beneath by gas flames, with one end open to suck in air. When the roasting is complete and the heat turned off, the drum continues spinning and three gallons of water are poured in to cool the beans down and prevent overcooking. The water evaporates almost immediately but it knocks the temperature down in the process.

At the same time, two Italian-made robotic packagers are churning out sealed packages of beans roasted earlier that morning, the machine a hissing whirl of pneumatic moving arms, funnels, and blades. Elsewhere in the plant, two Japanese tea robots are churning out elegant nylon mesh tea bags at a rate of 5,000 an hour in a hypnotic, graceful, and aromatic twirl.

The fresh coffee is packaged in a layered composite material that has a one-way valve in one side concealed beneath the company logo. The valve allows the carbon dioxide from the fresh beans to escape, thereby overcoming the problem of canning and stale coffee. Various sizes of bags are flowing out of the machines: one-pound bags for retail sales, three-pound bags for sale at big-
box stores, five-pounders in plain silver bags for making coffee by the cup in company coffee shops.

Before each bag is sealed, oxygen is flushed out with pure nitrogen so the coffee cannot oxidize and spoil inside the bag. In this way, roasted coffee can be kept and retain most of its flavor for months. This is a compromise, as coffee is at its flavorful best twenty-four hours after roasting, Isais says. And yes, he admits, he can tell the difference. But it's still a vast improvement over the old industrial canning process.

The logistics for the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf are complex: shipments take six to eight weeks to arrive via container from Africa, Indonesia, Central and South America, and Mexico. Two-thirds of the coffee shipments enter the country through the Port of Oakland, which has a preferred rate for certain commodities, coffee among them, and one-third arrives through the Port of Los Angeles. A contract trucking and logistics firm brings the raw green beans, bulk teas and botanicals, and other ingredients to the company distribution center in Los Angeles, where the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf–branded napkins, cups, lids, and all the other paraphernalia of the modern coffee shop are amassed as well, sourced globally and sold to franchise holders along with the coffee and tea. Once a day, five days a week, a semitruck brings a trailer-load of raw beans, tea, and other materials to the Camarillo plant, drops off the trailer at the loading dock, and takes out a different trailer that has been loaded with the previous day's roasted coffee, bagged and boxed teas, and other finished coffee products. This truck goes back to the LA warehouse and the process repeats the next day.

From LA, short-haul trucks take supplies out for delivery to regional Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf company stores and franchises, nearly half of which are in Southern California. Long-haul trucks depart for more distant distribution points for stores across the
nation, and to the port for international franchises and customers. Many of those coffees are returning to areas close to where they were grown, coming full circle over tens of thousands of miles, with Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf outposts in such far-flung locations as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Bahrain, Germany, Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico, and Mongolia. Espresso-based lattes and mocha concoctions are the big sellers abroad, even more so than in the U.S., as the coffeehouse has become a social magnet worldwide, particularly for the young.

All this is empowered by modern technology and logistics that can ship coffee beans from a distant country to California for roasting, preparation, and packaging, then send them back to the same part of the world for sale as finished product. This transportation-immersed meandering somehow makes economic sense—the magic and the curse of our door-to-door system—and in the process, provides jobs for an estimated 100 million people worldwide engaged in some aspect of the ever-growing coffee business.

The irony isn't lost on Isais that technology almost killed coffee and now is saving it and helping it spread. And yet coffee has in some ways come full circle, he says, returning to that purer experience that hooked all those Civil War veterans so long ago. He points to the training store attached to the roasting plant, a full-fledged coffeehouse to train baristas, open to the public if they can find the obscure location, perhaps by following the aroma that not even the emissions-control afterburners can completely purge. Here you can have that Civil War–era experience of drinking coffee brewed from newly roasted beans, with the scent of roasting still in the air.

“That's the taste that started it all,” he says. “Without the battlefields.”

T
he last mile in the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf supply chain for me—a literal mile—is my short walk to Main Street, where I can find the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe beans that both Isais and I favor.

It's a quick cup for me, and then I have to walk to the bus stop, where one of Long Beach Transit's big red hybrid buses will take me (after one transfer) to San Pedro and a conference on the Port of Los Angeles. The agenda for the conference is all about shipping tech of the future, although the buzz will be all about the crippling port congestion of the present. Busing will take a half hour or so longer than driving my own car, but I won't have to worry about parking, and I can catch up on some reading en route. A reasonable trade-off, with the added bonus of getting a bit of exercise from walking two miles to the bus stop and taking another little notch off the old carbon footprint. The typical household in the U.S. generates the equivalent of 48.5 tons of carbon emissions a year,
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which is roughly five times the global average—with the single largest chunk coming from transportation.

Figuring out how to get around Southern California by public transit used to be an arduous, frustrating experience—one I'd rarely consider and often regret when I did. Many transit
agencies' online guides are atrocious or fragmented. But today's smartphone mapping apps provide a Rosetta stone for bus, trolley, and train travel in many cities in the country with real-time directions, pickup and arrival times, and no peering at incomprehensible bus-stop schedules that make the Zimmerman Telegram decoding project seem like child's play. This may be the single most useful and life-changing capability of the smartphone, enabling every flavor of mobility imaginable, from Waze's traffic jam avoidance to a cornucopia of ridesharing and car lending, to a wave of new personal courier and delivery services, to walking and biking routes that can be very different and significantly better than driving directions. One out of four smartphone owners uses the device to get public transit information, and one out of ten does so frequently.
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This may help explain why mass transit ridership was higher in 2014 than in the previous fifty-eight years (though, admittedly, Americans' use of transit is far, far lower today than it was a century before the age of the smartphone).
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Most of my walk to the bus stop is northbound along the Pacific Coast Highway, which sounds more picturesque than it is. Many parts of State Route 1—PCH to locals—offer glorious views of cliff and coast up and down the state, but my urban stretch is too far inland to provide even a glimpse of the ocean. It's a congested four-lane highway here, and my route takes me across the concrete-lined San Gabriel River that divides Los Angeles County from Orange County and serves as a transition between a mostly residential zone to two big retail, restaurant, and entertainment complexes.

For no good reason, the sidewalks vanish for a quarter mile south of the bridge, forcing pedestrians into the bike lane or the weeds that surround a barren stretch of land where only oil rigs bob like giant, creaky birds pecking for seed. This is the casual way walking is discouraged outside city centers: through
thoughtlessness rather than intention, the product of a hundred years of car-centric planning. Thousands of people move from homes in Seal Beach to restaurants, movies, and stores just across the river in Long Beach, but almost nobody walks the short distance because it is so deliberately unwelcoming. It makes for a tense journey as cars whiz by at 50 miles per hour or more, notwithstanding the posted speed limit of 40 miles per hour. The sidewalks reappear on the bridge itself and continue on the north side, but then the bike lane vanishes without warning a bit farther up the highway, turning into a third lane of car traffic. Cyclists who don't know to avoid this trap suddenly find themselves in the mix with speeding cars about to turn into their paths, a potentially deadly defect in detail and design that is also all too common throughout the region (and much of the country).

Today I see a bike rider miss serious injury by inches as I walk along this area. The car that nearly hit him while making an ill-advised lane change does not fare so well, barely avoiding the bicyclist but then rear-ending an SUV with a loud crunch. Traffic is blocked as the drivers stop and get out to assess the minor damage and to make the ritual exchange of shrugs, grimaces, accusing stares, and insurance information.

This is a mundane, everyday event, the sort that city dwellers barely notice anymore, like the near misses pedestrians regularly experience in crosswalks. But this one I do remember because of what the bicyclist says to me. I was walking right by him and so offered a commiserating shake of the head at his close call, at the obliviousness of some drivers, and at this zero-sum game of an intersection. He had lugged his bike out of the street onto the sidewalk and was standing astride it, running a hand through his long hair, calming himself. “That's the third time this has happened to me,” he tells me in a shaky voice.

“Really?” I ask. “You mean this week?”

He shakes his head. “Today.”

T
he car is the star. That's been true for well over a century, an unrivaled staying power for an industrial-age, pistons-and-brute-force machine in an era so dominated by silicon and software. Cars conquered the daily culture of American life back when spats, top hats, and child labor were in vogue, and well ahead of such other game changers as radio, plastic, refrigerators, the electrical grid, and votes for women.

Cars—all 1.2 billion of them worldwide
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—may not be the most vital component of our sprawling transportation landscape, or the most economically potent; the goods movement fleets and flotillas hold those crowns. Our beloved internal-combustion–powered, 3,977-pound metal boxes on wheels aren't even the most irreplaceable slice of the transportation pie no matter how attached we are to them or helpless we feel without them.
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They are still very much the same beast as Henry Ford's Model T, refined, safer, improved (though not as much as you think), yet still of the same basic, terribly inefficient DNA. Our cars are so rooted in that past they have never shed their deep connections to the age of horse transport, with the car's shape and dimensions still based on horse-drawn carriages and engine output still measured in the archaic eighteenth-century metric of horsepower. Horsepower! Do we measure power plants and nuclear reactors and computer processors by how many horses they “equal”? The surprise, from a technological perspective, is that the conventional car wasn't replaced by any number of more modern designs or technologies long ago, just as cell phones eclipsed landlines and then smartphones dethroned dumb ones.
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The same story holds for coal-fueled cargo ships, steam locomotives, dirigibles, telegraphs, phonographs, typewriters, vacuum tubes, and film cameras.

And yet the car remains the star. It's how generations of Americans have experienced transportation. It's how we intuitively measure distance, not in terms of miles but in car time:
Oh
,
that store is just fifteen minutes away.
Cars are intrinsic to our culture. We associate them with personal freedom, and we incorporate them into all our big moments from the start of life to the end. We gaudily decorate our cars for the post-wedding cruise into married life. We drive our newborns home from the hospital in a flurry of photos and Facebook posts, and gift expectant mothers with car seats at their baby showers in preparation for that first ride. We go to work in them, we take our meals in them (19 percent of them nationwide, by some estimates),
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we date and mate in them. We lavish them with polishes, waxes, personal decor, religious symbols, and political slogans, then show them off like prized Thoroughbreds. And at the end, we have built fleets of lustrous black cars for our last rides to the cemetery.

The car's outsized footprint even governs where and how we live. America has organized its built landscapes around cars to enable their movement, their parking, their convenience, and our dependence on them. The country has enough parking spaces to cover every inch of Delaware and Rhode Island combined—as many as eight spaces for every car in the country, which adds up to about 30 percent of open space in the dense cores of our cities.
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Our emotional involvement with our cars is no less outsized. We spend billions on new lanes and high-tech traffic control centers just in the
hope
of shaving a few minutes off our travels—billions for mere minutes—because movement impeded, even for the meager interval we'd happily invest in awaiting a restaurant table or a beer at the ball game, is psychologically unbearable if it takes place in a car. Researchers have documented this phenomenon time and again: the brain perceives each minute of a travel delay—waiting for a bus, looking for parking, being stuck
in traffic—as two to three times longer than a minute spent moving freely. Humans are conditioned, perhaps even hardwired, this way. This may explain why voters so often prefer spending on such projects as Carmageddon and their often fruitless promise of faster travel rather than investing in buses and subways that, by definition, may be more resource-efficient but also involve that hated, psychically torturous wait time caused by schedules, stops, and stations.

Before cars, streetscapes were designed primarily for walking. The rules of the road were simple: pedestrians ruled. When streetcars came along, they were open: passengers could just jump on as they passed. Now most thoroughfares are designed for driving, and if anyone is jumping, it's to jump out of the way. In many locations, sidewalks are either forbidden (walking on freeways is illegal in most states except in emergencies, and death-defying even then), omitted (as a cost savings), or in disrepair (Los Angeles's notorious city sidewalks being exhibit A, a literal walk of shame as even the mayor has conceded).
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In some states, pedestrians are legally required to avoid conflicts with cars rather than the reverse, and laws and custom so favor automobiles that driving into someone on foot is often treated as a traffic offense rather than an assault, if a citation is issued at all—even in cases of pedestrian injury or death.

Finally, while it is true that the Millennial generation is trending away from driving and owning cars,
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and a scattering of cities are building robust bike, transit, and walking-friendly zones for a more equal sharing of the road, this is a slow and controversial trend, still too nascent to undermine car culture primacy. For sixteen-year-olds all over the country, surviving the ordeal of the driving test and the triumphant receipt of that laminated icon remains America's one great secular ritual and rite of passage, as resonant in its own way as baptism and bar mitzvah, confirmation
and vision quest. The license marks an end to childhood, a new independence, and a kind of machine-powered freedom in which the car is not just conveyance but emblem—the star of the show.

All of this history, culture, ritual, and man-machine affection helps explain why the true cost and nature of cars have become so very hard for us to see. And what is that nature? Simply this: in almost every way imaginable, the car, as it is deployed and used today, is insane. And not in a good way. More like the deep-fried Twinkies stuffed with caviar I saw being sold for $125 apiece at the county fair this summer—insane that way. Except our cars are much more likely to kill us.

But wait. Cars are the epitome of convenience, aren't they? That's the allure and the promise that's kept us hooked, dating all the way back to the versatile, do-everything, on- and off-road miracle of the Ford Model T. Convenience—some might call it freedom—is not a selling point to be easily dismissed—this trusty conveyance, always there, always ready, on no schedule but its owner's schedule. Buses can't do that. Trains can't do that. Even Uber makes you wait. Whenever a car owner wants to jump in and go, the car is there waiting. No sweating and pedaling. No hours spent walking. This is how America gets to the store. This is how America gets to work. This is how pizzas come to our door. The car's not insane, it's amazing, right?

But there's a catch. The price for this convenience is acceptance of vehicles that are nothing less than rolling disasters in terms of economics, environment, energy, efficiency, climate, health, and safety. Our failure to acknowledge the social and real-dollar costs of these automotive shortcomings amounts to a massive hidden subsidy. The modern car could not dominate, or exist at all, without this shadow funding.

So what are the failings of our cars? First and foremost, they are profligate wasters of money and fuel: more than 80 cents of
every dollar spent on gasoline is squandered by the inherent inefficiencies of the modern internal combustion engine.
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No part of our infrastructure and daily lives wastes more energy and, by extension, more money than the modern automobile.

While burning through all that fuel, our cars and trucks spew toxins and particulate waste into the atmosphere that induce cancer, lung disease, and asthma. These emissions measurably decrease our longevity—not by a matter of days, but years. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculates that 53,000 Americans die prematurely every year from vehicle pollution, losing ten years of life on average that they would have survived in the absence of tailpipe emissions.
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There are also the indirect environmental, health, and economic costs of extracting, transporting, and refining oil for vehicle fuels, and the immense national security costs and risks of being dependent on foreign-oil imports for significant amounts of that fuel.

As an investment, the car is our most massive waste of opportunity—“the world's most underutilized asset,” investment firm Morgan Stanley calls it.
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That's because the average car sits idle 92 percent of the time. Accounting for all costs, from fuel to insurance to depreciation, the average car owner in the U.S. pays $12,544 a year for a car that puts in a mere fourteen-hour work week. Drive an SUV? Tack on another $1,908.
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