Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (2 page)

Costco French Roast consists of a blend of beans from South America, Africa, and Asia, each component shipped by container vessel up to 11,000 miles in 132-pound loosely woven sacks of raw, green coffee beans, some across the Pacific Ocean to ports up and down the West Coast, the rest via the Panama Canal, perhaps the Suez Canal, then on to one of several East Coast ports. The complexities are so great on this routing—based on ship space, season, and the vagaries of rates and departures—that it's difficult to trace bulk products more precisely than this. The raw beans then travel by freight train or truck (2,226 miles for the Port of Los Angeles portion) to one of the world's largest blending and roasting plants, located at 3000 Espresso Way in York, Pennsylvania, one of six such plants in the Starbucks empire and the one identified by the company as principally serving Costco. After roasting, blending, and testing to make sure every batch smells and tastes exactly the same no matter how many times a customer buys Costco French Roast, the beans are sealed in plastic and foil composite bags with their own coast-to-coast mileage footprint. Then the packages are stacked on wooden pallets (sourced from all over the nation) and shipped another 2,773 miles back across the country to the Costco depot in Tracy, California, from which my coffee was trucked to my local Costco store. By the time I got those beans, they had traveled more than 30,000 miles from field to exporter to port to factory to distribution center to store to my house—more than enough to circumnavigate the globe.

But that's not where the coffee mileage stops. There are the components of my German-built, globally sourced coffeemaker,
which collectively traveled another 15,700 miles to reach my kitchen. My little bean grinder had a similar triptych. The drinking water I use to brew my coffee comes to my home from a blend of three sources: from groundwater pumped in from local wells about 50 miles distant; via the 242-mile Colorado River Aqueduct; and through the 444-mile California State Water Project, which moves water south from Northern California, forces it 2,000 feet straight up and over the Tehachapi Mountains, then down into Southern California. The fuel and energy required for this third leg exceeds the electricity demand of the entire city of Las Vegas and all its glittering casinos. The electricity that powers my coffee machine runs through a grid festooned with millions of transformers and capacitors, most of which are now imported across 12,000 miles from China through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a complex that is a veritable city unto itself. The natural gas that fuels the power plants that provide most of the electricity to my coffeemaker is obtained from gas fields in Canada and Texas and sometimes farther through a 44,000-mile network of underground pipelines—North America's hidden energy transport plumbing.

At this point the collective transportation footprint on my cup of coffee is hovering at 100,000 miles minimum. And that's not counting the seemingly smallest segment of that journey, my 6.3-mile drive to Costco in my 2009 Toyota Scion xB, which has the most massive transportation footprint of anything I own—and not because I drive it very far. I chose to buy a used vehicle on the theory that a secondhand but fuel-efficient conventional car is greener and less wasteful overall than a newly made hybrid or electric (not to mention a whole lot cheaper), and because we needed something big enough to hold our three greyhounds (which it does, barely, with two humans on board, too). The Scion was built in Japan out of about thirty thousand globally
sourced components from throughout Asia and Europe, with one U.S. manufacturer contributing: the tires are from Ohio-based Goodyear, which has factories in Asia as well as the U.S. The assembled car was shipped from Japan to the Port of Long Beach in California, then trucked to a dealership in Southern California (other cars arriving by ship move by train to more distant dealers). The cumulative travels of the raw materials and parts of my car totaled at least 500,000 miles before its first test drive. The gas in its tank is a petroleum cocktail that adds another 100,000 miles to the calculation, as the California fuel mix consists of crude oil from fourteen foreign countries and four states.
⁵
Most of this oil arrives by tanker ships at West Coast ports, then moves thousands of miles around the state and country to tank farms, refineries, fuel depots, and distribution centers via pipelines, railroads, canals, and semitrucks before finally appearing at my neighborhood gas station.

Thousands of man-hours and billions of dollars in technology and infrastructure—along with the efforts of countless unsung heroes who pack, lift, load, drive, and track it all—combined to bring that cup of coffee to my lips (and my wife's nightstand; I'm the morning person in our household).

That cup of coffee is a modern miracle, magical and mundane at the same time, though we hardly if ever notice the immense door-to-door machine ticking away, making it happen with product after product, millions of them, each requiring the same level of effort and movement, day after day.

Elon Musk finds the average twenty-seven-mile commute on the 405 soul-killing, and it's hard to disagree. Yet our true daily commutes are so much more than that. Our true daily commutes, beginning first thing in the morning with the travels of my cup of coffee—and followed by my socks and orange juice and dog food and dish soap—are more on the order of 3 million miles.

We live like no other civilization in history, embedding ever greater amounts of miles within our goods and lives as a means of making everyday products and services seemingly
more
efficient and affordable. In the past, distance meant the opposite: added cost, added risk, added uncertainty. It's as if we are defying gravity.

T
he logistics involved in just one day of global goods movement dwarfs the Normandy invasion and the Apollo moon missions combined. The grand ballet in which we move ourselves and our stuff from door to door is equivalent to building the Great Pyramid, the Hoover Dam, and the Empire State Building all in a day. Every day. It is almost a misnomer to call this a transportation “system.” Moving door to door requires a complex system built of many systems, separate and co-dependent, yet in competition with one another for resources and customers—an orchestra of sometimes harmonizing, sometimes clashing wheels, rails, roads, wings, pipelines, and sea lanes.

And yet the same conductors of this magical door-to-door symphony also leave us with grinding commutes: Los Angelenos spent an average of eighty hours a year stuck in traffic in 2014, while New Yorkers bore a “mere” seventy-four hours of traffic-jam penance.
⁶
They gift us with more than 35,500 annual traffic fatalities—one death every fifteen minutes.
⁷
And we are the proud owners of roads we can no longer afford to maintain, saddling the country with an impossible $3.6 trillion backlog in repairs and improvements to aging roads and bridges
⁸
—a deficit that grows every year, because Congress has refused to raise the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal fuel tax.
⁹
It's been frozen in place since 1993 without even adjustments for inflation (which means that 18.4 cents is now worth only 11.2 cents). Drivers now pay
barely half the cost of maintaining the highway system though gas taxes, with the rest subsidized. Meanwhile, more than 61,000 of our bridges are officially designated “structurally deficient,” a third of which are deemed “fracture critical.”
¹⁰
There is no money to fix most of them.

How can a country that deploys insanely capable robot rovers to Mars and puts unerring GPS chips in our pockets leave us with two-ton rolling metal boxes to transport one person to work each day—boxes that kill ninety-seven of us every day and injure another eight every
minute
? Cars are the American family's largest expense after dwellings, our least efficient use of energy, the number one cause of death for Americans under thirty-nine, and our least productive investment by far. The typical car sits idle twenty-two hours a day, for which privilege Americans, on average, pay $1,049 a month in fuel, ownership, and operating expenses.
¹¹

Miraculous and maddening—these are the two poles of our transportation system, inside which Americans spend an unimaginable 175 billion minutes a year, at an equally unimaginable annual cost in money and time of $5 trillion.
¹²
An estimated $124 billion of that cost consists of lost productivity due to traffic jams, projected to rise 50 percent by the year 2030.
¹³

These two faces of transit are often viewed and treated as two separate, even competing worlds—the frequently frustrating, in-your-face reality of how we move ourselves, and the largely hidden world of goods movement with its gated marine terminals, secure distribution centers, and mile-long trains with unfamiliar foreign names on the container cars: Maersk and COSCO and YTL. The same Los Angeles–area communities that embraced a billion-dollar bill to add a lane to Interstate 405 have successfully fought off for fifty years the completion of another north-south freeway that would connect the port to inland
California with its vast web of warehouses, distribution centers, and shipping terminals. Residents oppose the building of the last five miles of this freeway, Interstate 710, because it is seen as benefiting freight, not people, as if the local Walmart stocked itself. The stream of big rigs flowing from the port instead have to take roundabout and inefficient routes on other freeways, wasting fuel and time—and adding to commuter traffic jams as well, where drivers curse the ponderous big trucks they have inflicted on themselves.

Perceptions aside, there are no separate transportation systems, just one, sharing the same crumbling, underfunded infrastructure, the same limitations of cost, energy, and environment. They are two limbs on a single tree, mutually dependent, both grappling with potential disruption from old problems and new technologies. The idea that goods and people can be considered separately from one another when it comes to building roads or enlarging ports or creating supply chains is one of our primary transportation obstacles and myths.

There are many other common myths that simultaneously drive and cripple our door-to-door machine: bigger, heavier cars are not safer. They make our roads
more
fatal. Mass transit isn't the most subsidized mobility option, as most Americans believe. Your car is. Except for highly trained professionals and the occasional savant, there are no good drivers—just bad and less bad ones. The very term “accident” is a lie we tell ourselves, as almost all crashes result from purposeful negligence, recklessness, or law breaking.

And the biggest myth of all, one that distorts how we plan and spend, is the one exposed by Carmageddon: adding more lanes does not, in the end, fix traffic.

Not only did Carmageddon do the opposite, improving congestion (at least temporarily) with the
closure
of lanes, but the
completion of the five-year project did not achieve the desired outcome of less congestion, either.

One year after the additional lane on the 405 opened, commuters on that ten-mile stretch of freeway spent an average of one minute
longer
stuck in traffic than they did before the new lane was added.
¹⁴
Call it the
Field of Dreams
syndrome: if you build it, the cars will come. Traffic, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and the lure of the extra lane brought in more cars than ever. The 405 remains the commuter's bane, worse than ever—more than a billion spent, with nothing to show for it.

Carmageddon marked a tipping point nonetheless, part of a larger convergence of trends and ideas that are transforming the way we move door to door. For the first time in a century, the strategy of designing our built landscape around cars and their free flow is being challenged. One in ten homes is car free now.
¹⁵
The Millennial generation is shunning licenses and car-dependent suburbs in increasing numbers. Americans are driving less per capita. They're shopping outside the home less, too. Ride-sharing apps, crowdsourced transit guides, bike commuters, and Wi-Fi–enabled buses are taking on the likes of General Motors, Yellow Cab, Hertz, and the bureaucracies that protect them. Every car added to the ridesharing fleets of Uber and Lyft and the others leads to thirty-two fewer car sales
¹⁶
—a seismic force in the auto industry. And in an unmistakable sign of the times, car-friendly Los Angeles did the unthinkable, hiring a new head for the city's transportation department by stealing her from in-state rival San Francisco, where she had become famous (or infamous) for her dedication to pleasing pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders as much as drivers.

Then there's the wild card in the mix: the driverless cars (and trucks) now being developed and tested on highways and city streets. They appear to be just a few years away from consumers,
with the potential to change everything—from drastically reducing highway deaths, to transforming car ownership as we know it now, to ending the need to devote a third of our urban space to parking. Think about that a minute: the most interesting thing about autonomous vehicles is not what they do while taking you somewhere. It's what they do
after
they drop you off. Carmakers are racing to bring these wheeled robots to market even as the technology terrifies them as an extinction threat to their century-old business model—and to the millions of jobs that business model creates. Every shiny new evolution in our door-to-door world has exacted a price along with its promise: the invention of the steamship that ushered in the first wave of globalization; the discovery that gasoline could be more than its first incarnation as a remedy for head lice; the containerization of cargo that enabled the second wave of globalization—our age of outsourcing and offshoring. The game changer of removing human drivers from the transportation equation could easily be the most disruptive evolution of all, fraught with as many challenges and fears as opportunities and boons.