Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (27 page)

But that costly yet inevitable shift, surprisingly, is not what keeps Noel Massie up at night. And his desire to explain that, as well as his company's role in the door-to-door universe, is what brought me to his office in the old Olympic Building.

Massie guards his time as carefully as ORION crafts a delivery route: the business of minutes thing carries over to his personal calendar in a big way. His personal schedule is so packed, we
had to book our meeting sixty days out. “Don't feel bad,” Massie tells me. “Mayors and city councilmen are handled the same, if they get a meeting at all.” He grins at the thought of saying no to the mayor of LA. “Seriously, I'd rather meet with students.”

Each day of the week on Massie's calendar is fully purposed: Monday is dedicated to sales—revenue, customer acquisition, marketing, volume, what he calls the “Where are we?” meetings. Tuesday is reserved for operations: performance, costs, efficiency, error rates, the “Are we hitting our goals?” meetings. Wednesday is set aside for customer visits—he has 144,000 regulars who ship with him daily, and he'll pitch sought-after customers directly to entice them into the fold. Thursday is for “externals”—the day Massie devotes to local organizations, charities, schools, community engagement. He's active with the Urban League, the United Way, and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, where he became chamber president in 2014—the first African-American to hold that post in the organization's 125-year history. On Fridays he wraps up the week with intensive one-on-one meetings with division heads, directors, and anyone that doesn't fit in the other more categorized days. Once a month he holds his staff meeting outside the offices, assembling instead at a different local nonprofit around town. In return, he offers his host UPS's help in logistics, shipping, online presence—whatever a group needs. After one of these “outside-the-box” staff meetings, Massie was intrigued by his host for the day, a group called Trash for Teaching, which rescues and repurposes overruns, seconds, discontinued items, and other useful “waste” from businesses and manufacturers for use in science, technology, and art classes at schools throughout the region. He returned with three hundred UPS volunteers to reorganize and redesign the offices, warehouse, and distribution system at this LA nonprofit.

It's when he is out in the community, talking to nonprofits,
to schoolkids, to meetings at the chamber of commerce, that Massie expresses his great fear for the future of his business and the nation's economy. This is what keeps him up at night: he is worried that the day is approaching when his trucks won't be able to complete that last mile on time. Or at all. And it will not be due to any failing on the company's part.

“My business is mostly about the truck. Because the last mile in the life of every product in America happens in a truck. The glasses on your face, the tie you're wearing, the phone in your pocket. It may get here in a container. It may spend time on a train. It may fly in a plane. But the last mile is always in a truck. Unless we go back to horses and buggies, or someone invents teleporters, trucks are going to be what we use for a very long time. At the end of the day, trucks are the most important vehicles on our highways.”

He is leaning forward at his desk at this point, pausing for effect before revealing his main concern: “What do trucks need? They need roads. They need infrastructure. They need to be able to go where they need to go. And we are already far past crisis when it comes to infrastructure investment in this country.”

He ticks off the problems that keep him up at night: failing bridges, potholed streets, congested ports, endless traffic jams. Truckers on overnight hauls can't even find safe parking half the time. As vital as trucks are to the economy and our way of life, Massie says, they are treated like interlopers on America's roads. He'd like to see dedicated highway freight lanes—high-speed lanes just for trucks, isolated from passenger traffic—and greater public transportation investment to take cars off the road, making room for those freight lanes and more trucks. This is not an idle wish: demand for goods delivery is going to double in the next twenty years, he says, and if our infrastructure doesn't keep pace, what will happen then?

“It's simple, really. Trucks are like the bloodstream in the human body. They carry all the nutrients a body needs in order to be healthy. If your blood stops flowing, you would die. If trucks stop moving, the economy would die. That's not hyperbole. That's not embellishment. That's just math. And yet—and this is what really gets me—the general public hates trucks. People have become truck haters. They want them off the road. They oppose improvements that would keep the economy moving and growing. It's already hurting our business. People don't know what they're asking for. They would paralyze America if they had their way.”

S
ometimes it seems the paralysis Massie fears has already arrived. All it takes to see it is a drive on what is arguably America's most important highway.

California's Interstate 710 is unique: it was conceived as the first highway built primarily for trucks. What else could a freeway that terminated at a commercial seaport be for? As early as the 1920s, city planners and harbor investors began financing a road to connect the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to what was then the world's largest master-planned industrial district, a field of factories purposely aggregated south of downtown LA, populated by General Motors, Chrysler, Studebaker, and a dozen other iconic brands of the time. The idea was to create a direct north–south highway conduit for American-made products to be shipped out of the ports to the rest of the world.

It took decades more for the conduit to be built, reimagined, extended, and transformed from a locally sponsored road to a state highway and finally incorporated into the Interstate Highway System in 1983. This triumph came just in time for the containerization revolution that forever transformed the movement of goods and the direction they would flow. The road that was
intended to foster a flood of exports from the U.S. instead enabled an era of unbridled outsourcing and imports flowing to the U.S., although it still served its original purpose of connecting the ports to the rest of the country.

This it did brilliantly. Too brilliantly. The 710 became the single most vital highway for consumer goods in the country. And then the age-old problem of induced demand and eventual overload wreaked its inevitable havoc. By 2015 the 710 at rush hour had become a morass. Bumper-to-bumper big rigs fill the lanes for miles, belching diesel fumes and slowing traffic—cars and trucks alike—to a crawl. The smog is a horror for the neighborhoods that the freeway traverses. The health impacts—childhood asthma, respiratory illnesses—are measurable. Delivery times are delayed by the congestion, costing shippers millions in fuel and lost business. The constant pounding of all that heavy truck traffic, far beyond the design parameters of the roadbed, have broken the highway surface, requiring massive and costly repairs. The 1950s on-ramps, mere stubs by modern standards, fill up at peak hours, with traffic backed up onto surface streets, clogging them, too.

The most important freeway in America has turned to quicksand.

Two persistent problems now affect this primary link to the nation's busiest port. There is an obvious need to increase the freeway's capacity. And there is a separate but related need to actually
finish
the freeway, which for decades has fallen just over four miles short of where it's supposed to go—a failure that has consequences for traffic flow throughout the region.

Both problems will require billions of dollars to fix. Both are controversial. And both have aroused the wrath of environmentalists, legitimately aggrieved communities that border this freeway, and what Massie would call the “truck haters.”

The capacity problem is less controversial. Only the nature
of the fix is in question. At peak periods, the 43,000 daily truck trips to and from the port already overload the freeway. It ranks among the worst in the nation for congestion delays and also has one of the highest rates of big-rig accidents in the state. By 2035, there will be an estimated 80,000 daily truck trips crammed onto the same 710—nearly doubling the number of big rigs vying for space on the six-lane highway, a recipe for paralysis, pollution, and door-to-door disaster.

Then there's the gap. The freeway runs for twenty-three miles from the port, then just stops in the middle of Pasadena. The last leg of the freeway was supposed to run through the city and the adjacent (and very affluent) town of South Pasadena, dumping the truck traffic on the Foothill Freeway, an east–west corridor that connects directly to the Inland Empire's rail yards, distribution centers, and goods-movement nexus. What's good for goods, however, may not be good for local communities. Many neighborhoods carved up by the original 710 construction lacked the political and financial clout to oppose the project or to demand concessions, but the Pasadena area is another story. Community groups there have blocked all efforts to close the gap for decades.

But the approaching tidal wave of demand and the impending paralysis that Noel Massie and other business leaders fear have forced the state's hand. In 2015, two sets of proposals to fix the 710 were put forward.

State and local highway authorities have floated a couple alternatives to expand the capacity of the existing freeway: a $4 billion plan to add two new lanes, one in each direction, along with bike and pedestrian walkways that play on the nearby Los Angeles River, which the freeway parallels. Or there is a more costly $8 billion proposal that would be Massie's dream come true: four new elevated lanes for freight carriers only. The trucks would be separated from the cars and, theoretically, everyone would be happy.

One additional proposal put forward by the ports and local groups tired of choking on pollution would add electric power lines overhead so that zero-emission electric trucks could traverse the 710 corridor, then switch to battery power when leaving the freeway. And all of the plans will require much cleaner trucks than the current generation of diesel big rigs, as state and federal law demands sharp improvements in Southern California's notoriously poor air quality. Trucks in California will have to slash emissions by 90 percent by 2030. Startups, universities, retailers, and established truck manufacturers are joining forces in a race to develop next-gen big-rig truck technology that can match the power of diesel engines without the deadly emissions and the obscene gulping of fuel (the trucking industry powered through $147 billion in fuel in 2014). Twenty-two companies are working together on one such promising superlight experimental big rig called the WAVE—for Walmart Advanced Vehicle Experience—that uses a hybrid system consisting of a powerful battery electric motor coupled with a micro-turbine engine that together can cut emissions and fuel use by up to 241 percent. But a commercially viable version of the WAVE (that is, one that's cheap enough) may be a decade or more off, if it's even achievable at all.

Absent such a paradigm-shifting technological advance actually hitting the road soon and in large numbers, community opposition to any proposal that would allow more trucks or increase the freeway's footprint has already formed. Whatever alternative is selected, some sort of legal battle, and the associated years of delays, are inevitable. And that doesn't even begin to address the question of where the money will come from to build any iteration of the project.

As for the 4.5-mile gap, the state has put forward multiple proposals to complete the 710, including closing the gap with a $5 billion double-decker tunnel to accommodate freight traffic, or focusing solely on passengers with new light rail or rapid bus
routes that would close the gap for human passengers but not goods movement. Of all the proposals, only the tunnels would relieve traffic congestion throughout the region by providing another direct route between the port and the warehouse zone of the Inland Empire. But community opposition to any closure of the gap is vociferous. Why, members of the affected communities ask, should they have to live with a massive road improvement that will primarily benefit businesses outside their community? Why should they pay the price and the businesses reap the profits?

And there it stands for now: the most important goods corridor in America versus the legitimate concerns of communities who fear the shoring up of vital infrastructure.

This is very likely the last big freeway project in California. There is no room for any new freeways, and no money if there were room. As for expansion of existing roads, there is no need greater than the 710's, a freeway whose fate affects not just local communities but the entire nation and the goods-movement system itself. So far, no solution on the table is able to satisfy the concerns of opponents while also relieving the overload already present, much less looming in the future. It's a stalemate.

“I don't know if it's a cultural thing in America that people feel entitled to the cement and the roads without having to pay for them, without having to understand how the system works, or that our economy depends on it continuing to work,” says Noel Massie. “It's clear we need a healthy ecosystem that allows the movement of goods, of food, of everything in the future. It's not clear that we're going to get it.”

A
nd yet, that infrastructure (a word, by the way, that writers try to avoid because of its power to make eyes glaze over) that no one wants to pay for is still working miracles.

One such miracle is standing on an open space adjacent to a taxiway at Ontario International Airport, an air shipping container just in from Hong Kong awaiting the next flight out to the East Coast. The container is watched by an armed guard standing by, and is under constant live video surveillance as well. The container is piled high with small cardboard boxes on which no brand marking is visible, although everyone knows what's in them. The contents are worth more than $3 million, which explains the unusual security measures.