Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (25 page)

Once unloaded, each of the 22 million intermodal containers in the world can be identified by their internationally standardized reporting mark, and by embedded radio-frequency identification (RFID) transmitters. The identity of each container is supposed to be verified multiple times by the stevedore gangs so nothing gets lost in the vast and confusing topography of millions of stacked containers in yards and terminals at the port.

None of this would work if the number one design principle of the modern container ship was not ease of unloading. Fuel efficiency, power, safety, comfort, emissions—all are important concerns to the shipping lines—but if the containers can't flow off a ship with ease and speed, the vessel is worse than worthless. It becomes a money pit.

America does not build such ships: Japan and South Korea lead the world on the creation of ever larger container ships. Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering in Korea, one of the top five shipbuilders in the world, has 46,000 workers building 100 ships and oil platforms at any one time, including one of the world's largest cargo ships, the Maersk Triple E
.
(The three
E
's represent economy of scale, energy efficiency, and environmental performance.) This model of ship is 1,312 feet long and 194 feet wide, with the capacity to carry 9,000 cargo containers per trip. So far they serve only Asia and Europe, as they are much too big for even the newly expanded Panama Canal locks or any North American port. Some of the berths in Los Angeles and Long Beach could dock them, but not unload them: they lack cranes with enough reach.

These mega-ships require only fifteen crew members to sail across the world, and cost $190 million apiece. Maersk ordered twenty. Daewoo has the capacity to build twelve simultaneously.

Once a container ship makes it out of the waiting room anchorages and reaches a container terminal, the unloading becomes
another exercise in multi-ton surgery. Mammoth cranes capable of spanning the 170-foot-wide ships are positioned up and down the length of a vessel to begin the extraction of the containers. There are 140 electrically powered ship-to-shore cranes at the twin ports, a distinctive sight on the skyline, particularly when they're idle and the boom arms are pointed skyward, like soldiers firing a twenty-one-gun salute. The bright red and blue crane towers run three hundred feet high and will soon be taller. The ports are painstakingly raising them sixty feet by giving them longer legs to accommodate larger, taller container ships, at a cost of a million dollars apiece (versus $10 million for each new crane). Almost all are imported from China; America makes neither the ships nor the equipment for unloading them, and they have to be transported already assembled on specialized cargo ships.

The crane operators say their job is among the best at the port, if also one of the most stressful. It's also one of the most financially rewarding, as the most skilled crane operators can earn nearly as much as the port pilots. “It's technical, it's exciting, it's rewarding, and it's important,” a hard-hatted crane jockey shouted over the din of her machine as she stepped into the elevator that lifted her three hundred feet up to a catwalk leading to the operator's cabin. “I love it.”

The crane cabin rides on a trolley that lets it slide back and forth on the high horizontal boom that stretches over the width of a container ship. Metal cables spool up and down beneath the crane operator's feet, from which the “spreader” is suspended. The spreader takes the place of the old-school hooks that dangled from the cranes of the past. It attaches to the fittings atop the containers, with expanding metal grips that lock firmly into place and then retract after a “can” is lowered to the pier surface. The operator directs the cabin out over the ship while sitting in a moving armchair surprisingly reminiscent of Captain Kirk's command
position on the original
Star Trek
, buttons and switches beside each hand. The operator grips in each hand a joystick used to lower and raise the spreader until it's lined up properly with the container top. Wind and the ship's roll in the water add to the challenge, and the complexity of the task has so far kept humans in the loop rather than robots, although a couple of terminals are beginning to use automated cranes and vehicles to move containers after they come off the ships. Most of the time the operator is staring downward between his or her feet through a window in the cabin floor, watching intently as the spreader drops into position.

Red and amber lights give way to green when the spreader is properly gripping a container, and the operator quickly lifts the can. There's nothing slow or deliberate at this point: the move is a sprint, not a jog, even though the object being lifted could easily weigh ten tons or more. The cabin rides back, away from the ship and into position over an empty trailer chassis, where the operator lowers and drops the can. As soon as the container is settled, the crane detaches and immediately zips back for the next container while the newly laden truck leaves and the next empty chassis is driven into position.

Crane operators at the California ports can average between twenty-five and twenty-eight containers an hour—just over two a minute. The highest paid and most sought-after operators routinely handle more than thirty cans an hour and can earn $250,000 a year with a thirty-hour workweek. They move more cargo in two minutes than the old bulk cargo stevedores could unload in an hour. And yet, even with four cranes working the bigger ships at once, and all operating at peak speeds, a 6,000-container delivery takes 54 hours to unload entirely, not counting time to reload (even when many of the outgoing containers from American ports tend to be empties).

During the labor-management dispute at the ports in late 2014 and early 2015, the crane work slowed dramatically, contributing to congestion by lengthening the time it took to unload each ship. When the contract was finally settled, it took nearly three months to work through the backlog. And yet the problem of congestion remained, for the bigger ships have a longer-lasting effect on system overload than labor unrest: more containers on each ship mean more hours to unload.

W
hen the crane operator's work is done, the terminal gangs of longshoremen take over, moving the cans into temporary holding areas, where towers and pyramids of the different-colored containers amass until the proper truck or train is ready to be loaded. Marine clerks sort through the mazes of containers, some of which are difficult to find because of malfunctioning RFID devices or containers placed or logged incorrectly. The containers are moved in and out of the mountainous stacks by rubber-tired gantry cranes—smaller versions of the ship-to-shore cranes—which are mounted on inverted U-shaped frames riding on giant tractor tires instead of towers. As part of the LA–Long Beach green ports initiative, several of the terminals are replacing these traditionally diesel-powered cranes with electrical models. Most of the port terminals in the U.S. have human drivers on their gantry cranes, but driverless automation is being developed to take over this task and cut labor costs. In the twin ports of Southern California, two shipping terminals are rolling out autonomous gantry cranes, so far with mixed success.

The terminals, many of which are subsidiaries of the shipping lines, are charged with moving those containers out of the ports as quickly as possible, but once again overload has complicated the job. Just under a third of the containers depart via dockside
rail (or near dockside, after a short truck ride). The Alameda Corridor could handle twice the number of containers currently moving through it, but lack of rail capacity inside the ports represents a bottleneck limiting the number of trains moving cargo through the corridor. Plans to expand the capacity with construction of a new rail yard near the port have been stymied for years. This project, dubbed the Southern California International Gateway, faces neighborhood opposition, environmental complaints, and a lawsuit filed by the City of Long Beach against the City of Los Angeles, which gave the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway permission to build the facility. BNSF, the nation's second-largest freight railroad next to Union Pacific, was purchased by billionaire investor Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., in 2010 for $44 billion.

Given the limits on rail movement from the twin ports, the next stage in moving our stuff door to door is all about trucks. About 70 percent of the cargo moves out via drayage trucks, the short-haul semitrailers that jam the ports and surrounding roads, each one carrying a single container. These trucks are a major source of air pollution and traffic congestion in the region.

There are about 10,000 full-time and 4,000 part-time drayage drivers working out of the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports, and each day they swarm the marine terminals. It's difficult and not always rewarding work, as picking up containers at the ports is a daily exercise in patience and dockside traffic jams even on the best of days. Drayage drivers for the most part are paid by the load, not by the hour, so idle time is a loss for them. The drayage truckers are an important link in the national goods movement system, never straying far but performing the essential service of bringing the still-containerized goods to nearby rail yards and transmodal train terminals,
¹
product distribution centers, warehouses, and long-haul trucking operations. Except for a few large
companies with their own trucking fleets—Walmart, the big food and beverage companies—the next move after drayage for most of the goods that come to America through ports—and from American manufacturers as well—is handled by for-hire trucking fleets and logistics companies. These are traditionally known as the “common carriers.”

So the next stop for most goods out of the Southern California ports are close-in distribution facilities. The nearest network of these is in Carson, the little town on the south end of Los Angeles that Debbie Chavez calls home, where developers are dying to build the next new National Football League venue (commuters on the nearby, already congested 405 Freeway fervently hope they fail), and where a significant portion of the city lives and breathes and profits from its key role in the door-to-door system.

The Watson Land Company is a major force here. It sells that most valuable of quantities in a dense urban area: space. Or, rather, it leases that space on land far too pricey to sell because of its strategic location near the port, rail lines, freeways, and markets. Every port and city has such places, but Watson is a special case. Its owners are descended from the Dominguez Family, which was granted a huge swath of what is now Southern California by the king of Spain. Rancho San Pedro once stretched from where the ports are now all the way north to the edge of downtown, a vast empire of what was then undeveloped coastal vistas and rich farmland, though it has been broken up and sold over time. But the descendants still own 1,500 prime and priceless acres where a network of trucking companies and cargo receivers now reside in industrial and commercial buildings built and leased by Watson. Macy's, Maersk, International Paper, Alcoa, Mercedes, Bristol Farms, Herbal Life, Dermalogica, U.S. Customs, and a host of logistics companies few would recognize bring their cargo in and through this sprawling campus. Pilar Hoyos, an executive
at Watson and another member of the LOLs, sees her company as part of the hidden glue that holds the transportation system together, one of the layers of goods movement as essential as it is little known. She loves to visit her tenants' operations whenever she can, she says, because seeing the flow of goods, the constant change in taste and trend, is like glimpsing the inner workings of a vast and mysterious machine. “And all can be traced back to the old ranchos and the king of Spain and a family's decision to hold on to this piece of it.”

But space is only part of the puzzle. If most companies don't have their own trucking assets, how do they move the goods to their department stores, their shops, their factories? In years past, businesses would make their own arrangements, hire truckers, or haggle with railroads. Some still do. But the trend now is to farm that work out. Companies such as Frontline Freight in the nearby City of Industry work for Watson's tenants and other businesses across the nation; they are one of a new and growing breed of truckless, trackless transportation companies known as third-party logistics providers or freight forwarders. Frontline has a big warehouse and a computer bank staffed by a roomful of transportation data specialists. Each day the warehouse fills up with every sort of product imaginable, most of it from the ports: Chinese-made life vests, fitness equipment, pottery, barbecues, eight-hundred-pound aircraft parts, clothing, shoes, gourmet restaurant stoves, children's toys, Halloween costumes. “Here, look at this load,” sales manager Ben Fauver says. “Tree stumps.” A load of tree stumps had come in for use in some sort of outdoor display or movie set. “We get everything. And at the end of the day, everything's gone. We sweep the deck, and by the next morning it's full again.”

What Frontline does—like hundreds of other companies in this growing “3PL” line of business—is arrange to receive the
goods for an importer or other freight recipient (the goods can be domestic or imported, anything from anywhere is fine) and arrange to have the freight shipped to its final destination. That could be across town, the state, the country, or the world. Think of this business model as a travel agent or, perhaps closer to the mark, an HMO for shipping. Frontline uses the power of pooled customers and insider contacts to negotiate lower rates and faster shipping in exchange for a percentage of the fee. This is, increasingly, how the goods-movement system works, relying on brokers to put the pieces together—brokers not of goods but of movement.

The freight forwarders engineer a triptych for cargo—from port to drayage to carrier—with stops at close-in waypoints such as Watson. Next it's on to more distant destinations in the California desert, where hundreds of square miles have been transformed into a landscape of sprawling distribution centers (think everything from Amazon to Zappos and every company in between). Next rail, air, and long-haul truckers move the goods to the rest of the nation—on to our stores, our businesses, our hospitals and schools, and through the last mile to us. To our doors.