Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (15 page)

And here a strange dichotomy arises between man and machine that warrants attention.

Regulatory agencies, the legal system, advocacy groups, and the media leap into action when there is a design flaw in the
machines
we drive. On February 13, 2015, a day of normal human error causing normal traffic carnage, General Motors announced the recall of 81,000 passenger cars with a flaw in the power steering—a flaw that caused one crash and no death or injury. The previous year, General Motors recalled 2.2 million cars to repair faulty ignition systems that unexpectedly shut off the cars, leading to 124 deaths.
⁴³
And in May 2015 the largest recall in history would be announced, involving 34 million cars in the U.S. from multiple carmakers (57 million worldwide), all of them equipped with flawed air bags made by the Takata Corporation of Japan. Fixing them will cost the company at least $2 billion for repairs and potentially billions more in litigation costs. The defective bags spray metal fragments during an accident, much like shrapnel from a grenade. Six deaths and more than one hundred injuries have been linked to this problem.

Recalls often require months, even years, of investigative and regulatory pressure in order to hold carmakers accountable. This is a considerable effort that, however vital, involves numbers of deaths and injuries so small they barely register statistically.
When it comes to the overall death and injury rate from driving, fault rests overwhelmingly with the choices of drivers, not the mechanical defects in cars and components.

But when the defect is in the human behind the wheel rather than the machine itself, the story takes a very different turn. There has never been a recall aimed at fixing cars so drunks cannot start them, or so drivers cannot exceed the speed limit, or to prevent cell phones from being used while cars are in motion. Cars currently are designed to allow, even enable, all three of these deadly behaviors, although affordable technology exists that could make all three impossible. Their omission can be viewed as design defects, too—defects in the human-machine-road interface, which kills far more than any bad air bags and faulty ignition switches. Undertaking a “recall” to correct any one of these human design defects could prevent 30 deaths and 2,200 serious injuries
every day—
more death and injury prevention than all the car recalls in history. Now that would be a true Vision Zero.

Instead, Americans have thrown up their hands and written off daily death and injury on a massive scale as the inevitable cost of mobility in the modern world. The predictable results of epidemic-scale fatal driving behavior and design are not viewed as defects but as “accidents,” a choice of language that suggests being stuck down by someone carelessly misdirecting two tons of speeding metal is somehow equivalent to being struck down by a bolt of lightning. But they are not the same. One is largely preventable, while the other, not so much.

There is another difference: the odds of lightning killing a U.S. citizen in the course of his or her lifetime is 1 out of 136,011. The odds of that same person dying in a car crash: 1 out of 112.

T
he ports are a mess—and I can't get work,” the longshoreman turned Lyft driver complains. He has picked me up outside the conference on green ports of the future, but my driver is more concerned with the dysfunctional ports of the present. He pats the wheel of his black sedan. “So this is paying the bills for now, Lyft and Uber. A lot of the guys are doing it. Course, it's nowhere near the money we make moving cans.”

Moving cans. That's what the longshoremen call their work loading and unloading shipping containers from cargo vessels. They move those cans back and forth to vast dockside yards—the terminals—to await loading on trucks or trains. Then other crews move fresh cargo back onto the ships. Stacks of empty containers accumulate in a kind of no-man's-land at the port, with many of them shipping back to Asia empty. Ships arrive filled with imports, but far fewer goods travel back in the other direction.

The container ships usually make a quick turnaround, because time literally is money in this business, a billion dollars of it in goods moving every day through the conjoined port complex of Los Angeles and Long Beach—the quickest and best shipping
option in the U.S., according to its promotors. But in February 2015 the wait can be weeks instead of two or three days, so bad is the congestion and overload at the ports—delays in delivery that are grinding the door-to-door machinery into low gear nationwide.

Today twenty-seven cargo ships are languishing in backup anchorages, a flotilla of vessels bigger than half the navies in the world. Some of them have been waiting as long as ten days to get in. The congestion has multiple causes: too few trucks, bottlenecked roads, bridges in need of modernization, and, most of all, bigger ships with bigger loads arriving at the same old docks. But the most acute and controversial cause of congestion at the moment, and the one drawing the most attention and public ire on February 13, is a nine-month labor dispute.

A major sticking point in settling a new contract between the longshoremen's union and the shipping companies is the obscure but pivotal system of arbitration, which affects all aspects of work on the docks, from safety rules to wage disagreements to the protocol for taking restroom breaks. That's all it takes to cripple a hub of global commerce, and Tom,
¹
a second-generation longshoreman from a family of dockworkers, is among the thousands out of work as a result. It's not a strike—not even an official job action, he explains as we drive toward home—but rather a policy of following every work rule to the letter, as if every driver on the road suddenly stuck to the speed limit. The shipping lines call it a work stoppage and they're furious, but the union claims rules are rules. The union, the shipping lines, and the terminal operators are all contributing to the impasse: there is blame aplenty for every side of this struggle that has hobbled all twenty-seven West Coast commercial ports. Together those ports handle almost 13 percent of America's gross domestic product and create 9 million jobs. But it's Tom and his fellow workers with little seniority, the
women and men in their twenties, who are out of those high-paying dock jobs while the titans battle. So he drives for the rideshare companies, picking up fares instead of containers for about a fourth of his normal wages or less at the port.

“We want this to settle, but we're also not going to back down,” Tom says. “This situation is not good for anyone.”

This is an understatement. When ports that handle so much of the national economy slow down, their far-flung connections and importance in our daily lives become poignantly clear as the suffering spreads far. The impact radiates out from the port, affecting everything from farming to gas prices to car sales to the celebration of Valentine's Day. (“Don't even ask,” Tom says, eyes rolling in half jest. “There's a chocolate heart shortage. It's a disaster.”) Little is spared by the overload, not even our national staple, pizza. Just ask Domino's.

W
hile my wife and I have an anniversary dinner at our favorite restaurant on Friday the thirteenth, our teenaged son stays home and orders up a pizza. He uses Domino's online pizza tracking app, which lets him design his own pie, informs him when the pizza is popped in the oven, and tells him who at our local Domino's franchise is doing the cooking and when his dinner is on the way to the house.

All of which disguises the fact that Domino's real business isn't pizza: it's logistics and transportation. The individually owned franchises—the actual restaurants, 11,600 of them worldwide—are in the pizza business. Domino's the corporation only owns about 300 of them, mostly to test new products and decor. The main profit engine for the Domino's company, however, lies in making, obtaining, and transporting supplies to its franchises. The dough, so to speak, is in the dough (and the sauce
and the cheese and the pepperoni), about 63 percent of the $2 billion in revenues.
²

The heart of the business in the continental U.S. lies in the sixteen Domino's supply chain centers spread around the country. For Southern California and the pizza my son scarfed up this day, the supply center is in an industrial park in the city of Ontario, where an affable pizza lover by the name of Don Fontana, vice president of the company's west region supply chain services, bemoans the shortage of pineapple slices caused by supply problems at the port.

“We've had to scramble to find alternative sources,” he grumbles. The Hawaiian-style ham and pineapple pizza is one of the more popular combos in the region, Fontana says. (Regions vary: green olives are popular in New England, and Texans like beef on their pizzas.)

Pineapple is one of the few internationally sourced ingredients Domino's uses—Thailand and the Philippines are main sources—and so the port congestion has an impact here. It also affects other Domino's suppliers: the vast factory farms in California's Great Central Valley that grow tomatoes specifically for sauce, and the industrial sauce makers that set up next to them, peg their operations on the ports, too, because they are the world's leading exporters of the stuff. Their operations—and revenues—slow down because they can't move product out fast enough.

Fontana enjoys showing off this operation, the third busiest in the Domino's empire, serving 347 franchises. While in the warehouse area he wears a hard hat, which looks big on him. He's pretty thin for a guy who says he eats pizza several times a week, although he is a purist most of the time, preferring cheese and crushed red peppers as his only toppings. He waves enthusiastically at the twin two-story-tall tanks of flour, each containing enough to make a quarter million pizzas. They stand well away
from the food preparation area, equipped with “fluidizers” that use air pressure to make the powdery flour flow through pipes and conduits like a liquid. They're filled four times a week by big-rig tanker trucks that pull up alongside the warehouse and pump flour through intake pipes on the outside of the building. No sacks of flour in this operation; it would take far too long and far too many sacks.

Everything at the Ontario plant revolves around goods movement, Fontana says, even the “supply chain center” designation, which sounds a bit cold and clinical for his taste. Each center used to be called “the commissary,” a term derived from the company founder's Marine Corps background. “Everybody still calls it that,” Fontana confides, although the official name changed about twenty years ago. “When we call and use the term ‘supply chain center,' no one knows what we're talking about until we mention the word ‘commissary.'”

The journey of my son's pizza starts at 4:00 a.m. in Ontario when the first of fourteen big rigs arrives with the day's supplies, starting with two truckloads of mozzarella. That's 2,736 fifteen-pound bags from cheese giant Leprino Foods' branch in Lemoore, California, 233 miles north and made from milk sourced from California dairies. Another truck arrives with 936 cases of sauce from TomaTek in Firebaugh, California, in the heart of tomato-growing country 278 miles north of Ontario. The Tyson Foods delivery brings pepperoni, sausage, ham, and salami in from the Dallas area, 1,400 miles, and chicken toppings out of Arkansas, 1,600 miles. Presliced onions and bell peppers come in from Boskovich Farms, just 100 miles away in Oxnard, California, while one of the top five toppings, mushrooms, arrives from Monterey Mushrooms in Watsonville, California, 361 miles distant. Flour originates in the wheat belt 1,500 miles away, but the mill that delivers it by tank trunk daily, Ardent Mills, a
joint venture of food giants Cargill and ConAgra, is just twenty miles away in Colton. Salt is shipped in from Cargill in Wayzata, Minnesota, 1,900 miles distant, while sugar arrives from Cargill's Brawley, California, plant, just 163 miles away. Assorted deliveries of less frequently used toppings—garlic, anchovies, banana peppers, beef strips, and jalapeños—round out the offerings, along with frozen bags of preprepared pasta dishes and chicken strips and beef for sandwiches. Multiple deliveries of empty pizza boxes arrive throughout the day from Santa Fe Springs, 33 miles away, although they're made by a Georgia company 2,200 miles away, making them the most distant piece of the pizza puzzle other than pineapple. The various ingredients are parceled out to sections of the warehouse that are refrigerated, frozen, or kept at room temperature, where they await loading on outgoing trucks later that day.

The only freshly prepared pizza component is the dough, along with the fresh-baked sandwich rolls, whose enticing aroma permeates the commissary's baking area and occasionally wafts onto the warehouse floor. Everything in the Domino's supply chain center revolves around the dough-making operation cycle, which begins when the ovens start preheating at 5:00 a.m.

Domino's pizza dough has six primary ingredients that go into one of three giant mixing bowls at the plant. Each mixing bowl holds more than six hundred pounds of dough, consisting of flour, yeast, salt, sugar, water, and oil. A secret “goody bag” with a small quantity of Domino's proprietary flavors and dough conditioners is dumped in the mix, too, and giant stainless steel beaters go to work kneading the mixture under the supervision of dough master Julio Rico. When the mixing is done, the giant bowl is loaded on a clanking stainless steel lift that raises the dough about eight feet in the air and then overturns it into a cutting machine that extrudes dough cylinders like Play-
Doh, dumping them on a conveyor belt. The belt whisks the pasty-looking cylinders to a rolling machine that turns them into balls of dough ranging from baseball to softball size, depending on whether they are for small, medium, large, or extra-large pizzas. The dough balls shoot through a metal detector to make sure no twist-ties or bits of machinery contaminated the dough, then three line workers inspect, flatten, and pack the dough balls into one of the thousands of blue plastic trays that fill the facility in tall stacks.

By 1:30 p.m., the production phase of the day ends with the last dough run, whole wheat pizza dough for school lunches. The daily output: enough dough for 100,000 pizzas, plus 7,200 sandwich rolls partially baked, to be finished just prior to serving at the franchises.

At 2:00 p.m. the loading of the outgoing trucks begins. These are Domino-branded refrigerated big-rig trucks owned and maintained by Ryder and made by Volvo, with forward-looking collision avoidance systems designed to eliminate rear-enders. It's a first small step of bringing automation into the trucking side of the goods movement system. The trucks have been plugged in to the supply center's electrical system and cooling down to 36 degrees all day. Even the loading dock is refrigerated to protect the raw dough. The bulk of each trailer's interior space is taken up by the towers of stacked blue trays with their 100,000 dough balls, layered and mapped into sections based on the size of the pizza (medium and large are by far the most popular). The other ingredients—cheese, sauce, toppings, golden cornmeal to dust the pizza pans, napkins, and red peppers, in addition to cardboard pizza boxes—have to be crammed in around the all-important dough trays.

At 8:00 p.m., the first of the trucks departs for deliveries to the franchises, continuing in waves through midnight. Each
truck has its own geographic area that might have twelve to fifteen stops, ranging from close-in deliveries in the LA metropolitan area, to franchises as far as the Arizona border, the Mexican border, and the ski resort at Mammoth Mountain, the most distant stop at three hundred miles and the only overnight run. The goal is to deliver the goods while the pizzerias are closed. The drivers have keys and put everything away, so the store is stocked and ready to start cooking the moment it opens for business.

Over the years, Domino's has had to build ever more amounts of time into its logistics system as traffic and overloaded infrastructure slowed down the arduous process of assembling ingredients and bringing our pizzas door to door. Before my son had even finished his pizza, the first truck was departing Ontario, headed to the coast and our local Domino's with the supplies for the next day's orders.

F
riday the thirteenth proved to be a busy day for the transportation system of systems beyond the worlds of pizza and ports, offering glimpses of future disruption and present overload in a series of interconnected events.

In Mountain View, California, the dreamers behind the Google self-driving car project logged yet another day in their quest to navigate a million miles with nothing but algorithms behind the wheel. The search giant's modified robotic Lexus SUVs mixed it up with regular cars, bikers, and walkers on the busy streets around the Google campus without error—other than the fact that the robots were the slowest cars on the road. It seems there was a software glitch human drivers lack: Google cars refuse to treat the posted speed limit as a suggestion, and have been rear-ended as a result. “The least reliable part of a car,” Chris Urmson, head of the Google car project, likes to say, “is the driver.”