Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (16 page)

In Sacramento, meanwhile, the state's department of motor vehicles struggled to craft the nation's first rules of the road for a point in the future when driverless cars leave the current test phase and are fully loosed on the world for any and all who want them. The DMV's stated primary goal is to keep humans safe from the robots, although all evidence to date suggests that it might be better to make that the other way around. The regulators were stymied by the question of how to test the safety of the technology without stopping its development in its tracks. A key question was whether to follow the longstanding practice of letting the industry do the safety testing and report the findings, or to have independent safety testing and analysis by outside experts. Industry trust has been severely damaged in the wake of revelations that General Motors failed to disclose fatal ignition system defects for a decade,
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and by the discovery in late 2015 that Volkswagen had installed illegal software cheats on its popular diesel cars to make them appear to be far less polluting than they really are.
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In Seattle, another robot story unfolded as the leaders of retail giant Amazon.com suffered a setback in pursuing their vision of mini-drones replacing human delivery trucks and drivers. The Amazonians were upset to learn that new federal flight rules would require commercial drone operators to remain within direct sight of their little flying minions. This precaution fits just fine with drone real estate inspections, crop dusting, and aerial filming on movie sets, and it's what current rules require of hobbyists who fly remote control planes. But it makes little sense for delivering packages, as it would turn today's one-person, one-truck operation into tomorrow's one-person, one-truck plus drone operation. Instead of saving money by cutting humans from the field, it would add to costs. If Amazon wants to pilot their drones all long-distance, Air Force bunker–style, it seems
the company will need a swarm of lobbyists before it can unleash the drones.
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In Houston, commuters were wishing they could launch their own drone attack on state highway engineers as lines of cars crawled down a stretch of Interstate 10 that had been expanded from eight lanes to a colossal twenty-six—the $2.8 billion Katy Freeway project that was supposed to solve traffic forever. Six years after the expansion, a thirty-mile rush hour drive from downtown that once took under forty-seven minutes now takes more than seventy minutes on the widest highway in the nation if not the world. This is the build-it-and-they-will-come effect writ large, known to traffic engineers as the phenomenon of “latent demand or induced demand.” Before construction began, light rail lines were suggested in place of some of the added car lanes in order to tame future congestion with a mass transit option, but the proposal was rejected as a waste of time and money. In California, transportation officials were chortling. Texas has made Carmageddon look good by comparison.

Residents of San Bernardino, California, however, woke to the sound of the suburban dream breaking. Their city began holding a series of town hall meetings to discuss possible outcomes of their city's bankruptcy—none of them pretty. Located in the desert east of LA, San Bernardino exists in its modern form as the epitome of car-dependent suburban sprawl, its entire economy built on cheap land, subsidized highways, and subsidized free parking, and a landscape of immense warehouses that take advantage of the cheap land. These are the policies that created America's car-centric landscapes since the 1950s. When San Bernardino's turn came at the start of the millennium, new residents flocked to vast tracts of new homes with big yards and pools, priced half or less than similar houses in LA. The price also included dependence on hour-long (or longer) commutes, but as
long as real estate prices and demand kept spiraling up, the trade-off seemed to make sense. The inability to sustain this version of the American dream became apparent when the housing bubble burst, jobs dried up with the recession, and whole San Bernardino subdivisions went belly-up as the foreclosure rate hit 3.5 times the national average. Now the bankrupt city's financial ruin is second only to Detroit's. It has been said that Henry Ford's true invention was not the modern car but the modern traffic jam, although in San Bernardino it seems what he really invented was modern sprawl.

Elsewhere on February 13, the traditional annual announcement of sales for the most popular car models was made today, revealing just how much Americans still love their traditional internal combustion cars—and how fickle their embrace of more efficient alternatives has been. Nationally, the two top sellers were pickup trucks. In California, America's biggest vehicle market, where greener cars have traditionally done well, the Honda Accord conventionally powered sedan outsold the fuel-saving hybrid, the Toyota Prius, for the first time in years. This shift reflected a national trend away from hybrids and alternative-fuel vehicles, which Americans were dumping due to the 2014 plunge in gas prices. Sales of the most popular of hybrids, the Prius, declined 12 percent. Meanwhile, SUVs were making a comeback, too, although slimmer ones than in years past were leading the resurgence.
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A subplot in the story of temporarily declining gas prices unfolded today as well, in the form of two immense freight trains barreling cross-country toward depots in the Virginias. Given priority over trains bearing crops, cows, and passengers, each of these trains carried millions of gallons of crude oil from the boomtowns of North Dakota and points north. This oil came from the Bakken shale deposits recovered through the extreme form of drilling known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
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The
rapid rise of thousands of such oil trains as a major new piece of the American energy delivery system accounts for America's unexpected rise to the world's leading petroleum producer in 2014, and it's those rail shipments that glutted the market and helped drive gasoline prices down. About 75 percent of this new oil from the Bakken moves by train.
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But these two trains rumbling toward the East Coast, like an alarming number before them, would never reach their destinations. One would crash and burn on Saturday the fourteenth in an isolated area near the Canadian border; the other would make it as far as Mount Carbon, West Virginia, before nineteen fuel-laden cars would tumble from the tracks, burst into flames, and send fireballs rising into snow-filled skies. Hundreds of families had to be evacuated. Communities lost water and power. A new federal rule mandating safer tanker cars, long delayed and disputed by the rail industry, was still in the works at the time of the crashes. It will take years more to implement amid debate over the wisdom of running so much volatile fuel through cities and towns.
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The wisdom of operating massive oil refineries in the midst of neighborhoods, schools, and shopping centers would also become a source of scrutiny and concern because of a seemingly innocuous task under way today: the shutdown and maintenance of a massive oil-cracking tower. This normally routine task had set in motion a chain of events that would end in an explosion five days later. The blast, caused by an overpressurized antipollution system known as the fluid catalytic converter, took place at the 750-acre ExxonMobil Torrance Refinery, capable of producing up to 10 percent of California's gasoline supply. This steaming, flaring industrial outpost is surrounded by the affluent coastal communities of Los Angeles County collectively referred to as the South Bay, and the explosion rained down ash and debris on its neighborhoods. Four workers were injured, and nearby schools
were forced to keep students huddled indoors. This was the fifth explosion at the facility since November 1987.
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The refinery is part of an aging national oil transportation system that includes oil trains and pipelines. In ExxonMobil's case, pipes connect the refinery to the port complex less than ten miles away (receiving crude, delivering marine fuel, though both had slowed because of port congestion). Other pipelines deliver aviation fuel to Los Angeles International Airport, push gasoline to distribution terminals in the region, and receive the world's thickest, densest crude from oil fields 160 miles north in the San Joaquin Valley. The explosion halted production at this massive petroleum nexus and contributed to a dollar-a-gallon spike in prices at the pump within weeks. A state investigation later brushed aside the oil giant's assurances about safety and found nineteen separate violations at the plant, six of them deemed “willful.” The state determined that ExxonMobil had failed to fix the fluid catalytic converter that exploded despite knowing for nine years that it was faulty. The defect made the explosive buildup of pressure undetectable until it was too late. Investigators reported that the explosion could have been catastrophic, with a risk that a cloud of highly toxic, potentially fatal hydrofluoric acid could have been released into populated areas. The $560,000 fine levied against the oil giant was nothing compared to the consequences to the region's consumers and businesses, who saw the results at the pump. While the rest of the country was paying $2.43 a gallon in the fall of 2015, Southern Californians were paying an average of $3.45. As the investigations continued, Exxon abruptly announced it had sold the troubled refinery to New Jersey–based PBF Energy for $537.5 million.

Meanwhile, near Los Angeles International Airport—long despised for being accessible only by car while being surrounded by jammed highways and streets—excavation of a new subway
line kicked into high gear today. When it's completed by 2020, after a quarter century of failed plans and pleas to make airport travel easier, Angelenos will finally be able to do what other major airport passengers have long taken for granted: they will be able to take the train to the plane. Well, almost. The new eight-mile line will fall just under a mile short of the terminals, requiring some sort of people mover to close the last leg of the trip—a barrier of money and inconvenience that could easily slow the project and deter riders until that last mile is built.

The people mover is promised as part of a separate $5 billion modernization and makeover for the city-owned Los Angeles International Airport, which could be completed as soon as 2024, if only to sweeten the city's bid to host the Olympics that same year. LAX, one of the busiest and most reviled airports in the world, was originally built in the sixties and expanded in the eighties (for the last Olympics held in LA), which means it was designed to accommodate comfortably about half the 70 million travelers a year who now elbow their way to the gates. The double-decked horseshoe-shaped access road that provides the only way into the nine separate airline terminals is a nightmarish, paralyzed, roaring mess of cars, buses, shuttle vans, and fumes virtually every hour of the day and night. It is by far the most hated mile drivers face anywhere in Los Angeles. The modernization plan calls for killing the horseshoe and directing incoming traffic to remote parking lots served by the vital, but still mythical, people mover.

In other air travel moves this day, the Federal Aviation Administration conducted a final round of debugging and shake-out tests for its $40 billion NextGen air-traffic control system. The long-awaited, long-delayed, and over-budget system is supposed to increase safety and efficiency for air travelers weary of delays and canceled flights. NextGen, which would pass its tests and be up and running by March 2015, would replace the aged
computer system known simply as “Host,” which had run plane traffic in U.S. airspace with floppy-disk-era technology for forty years. Stage one of the rollout had NextGen taking over at FAA's twenty main air control centers that run high-altitude plane traffic nationwide. The next two stages—upgrading 1970s-era analog radio systems and replacing airport ground radar centers with satellite-based GPS—is supposed to happen by 2020. The old ground radars still in use are safe but horrendously inefficient and slow to update, which means air traffic controllers have to keep aircraft separated by large buffer zones to avoid collisions. With the new satellite systems, the 7,000 passenger planes zipping over America at any given time should be able to fly much closer together without compromising safety, which will speed up takeoffs and landings. And that—in theory—will not only make the skies more friendly to fly again, but is expected to save the economy an estimated $22 billion a year by reducing fuel waste, chronic congestion, and flight delays.

Finally, on February 13, U.S. transportation secretary Anthony Foxx kicked off a national bus “infrastructure tour” today, with the long-shot goal of garnering support for his $478 billion federal transportation plan, which focuses on what he calls the “beyond traffic” approach. By that he means to seize on the lessons of Carmageddon and emphasize
mobility
over car culture: less sprawl and highway expansion, in favor of policies promoting “close-in” growth connected to existing cityscapes and transit options. “The old approaches aren't working,” the affable former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, proclaimed. To illustrate his point, his bus crawled through a South Carolina interstate highway confluence so confusing and in such disrepair that local commuters have dubbed it “Malfunction Junction.” There are hundreds of such “spaghetti interchanges” around the nation, Foxx complained, but no money for the fix.

The goal of Foxx's tour was to pitch his idea to replace the federal tax on gasoline. That tax is supposed to fully fund the national Highway Trust Fund, but it falls hopelessly short. For strictly political reasons, the 18.4-cent federal gas tax, which doesn't begin to pay for the system's needs, is not likely to be raised anytime soon, given that it's been frozen since 1993. So Foxx and the Obama administration proposed to replace it with a new 14 percent tax on foreign corporate earnings, which could only be spent on transportation and that would generate double the current gas tax revenues. On paper, this would be a tax reduction for American businesses: the current tax rate for foreign profits is 35 percent. However, companies generally avoid paying any of that by parking their cash offshore. Foxx's proposal would close that loophole and fully fund transportation in America in the process. A number of major corporations might support this. Apple Inc., for example, had by 2015 nearly $200 billion in cash accumulated offshore from foreign sales that it would like to use domestically for a variety of projects, including buying back a large block of its own stock. At a 35 percent tax rate, repatriation of that money is a nonstarter; under 15 percent, and the company just might bring the cash home. Apple's CEO testified before a Senate committee in 2013 that he was looking for just such a deal so long as it was “fair to all taxpayers.”