Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (19 page)

It would take more than a decade's work to show substantial improvements in the port waters, to nurture kelp beds transplanted shoot by shoot and rock by rock (the underwater plants cling to rocks, not sand), and let nature work its slow magic. Slowly, the harbor waters once again became infused with life-giving oxygen and the ecosystem that had always belonged there revived. Life returned to the harbor, not least because the commercial tuna industry collapsed. Overfishing, the lure of cheap labor in American Samoa and Asia, and the ebb and flow of the new global economy led the big tuna brands to flee one by one, with all gone by the
end of the eighties except for Chicken of the Sea, which hung on until 2001, then closed what was the last tuna cannery in the continental U.S. Thailand-based Thai Union Frozen Products now owns Chicken of the Sea while British private equity firm Lion Capital LLP owns the Bumble Bee tuna brand—yet more once-proud domestic products outsourced, with many more thousands of miles added to America's cupboards in the process. On average, each American household consumes nineteen cans of tuna a year.
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Huge export container terminals eventually rose where the canneries once stood, but smaller-scale commercial fishing enterprises flourished anew around the harbor as water quality improved and overfishing ended. The work by Knatz and her colleagues exceeded all expectations.

But its success notwithstanding, her environmental work offered Knatz little opportunity for career advancement. The port brass perceived her department less as an asset and more as a hindrance to the port's main mission: shipping, commerce, and growth. It was her job to question projects and their impact on the environment, and to suggest ways of reducing the harm. The projects ports like to do most—dredging, filling, and creating more capacity for exhaust-spewing ships, cranes, and trucks—
always
have a negative impact. And reducing those negatives usually imposes additional cost. Never mind that Knatz's work insulated the port from even more costly lawsuits and delays.

She would have happily moved into a different department at the port with more responsibility, earnings potential, and advancement possibilities, but Knatz soon learned there were few opportunities then for women in the core lines of business at the port, where the workforce was overwhelmingly male. She felt the prevailing attitude back then was that she was already fortunate to be the only female in a “nontraditional” job at the port, meaning she didn't work a clerical, secretarial, personnel, or public relations
position. When she applied for other jobs—in marketing, for example—she recalls being turned down because, a manager explained, she couldn't play golf with “the guys.” Or because the wives of the men on the staff wouldn't like it if she went with them on foreign trade missions. Some of the cultures they had to visit abroad to drum up business for the port would think she was brought along only “for sport,” one supervisor suggested, which confused Knatz until she realized he was referring to sex. In another time or with another employee, this could have been the stuff of very costly lawsuits, but Knatz recalls never considering such a move. “I'm more of a nose-to-the-grindstone type of person, and figure if I let the work speak for itself, I'll prevail.”

In 1981, Knatz accepted an offer to run the environmental department at the rival Port of Long Beach. Although there is of necessity some collegiality and partnership on broad issues and projects that affect two gigantic ports that happened to share a single harbor, they have for the most part been locked in fierce competition for customers ever since the late 1920s. That's when the discovery of copious oil reserves beneath the previously ritzy Long Beach neighborhood of Signal Hill financed the creation of a second commercial port in San Pedro Bay, luring both Ford and Procter & Gamble to build massive factories nearby. When Knatz came over to Long Beach six decades later, the Long Beach port was considering a range of large building and improvement projects to accommodate the shift to container ships and the approaching tsunami of Asian import goods. Knatz's challenge was to deal with the environmental impact of those projects, a seemingly impossible task. The 3,000-acre port eventually would be jammed with ten mammoth piers, eighty deep water berths, dozens of miles of on-dock railroad track, and twenty-two cargo terminals—six of them sprawling container yards, six for bulk commodities (salt, gypsum, cement, petroleum coke), five for petroleum
and other bulk liquids, and five break bulk terminals for such cargo as cars, lumber, steel, aluminum, and iron ore. There's no way to accommodate all that without environmental harm, and no room to spare to set aside sufficient wildlife preserves, parks, or buffer zones that might, as the law demands, “mitigate” the damage to the environment.

The difficulty of striking an agreeable balance between profit, planet, human health, and technical feasibility is one reason why so many big, landscape-altering projects—particularly huge, emission-spewing transportation projects—get held up for years and so often end up in court. State and federal laws unambiguously require mitigation, but the question of how much is always contentious, with project boosters vying to do the least possible, and communities that might suffer from an expanded port, freight yard, or freeway pushing for the most possible. With the port caught in the middle, Knatz hit on what was then a daring plan, although it's now accepted practice: she wanted to do environmental mitigation
outside
the port for work
inside
the port. She began using port funds to restore nearby Pacific coast wetlands, build public parks and beach facilities for communities near the port, and clean up landscapes and habitats near but not in the port that had far higher ecological value than the waters of a bustling commercial harbor.

The regulatory bureaucracy initially bristled at the unorthodox approach, but local communities loved it and began lining up to pitch their own projects as candidates. The tide turned completely in favor of this “outside-the-docks” approach when both Long Beach and Los Angeles ports agreed to provide a combined $60 million for the restoration of the critical Bolsa Chica wetlands twenty miles south of the harbor. This important breeding ground for migratory birds and other marine species had been badly damaged by oil drilling, roadbuilding, and
encroaching development. Today it's an ecological preserve and permanent conservancy—a slice of nature initially undone by the rapidly expanding transportation system, only to be brought back from near destruction by even more transportation expansion at the ports.

In 1988, Knatz left her job running the Long Beach port's environmental department to become director of planning instead, which finally put her where she wanted to be: in the thick of the ports' core business. There she would push through a long list of expansion projects, most notably a $2.4 billion mega-project known as the Alameda Corridor. This twenty-mile cargo expressway for trains links the twin ports to the transcontinental rail lines that pass through downtown Los Angeles. By the time it was done, the Alameda Corridor would rank among the biggest and most successful public works projects ever undertaken in the U.S., a public-private partnership that, unlike most mega-projects in recent years, finished on time and on budget.
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It is the envy of other American cities that lack such a connector between port and transcontinental rail system. Chief among them is New York City, which is number one in the U.S. when it comes to dependence on trucks for goods movement, and so suffers from unusually intense diesel truck emissions. Of the more than 400 million tons of freight that move through New York annually, 90 percent moves by truck.
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Nationally, trucks move about 70 percent of freight.
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The Alameda Corridor project solved that problem on the West Coast. It came about because the economic boon of rapid growth in container traffic and imports spawned a Newtonian reaction, equal and opposite, bringing a swarm of trucks that boosted congestion and smog on the major streets and highways connecting the port to the rest of the world. Traffic engineers and local planners, who predicted worse ahead as the port continued
to grow, believed creating an efficient method of moving more cargo by train instead of by truck offered a solution.

The key word here was “efficient,” for trains were nothing new at the port. There had been a rail connection between downtown and the port in place for more than a century—indeed, for almost as long as Los Angeles had anything more than mudflats and a few nailed boards to call a port. Knatz, so fascinated by the history of the port that she would write numerous articles and two books on some of the more unusual aspects of its past, dug into this end of the story gleefully. A visionary entrepreneur and self-made millionaire by the name of Phineas Banning built the first railroad between the port and the warehouse districts of downtown Los Angeles all the way back in 1869. Banning also masterminded the first dredging and wharf construction in San Pedro Bay. Previously, ships had to anchor off the coast and shuttle goods ashore on small boats. At the time, Banning's railroad traversed open coastal country, sparsely settled and otherwise difficult to cross. His Los Angeles & San Pedro Railroad represented a huge transportation advance from wagons banging over rutted roads and range. The new transportation technology began the transformation of a muddy backwater port into a thriving West Coast economic engine.

A few years later, the Southern Pacific Railroad bullied itself into ownership of Banning's achievement, as its monopolist tycoon leader, Collis P. Huntington, essentially extorted its sale in exchange for connecting the city to the transcontinental railroad line he was building. Huntington also demanded the city pay his railroad the then princely sum of $600,000 ($11.5 million in 2014 dollars) as well as gift Southern Pacific with sixty acres of choice downtown LA real estate. Otherwise, he vowed the Southern Pacific, originating in San Francisco and moving south down the coast before chugging eastward, would bypass
Los Angeles entirely. And this pre-Hollywood Los Angeles of the 1870s, a mere village of 5,000 or so, could simply wither and die without a rail connection. The big rail lines were the nineteenth-century lifeblood of commerce, travel, and migration, as the ruthless Huntington knew all too well. Capitulation by the city and Banning was inevitable, but that was just the start of Huntington's machinations. Next he launched a campaign to strangle the very port in San Pedro harbor he was supposed to be serving by imposing horrifically high freight rates on the railroad Banning built. Under the new rate schedule, it often cost more to move goods the twenty miles between downtown and the port than it cost to ship the same goods to Hong Kong. Huntington wanted to force customers to take their import and export business to his own pet port project in the beach town of Santa Monica thirty miles up the coast, where he had had constructed what was then the longest wharf in the world. That's where he wanted the leading port of the West Coast to take root: on his land, his wharf, his town. His goal was control in Southern California of nothing less than the two dominant transportation modes of the day, marine and rail, thereby owning Los Angeles's future all by himself.

Huntington's bold bid to create what would have become the greatest trade and transport monopoly in U.S. history failed after a years-long battle known as the “Free Port Fight,” but only after his foes in Congress just barely thwarted his clout and money. They succeeded in designating San Pedro Bay over Santa Monica as the site for an all-important breakwater construction project by the Army Corps of Engineers, who were charged with creating Southern California's first protected calm-water harbor. Construction of that breakwater was such a big deal at the time that a special wire was set up to connect the White House directly to the San Pedro waterfront so that President McKinley could push an electric button on April 26, 1899, signaling the construction
crews to commence work. Boulders were carried from inland quarries by steam locomotives pulling long lines of flat cars piled high with the rock needed to build the massive breakwater, a dike to calm the tides and protect docked vessels from storms and high seas. Like so many other vital pieces of the transportation system of systems, the design and location of the future hub of commerce on the West Coast—and the very existence of Los Angeles as a major city—rested not on some grand municipal study, engineering analysis, or the project's objective merit. The biggest port on the continent owes its existence to the vagaries inherent in a few powerful individuals' struggle for wealth, dominance, and the big win, along with a president's giddy desire to throw the switch on what was at that moment the nation's largest public works project. Had the question been limited to simply choosing the most naturally ideal place for a major Southern California port, neither location in Los Angeles would have been chosen. If geographic merit alone were the only consideration, McKinley's magical button would have connected to San Diego and that city, rather than Los Angeles, would have grown up to be the future hub of West Coast cargo, commerce, and population growth. Whether it's the selection of a port location, or a twenty-six-lane freeway expansion in Texas that makes traffic worse, or LA's decision after World War II to dismantle the most extensive light rail and streetcar system in the country (then, a half century later, spend billions and decades trying to undo that folly), America's transportation future owes as much to greed, gamesmanship, and hubris as sensible design. Perhaps more.

When the dust settled in the war of the would-be ports, Los Angeles stood connected to the Eastern U.S. and the rest of the world by rail and sea, and the village of 5,000 of the 1870s grew to a city of 100,000 by 1900. Just ten years later it would be home to 300,000. The rural outskirts between downtown LA and the
port began to evolve into the dense checkerboard of communities, industry, immense rail yards, and the grid of streets and roads that it is today. But during this urbanization process, what had been a breakthrough railroad route to the port through the hinterland became an antiquated roadblock and a continual frustration for both shippers and drivers. Motorists found themselves stacked up at railroad crossings twenty cars deep while waiting for excruciatingly long and slow freight trains to pass. By the 1980s, Banning's old railroad right of way consisted of four low-speed branch lines owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad with more than two hundred street-level crossings. That's an average of ten intersections of car and train traffic every mile. The route had become such a jigsaw puzzle that freight trains rarely averaged speeds of more than 10 miles an hour, 15 on a very good day. On bad days, the twenty-mile trip from port to downtown took four hours. A bicycle rider, even a jogger, could beat that time. These trains ran up to 6,000 feet in length—a mile and an eighth—which meant drivers trapped at those crossings typically waited twenty to thirty minutes each time a train passed. Those trains ran continuously throughout the day. This was a mess, a system pieced together across more than a century, becoming increasingly dysfunctional as the city grew up around it. The rail line to the port was not designed for modern traffic, much less the high risk of death and destruction whenever human drivers are asked to sit patiently for twenty minutes with nothing more than flashing lights barring them from crossing the tracks.
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