Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (26 page)

And it is here, where our stuff meets the road, that the most visible and constant overload kicks in.

I
n the cavernous basement of the Olympic Building, a line of boxy, dark brown delivery trucks rolls out to the early morning streets of downtown Los Angeles—a chorus of tires squeaking across smooth concrete. Five floors up in the president's office, Noel Massie allows himself a brief moment of contentment as he feels the building vibrate around him and then fall still with the last of his fleet's departures. This is the reassuring physical signal that his part of the never-ceasing, get-it-now economy has successfully turned one more notch on its endless loop—a cycle repeated this day at 2,000 similar United Parcel Service delivery hubs around the country and the world.

In the next eight hours this cycle will land 15.3 million packages on America's doorsteps,
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where people will find what they need, what they want, and what they bought without ever leaving their homes or businesses. But Massie has no time to linger over the everyday marvel of delivering so much so fast, as he must push on to the next cycle: his people are already planning for the incoming packages that will soon be barreling back to the Olympic Building and all its many sister locations, ready for unloading, sorting, redirecting, and delivery—the stuff of tomorrow's doorsteps.

It is fair to say that Noel Massie's days are dominated by two things: trucks and minutes. He has too many of one, too little of the other, with 2 million shipments under his purview moving one way or the other hanging in the balance—every day. He is the door-to-door economy incarnate, although his official title is district president of United Parcel Service.

There used to be fifty UPS presidents in the nation, but a wracking consolidation in 2012 knocked the number down to a more efficient, less costly twenty. But these men and women had been the princes of America's leading door-to-door company. Imagine the White House eliminating 60 percent of its cabinet along with all its executive staffs: that was the level of transformation that shuddered through the company. But when the dust settled, Massie ended up with one of the biggest and busiest slices of the UPS pie in the world: the southern half of the state of California, from the Mexican border to the City of Fresno (plus Hawaii, southern Nevada and western Arizona). His headquarters are in the nondescript gray and brick building at the somewhat shabby corner of Olympic Boulevard and Sunbury Avenue in downtown LA, only one of many operating centers in Massie's purview, which includes an array of far-flung distribution centers, truck terminals, an international airport, and 20,000 employees. Now he is overlord to an immensely desirable customer base of Amazon-ordering, iPhone-buying, one-day-delivery shop-a-holics, along with many of the businesses that serve and sell to them. But his delivery nirvana is balanced against a landscape of traffic and sprawl seemingly designed to make his job of daily drop-off and pickup all but impossible.

“I am in the business of minutes,” Massie says. “It's all about the minutes. If the plane leaves at seven, you either get there or somebody doesn't get what they need in time. Brain scans for someone's surgery. Tissue samples for the lab. You can't mess that up. Minutes matter in this business.”

Before packages, before sorting and bagging and loading, before driving and delivering, there is the clock, a UPS president's true boss, Massie says. “Minutes make us or break us” is one of his mantras.

For all that, the man has an impish quality about him. He is focused but funny, balding but unlined at fifty-seven years, quick with a smile but also—he can't really help himself—a reflexive clock watcher, always checking the time. Massie's schedule begins each weekday with his 5:30 a.m. rise from bed at his family home in Yorba Linda, an Orange County suburb thirty-five miles south of his office. It ends with his departure from the Olympic Building twelve hours or so later. “I don't have a specific quitting time; I work till I'm done.”

What does that work look like? On an average day, Massie's Southern California employees will make 1.2 to 1.3 million deliveries in Southern California, more than 8 percent of the UPS worldwide total, generating more than 8 percent of the company's total annual revenue of $58.2 billion.
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He does this with about 5 percent of the UPS workforce (which is 435,000 worldwide, moving 6 percent of the nation's GDP).

A secret weapon makes this feat possible: a staff of 150 industrial engineers. This is the title UPS gives to the men and women whose job is to design the optimum route and order of stops that will get delivery drivers where they need to be when they need to be there while using as few minutes and miles as possible. The brown trucks are the symbol and the familiar face of UPS as far as the outside world is concerned, but the heart of the operation, the force that keeps the whole complex clockwork moving, is the army of engineers mapping and calculating morning and night. With more than 10,000 drivers in Southern California averaging 120 stops a day, in the most traffic-ridden, constantly changing urban sprawl in the U.S., Massie's troops face one of the toughest choreographing challenges in the door-to-door universe.

The first tool in the UPS engineers' arsenal is the built-in “telematics” data devices every truck and driver carries. This hardware relays each truck's performance information in real time to the engineers, who compare it to previous days on the same routes. With this data they can identify streets, turns, and intersections that are causing delays because of shifting traffic patterns, detours, or construction—even small delays drivers may not notice. The data lets them build more efficient routes for the next day.

Then there is the company's famous no-left-turn policy, put in place in 2004, when the engineers realized that drivers waiting to turn left with engines idling were burning significant amounts of minutes and fuel. By assigning routes that avoid lefts for 90 percent of a delivery van's turns, the company found it shaved 98 million minutes a year of idling time from its routes, which not only sped deliveries but also saved the company about 1.3 million gallons of fuel a year. Avoiding the left is also a proven safety measure, as traffic data shows that left turns are involved in ten times as many crashes and three times as many pedestrian deaths as right turns.

The industrial engineers' newest and most sophisticated tool is a computer program called ORION (a catchy acronym for a decidedly uncatchy 1,000 pages of computer algorithm known as On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation). No human can consider all the possible routes with brainpower alone—the variations for one truck with 120 stops in different locations with varying drop-off and pickup times yield a number too high to have a name (trillions just won't cut it). Rounded off, it is best expressed in scientific notation: 6.7 x 10
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; if you wrote this value down in normal notation, the number of possible routes would look like this: 6,689,502,913,449,135,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
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Common sense and driver experience have been the routing tools used for most of UPS's century of existence, but a method of mapping with certainty the most efficient and effective route has been elusive. It's a classic mathematical conundrum known as the Traveling Salesman Problem. Now ORION can crunch that big number down to a short list of optimal routes that saves both minutes and miles, mapping out turns and tweaks that are too numerous for any human driver or engineer to compare unaided. The humans take that list, modify the routes that are supremely efficient on paper but make no sense in the real world, and the trucks are ready to roll. Massie says the results have been impressive, in part because the small savings each ORION route finds can add up fast when you've got nearly 100,000 delivery vehicles plying the world. Shaving just one mile off every truck's route can save the company $50 million in annual fuel costs; UPS expects up to $400 million in savings when ORION goes company-wide in 2017.

As complex as all this sounds, Massie's job would be much easier if that was all there was to it: just a simple problem of engineering. That's what he was studying thirty-four years earlier, a semester away from his degree and already interning at IBM. Then UPS plucked him out of his part-time job loading trucks and offered the industrious young man out of East Oakland a full-time gig with room for advancement. He never really stopped approaching his work as an engineer would, and the true daily task is much more than delivery and pickup. Those are just the bookends in the process, the publicly visible beginning and end points of a much bigger race. The company may be delivering 18 million parcels a day, but only 2.7 million are overnight air shipments.
This means that, at any one time, the company is juggling 100 million or so packages (more during holidays) while they are in transit.

Routing all that requires a twenty-four-hour operation. In Massie's district—as in any UPS district—the cycle begins around 1:00 a.m., when the fifty-three-foot big rigs—“feeder trucks,” in UPS-speak—move between cities and regions laden with ground shipments. Because UPS uses a hub and spokes system for both air and ground deliveries, few trucks haul parcels beyond a five-hundred-mile radius. A feeder truck bound for Salt Lake City from Los Angeles might stop at Las Vegas and meet a truck coming in from Utah. The two drivers will unhook and swap their trailers, then turn around and go home. Longer-distance shipments out of Southern California—about 80 percent of packages and documents—arrive and leave by rail, with the faster (and pricier) air shipments headed to the company's regional air hub at Ontario, California, the unlikely desert location that UPS has made into one of the dozen busiest cargo airports in the country.

The feeder trucks, trains, and planes meet up, crisscross the country, and bring the packages toward their destinations, ultimately landing at sorting centers and delivery facilities like Massie's Olympic Building. They are, literally, feeding the beast.

At 4:00 a.m., the night loading of the delivery trucks begins, preparation for the final stage in the package shipping process. Parcels that arrived earlier by air or feeder truck or were picked up by the delivery vans themselves are sorted, scanned, and incorporated into ORION's route-planning calculations, which are continually updated as new pickups arrive. While the sorted packages are being put on delivery trucks, the routes are finalized and downloaded into the drivers' tablets (UPS had deployed this tech years before the iPad came along). Then the iconic brown box trucks depart to complete their deliveries—the endpoint the
customer at the doorstep actually sees. Finally the same drivers complete their pickups—three quarters of a million package pickups in Massie's Southern California district—and return to the network of operating centers, usually between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. There, incoming packages are sorted by destination and shipping method and sent out by feeder truck, rail, and air to the proper UPS hub, and the process begins anew, sometimes with bare minutes to spare before a plane, train, or truck departure.

UPS has a panoply of businesses: it's a massive ocean shipper, although it owns not a single ship. It runs a separate freight-hauling trucking line, acting as a common carrier for businesses nationwide. It runs a drayage division that transfers goods out of the nation's ports, it's a logistics and freight forwarder service, it's an e-commerce consultant (online shopping being their main growth area as shippers), and it is classified as an airline, with enough planes to put it in the world's top ten carriers. UPS even operates its own bank. But the main business, and the main source of revenue, remain what they have been for more than a hundred years: UPS solves the last-mile problem with its doorstop deliveries.

When it comes to transporting humans, there is no similar solution that comes right to our doors. Trains, buses, subways, and trolleys can move many people at once (as UPS vans can move many packages at once), but these more efficient human conveyances have not been able to beat the car—automotive inefficiency, cost, and death toll be damned. The car alternatives cannot affordably take a person door to door. You have to get to the station or the bus stop or the platform. That metaphorical last mile remains a barrier of time, distance, and inconvenience between transit and the traveler.

But in the goods transportation space, that problem has been solved so long and so well that it's taken for granted—to the point that customers don't just expect two-day service anymore,
or next-day service. Now they want same-day service. And when companies like Amazon promise such service, companies like UPS—along with its principal U.S. competitors, Federal Express, the post office, and the many smaller start-ups that have appeared to help fill that niche—have to make it happen. UPS was the first company to solve the door-to-door riddle, and they are now the biggest.

UPS traces its roots back to a small messenger company founded in 1907 in the basement of a Seattle saloon by a teenage errand boy named Jim Casey. After a few years of running errands, Casey and several partners switched the model to delivering packages, primarily business to business. The idea slowly spread from coast to coast. Later it expanded to include business-to-consumer deliveries, first by shipping items ordered from such outlets as the Sears Catalog and its rivals—the analog precursors of e-commerce—and now for dot-com retailers, which represent almost half of all UPS deliveries as of 2015.

This shift has been a difficult transition for UPS and its competitors, because instead of hauling ten or twenty or a hundred boxes from a manufacturer to a store—the mainstay of the delivery business for most of the twentieth century—the consumer space for the most part consists of one package to one house. That means many more stops and many more miles for essentially the same earnings. Solving the last-mile problem one house at a time is an expensive proposition.