In 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,1 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.2 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 10143; if you wrote this value down in normal notation, the number of possible routes would look like this: 6,689,502,913,449,135,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.3
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.
But that costly yet inevitable shift, surprisingly, is not what keeps Noel Massie up at night. And his desire to explain that, as well as his company’s role in the door-to-door universe, is what brought me to his office in the old Olympic Building.
Massie guards his time as carefully as ORION crafts a delivery route: the business of minutes thing carries over to his personal calendar in a big way. His personal schedule is so packed, we had to book our meeting sixty days out. “Don’t feel bad,” Massie tells me. “Mayors and city councilmen are handled the same, if they get a meeting at all.” He grins at the thought of saying no to the mayor of LA. “Seriously, I’d rather meet with students.”
Each day of the week on Massie’s calendar is fully purposed: Monday is dedicated to sales—revenue, customer acquisition, marketing, volume, what he calls the “Where are we?” meetings. Tuesday is reserved for operations: performance, costs, efficiency, error rates, the “Are we hitting our goals?” meetings. Wednesday is set aside for customer visits—he has 144,000 regulars who ship with him daily, and he’ll pitch sought-after customers directly to entice them into the fold. Thursday is for “externals”—the day Massie devotes to local organizations, charities, schools, community engagement. He’s active with the Urban League, the United Way, and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, where he became chamber president in 2014—the first African-American to hold that post in the organization’s 125-year history. On Fridays he wraps up the week with intensive one-on-one meetings with division heads, directors, and anyone that doesn’t fit in the other more categorized days. Once a month he holds his staff meeting outside the offices, assembling instead at a different local nonprofit around town. In return, he offers his host UPS’s help in logistics, shipping, online presence—whatever a group needs. After one of these “outside-the-box” staff meetings, Massie was intrigued by his host for the day, a group called Trash for Teaching, which rescues and repurposes overruns, seconds, discontinued items, and other useful “waste” from businesses and manufacturers for use in science, technology, and art classes at schools throughout the region. He returned with three hundred UPS volunteers to reorganize and redesign the offices, warehouse, and distribution system at this LA nonprofit.
It’s when he is out in the community, talking to nonprofits, to schoolkids, to meetings at the chamber of commerce, that Massie expresses his great fear for the future of his business and the nation’s economy. This is what keeps him up at night: he is worried that the day is approaching when his trucks won’t be able to complete that last mile on time. Or at all. And it will not be due to any failing on the company’s part.
“My business is mostly about the truck. Because the last mile in the life of every product in America happens in a truck. The glasses on your face, the tie you’re wearing, the phone in your pocket. It may get here in a container. It may spend time on a train. It may fly in a plane. But the last mile is always in a truck. Unless we go back to horses and buggies, or someone invents teleporters, trucks are going to be what we use for a very long time. At the end of the day, trucks are the most important vehicles on our highways.”
He is leaning forward at his desk at this point, pausing for effect before revealing his main concern: “What do trucks need? They need roads. They need infrastructure. They need to be able to go where they need to go. And we are already far past crisis when it comes to infrastructure investment in this country.”
He ticks off the problems that keep him up at night: failing bridges, potholed streets, congested ports, endless traffic jams. Truckers on overnight hauls can’t even find safe parking half the time. As vital as trucks are to the economy and our way of life, Massie says, they are treated like interlopers on America’s roads. He’d like to see dedicated highway freight lanes—high-speed lanes just for trucks, isolated from passenger traffic—and greater public transportation investment to take cars off the road, making room for those freight lanes and more trucks. This is not an idle wish: demand for goods delivery is going to double in the next twenty years, he says, and if our infrastructure doesn’t keep pace, what will happen then?
“It’s simple, really. Trucks are like the bloodstream in the human body. They carry all the nutrients a body needs in order to be healthy. If your blood stops flowing, you would die. If trucks stop moving, the economy would die. That’s not hyperbole. That’s not embellishment. That’s just math. And yet—and this is what really gets me—the general public hates trucks. People have become truck haters. They want them off the road. They oppose improvements that would keep the economy moving and growing. It’s already hurting our business. People don’t know what they’re asking for. They would paralyze America if they had their way.”
Sometimes it seems the paralysis Massie fears has already arrived. All it takes to see it is a drive on what is arguably America’s most important highway.
California’s Interstate 710 is unique: it was conceived as the first highway built primarily for trucks. What else could a freeway that terminated at a commercial seaport be for? As early as the 1920s, city planners and harbor investors began financing a road to connect the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to what was then the world’s largest master-planned industrial district, a field of factories purposely aggregated south of downtown LA, populated by General Motors, Chrysler, Studebaker, and a dozen other iconic brands of the time. The idea was to create a direct north–south highway conduit for American-made products to be shipped out of the ports to the rest of the world.
It took decades more for the conduit to be built, reimagined, extended, and transformed from a locally sponsored road to a state highway and finally incorporated into the Interstate Highway System in 1983. This triumph came just in time for the containerization revolution that forever transformed the movement of goods and the direction they would flow. The road that was intended to foster a flood of exports from the U.S. instead enabled an era of unbridled outsourcing and imports flowing to the U.S., although it still served its original purpose of connecting the ports to the rest of the country.
This it did brilliantly. Too brilliantly. The 710 became the single most vital highway for consumer goods in the country. And then the age-old problem of induced demand and eventual overload wreaked its inevitable havoc. By 2015 the 710 at rush hour had become a morass. Bumper-to-bumper big rigs fill the lanes for miles, belching diesel fumes and slowing traffic—cars and trucks alike—to a crawl. The smog is a horror for the neighborhoods that the freeway traverses. The health impacts—childhood asthma, respiratory illnesses—are measurable. Delivery times are delayed by the congestion, costing shippers millions in fuel and lost business. The constant pounding of all that heavy truck traffic, far beyond the design parameters of the roadbed, have broken the highway surface, requiring massive and costly repairs. The 1950s on-ramps, mere stubs by modern standards, fill up at peak hours, with traffic backed up onto surface streets, clogging them, too.
The most important freeway in America has turned to quicksand.
Two persistent problems now affect this primary link to the nation’s busiest port. There is an obvious need to increase the freeway’s capacity. And there is a separate but related need to actually finish the freeway, which for decades has fallen just over four miles short of where it’s supposed to go—a failure that has consequences for traffic flow throughout the region.
Both problems will require billions of dollars to fix. Both are controversial. And both have aroused the wrath of environmentalists, legitimately aggrieved communities that border this freeway, and what Massie would call the “truck haters.”
The capacity problem is less controversial. Only the nature of the fix is in question. At peak periods, the 43,000 daily truck trips to and from the port already overload the freeway. It ranks among the worst in the nation for congestion delays and also has one of the highest rates of big-rig accidents in the state. By 2035, there will be an estimated 80,000 daily truck trips crammed onto the same 710—nearly doubling the number of big rigs vying for space on the six-lane highway, a recipe for paralysis, pollution, and door-to-door disaster.
Then there’s the gap. The freeway runs for twenty-three miles from the port, then just stops in the middle of Pasadena. The last leg of the freeway was supposed to run through the city and the adjacent (and very affluent) town of South Pasadena, dumping the truck traffic on the Foothill Freeway, an east–west corridor that connects directly to the Inland Empire’s rail yards, distribution centers, and goods-movement nexus. What’s good for goods, however, may not be good for local communities. Many neighborhoods carved up by the original 710 construction lacked the political and financial clout to oppose the project or to demand concessions, but the Pasadena area is another story. Community groups there have blocked all efforts to close the gap for decades.
But the approaching tidal wave of demand and the impending paralysis that Noel Massie and other business leaders fear have forced the state’s hand. In 2015, two sets of proposals to fix the 710 were put forward.
State and local highway authorities have floated a couple alternatives to expand the capacity of the existing freeway: a $4 billion plan to add two new lanes, one in each direction, along with bike and pedestrian walkways that play on the nearby Los Angeles River, which the freeway parallels. Or there is a more costly $8 billion proposal that would be Massie’s dream come true: four new elevated lanes for freight carriers only. The trucks would be separated from the cars and, theoretically, everyone would be happy.
One additional proposal put forward by the ports and local groups tired of choking on pollution would add electric power lines overhead so that zero-emission electric trucks could traverse the 710 corridor, then switch to battery power when leaving the freeway. And all of the plans will require much cleaner trucks than the current generation of diesel big rigs, as state and federal law demands sharp improvements in Southern California’s notoriously poor air quality. Trucks in California will have to slash emissions by 90 percent by 2030. Startups, universities, retailers, and established truck manufacturers are joining forces in a race to develop next-gen big-rig truck technology that can match the power of diesel engines without the deadly emissions and the obscene gulping of fuel (the trucking industry powered through $147 billion in fuel in 2014). Twenty-two companies are working together on one such promising superlight experimental big rig called the WAVE—for Walmart Advanced Vehicle Experience—that uses a hybrid system consisting of a powerful battery electric motor coupled with a micro-turbine engine that together can cut emissions and fuel use by up to 241 percent. But a commercially viable version of the WAVE (that is, one that’s cheap enough) may be a decade or more off, if it’s even achievable at all.
Absent such a paradigm-shifting technological advance actually hitting the road soon and in large numbers, community opposition to any proposal that would allow more trucks or increase the freeway’s footprint has already formed. Whatever alternative is selected, some sort of legal battle, and the associated years of delays, are inevitable. And that doesn’t even begin to address the question of where the money will come from to build any iteration of the project.
As for the 4.5-mile gap, the state has put forward multiple proposals to complete the 710, including closing the gap with a $5 billion double-decker tunnel to accommodate freight traffic, or focusing solely on passengers with new light rail or rapid bus routes that would close the gap for human passengers but not goods movement. Of all the proposals, only the tunnels would relieve traffic congestion throughout the region by providing another direct route between the port and the warehouse zone of the Inland Empire. But community opposition to any closure of the gap is vociferous. Why, members of the affected communities ask, should they have to live with a massive road improvement that will primarily benefit businesses outside their community? Why should they pay the price and the businesses reap the profits?
And there it stands for now: the most important goods corridor in America versus the legitimate concerns of communities who fear the shoring up of vital infrastructure.
This is very likely the last big freeway project in California. There is no room for any new freeways, and no money if there were room. As for expansion of existing roads, there is no need greater than the 710’s, a freeway whose fate affects not just local communities but the entire nation and the goods-movement system itself. So far, no solution on the table is able to satisfy the concerns of opponents while also relieving the overload already present, much less looming in the future. It’s a stalemate.
“I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing in America that people feel entitled to the cement and the roads without having to pay for them, without having to understand how the system works, or that our economy depends on it continuing to work,” says Noel Massie. “It’s clear we need a healthy ecosystem that allows the movement of goods, of food, of everything in the future. It’s not clear that we’re going to get it.”
And yet, that infrastructure (a word, by the way, that writers try to avoid because of its power to make eyes glaze over) that no one wants to pay for is still working miracles.
One such miracle is standing on an open space adjacent to a taxiway at Ontario International Airport, an air shipping container just in from Hong Kong awaiting the next flight out to the East Coast. The container is watched by an armed guard standing by, and is under constant live video surveillance as well. The container is piled high with small cardboard boxes on which no brand marking is visible, although everyone knows what’s in them. The contents are worth more than $3 million, which explains the unusual security measures.
This is how the latest model of the Apple iPhone gets from the factory to your home. The black market is just too lucrative to take chances. When phone-making rival Samsung fetches its new phones by truck, it sometimes goes even further, sending decoys out to fool and possibly catch organized phone thieves.
Welcome to UPS’s regional air hub in Ontario, California, the crown jewel in Noel Massie’s empire—and one of the big potential beneficiaries of an expanded 710 freeway. In many ways, it serves as the air version of the Los Angeles and Long Beach port complex, a vital link in the movement of goods between America and Asia.
One of six regional UPS air hubs in the continental U.S., Ontario is strategically located in the goods-movement capital of the West, the freeway-rail-air desert nexus of wide-open space and cheap real estate known as the Inland Empire. Here the warehouses seem to stretch to the horizon, a vista that boosters call a vital source of jobs and critics decry as a wasteland of pollution and poor pay. Most major retailers and manufacturers, from Walmart to Skechers, maintain enormous distribution facilities here, with freight coming to them from the ports, then moving out again through UPS and a host of rival carriers. As a result, Ontario has also become UPS’s largest ground operation as well as an air hub.
This is where the smartphones bound for America from Asia first come. This is where planeloads of perishable fresh flowers land one after another in time for Mother’s Day. This is where the ancient Terra Cotta Warriors museum exhibit first landed from China. Ontario is a place of constant motion and constant cargo both exotic and mundane—an installation where, in one form or another, everything a delivery company can do is on display.
UPS has 539 cargo jets flying nearly 2,000 trips to 728 airports worldwide every twenty-four hours. (Federal Express has an even bigger air presence, but UPS’s ground operations dwarf its chief competitor, making it the larger carrier overall: $11 billion more in annual revenues than FedEx’s $47.1 billion.) About twenty UPS flights arrive and twenty depart every day at Ontario, with the first touching down at 4:00 a.m. with overnight deliveries to all over Southern California. Because time is so short, the containers on this plane are presorted so they can be loaded directly onto feeder trucks without cracking them open—one truck for San Diego, another for downtown LA, another for the South Bay, or wherever the parcels are bound. The entire plane load—thirty-eight containers; more if it’s a 747 jumbo jet—are out of the airport and on the freeway in less than an hour. “In LA traffic, you’re sunk if you’re not on the freeway by 5:00 a.m.,” says Don Chubbuck, hub planner and industrial engineer at Ontario. “That’s why we do the sort on the other end.” The overnights will get to the local UPS operating facilities by 7:00 a.m., 7:30 at the latest, for a quick load onto brown box trucks in time for delivery that day.
Air shipping containers look nothing like the big steel cans used on oceangoing cargo ships. Air cargo cans are made of lightweight plastic, portions of which are transparent, and are shaped into semicircular cylinders with flat bottoms—mirroring the shape of a stripped-down jetliner’s interior. UPS jets are basically passenger airliners stripped of seats, carpeting, overhead bins, and every other accouterment other than seats for the pilots and a very tiny airplane galley for snacks and drinks. The echoing cargo area has rollers embedded in the floor so the containers can be pushed quickly into place without need of heavy equipment. When unloading, crew members roll them to the cargo hatch, which is much wider than the doors on passenger jets. Then a motorized contraption called a K Loader, which looks like a gigantic scissors jack used to change a flat tire, reaches up to the two-story-high hatch and grabs two containers at once. An entire aircraft with 200,000 pounds of cargo can be unloaded in minutes this way.
Except for the direct loading of the presorted 4:00 a.m. overnights, the air containers are trucked into a 750,000-square-foot hub center adjacent to the runways, where they are lined up next to banks of massive conveyor belts. At the time of this writing, the containers were unloaded by hand onto the belts, but an automated facility to do this robotically was being set up. The belts carry the packages past overhead scanners that read their delivery bar codes and route each one to the proper trucks, which are backed up flush to the opposite side of the conveyor belts. Rivers of packages are sorted to their destinations this way at high speed. International goods are first diverted to a special U.S. Customs post that’s manned in the late-night and early-morning hours before they, too, hit the loading conveyors.
Multiple flights of lightweight, high-value products from electronics to jewelry fly in daily from Asia, usually via Anchorage for refueling. The incoming planeloads are unloaded at Ontario if the contents are bound for one of the seventeen Western states. The rest continue on to UPS’s main “Worldport” air hub at Louisville, Kentucky, where the sorting facility is big enough to house eighty football fields and can ship more than 400,000 packages an hour.
On the other side of the Ontario hub, incoming ground-shipped packages from homes, businesses, and the Inland Empire’s hundreds of product distribution centers—amazon.com, target.com, nordstrom.com, macys.com; the list goes on—are disgorged into a football-field-sized sorting area. Teams of sorters pull goods from fifty enormous aluminum chutes, each tagged for a different part of the country. Once sorted, those packages are placed on feeder trucks bound for other Western states, or shorter-haul trucks to one of the local railheads for transcontinental rail shipment.
A parallel operation—the “small sort”—gathers documents and small packages bound for the same destinations into large bags that are scanned as single parcels and sent on their way (bagging them makes for more efficient handling and less damage). A third sort—“the irregulars”—uses trains of motorized dollies moving through the hub to deliver to the proper outbound trucks such large or oddly shaped items as tires, machine parts, heavy crates, works of art, and refrigerated containers carrying perishable prescription drugs or medical samples. And yet another area—a long line of truck bays facing away from the runways—is filled with brown box vans being loaded overnight with package deliveries to local homes and businesses.
The single most common product type shipped by UPS is—perhaps unsurprisingly in this age of e-commerce—the consumer retail product category. The next most common in order are car parts, medical supplies and drugs, professional services (mostly legal and real estate documents), and industrial supplies and products. UPS workers at Ontario see the economy in real time: which companies are shipping more stuff, which products are moving slowly or exploding in popularity. Massie keeps careful track of such data, but guards this proprietary information with a level of secrecy appropriate to the confessional—an apt metaphor, because his customers, from small businesses to Fortune 500 titans, give him critical information they share with no one else, and that their competitors would love to possess.
In such a ceaseless hive of goods movement, there are occasional errors—“miss-sorts,” UPS calls them. This is what causes a package to be lost or late or sent to the wrong destination. It is something Chubbuck and his industrial engineer colleagues at Ontario have been working on since he arrived there in 2007, when the error rate at the hub was one in 250. That works out to a 99.6 percent accuracy rate, which sounds good until you apply it to millions of packages. Then it’s 4,000 misdirected packages per million, and Chubbuck calls that “completely unacceptable.” In 2015 he said some of the sorting belts in the Ontario sort achieved one in 20,000 miss-sorts, a vast improvement—a 99.95 percent accuracy rate (50 misdirects per million packages). But Chubbuck says that is still too many errors, and he and his colleagues are working to bring the rates down even further. “It is fine for shipping candy bars—maybe. But how about for medical? When somebody needs X-rays for surgery, one out of 20,000 just isn’t good enough.” And so the work on errors continues.
Noel Massie believes that automation will ultimately solve, or at least manage, such problems as sorting errors, just as it has helped with route optimization. Robotic aircraft—jetliner drones, in other words—will be coming soon, he says. If you ask the pilots, they’ll tell you the robot planes are already here in all but name. UPS’s cargo planes can automatically approach the airport, lower the landing gear, land the plane, taxi off the runway, and then park and shut down the engines—all without the pilots touching a single control. In fact, when weather and visibility are poor, it’s the only way to land the plane. Driverless trucks will be next, Massie says; if not the delivery vans, then certainly the feeder trucks plying the freeways. Safety, efficiency, lower cost, and the ability of trucks to drive nonstop without the need for sleep make the rise of the robots inevitable. But none of that is going to help him sleep soundly at night, he says.
“Technology’s not the problem. Traffic’s not the problem. The problem is infrastructure. That’s what’s going to stop us.”
Many people will shrug it off as just traffic jams and inconvenience, he says, but the view from Massie’s office on the fifth floor of the Olympic Building reveals more. If overload causes the delivery drivers of UPS to take a mere ten minutes longer on the average route, the company’s costs go up $125 million. That means cost goes up for everybody who sells and buys stuff. And then multiply that a thousandfold, or ten thousand–fold, for every other business that has to move things door to door, which is virtually every business. Massie can feel the pressure of those mounting minutes gathering, an inexorable glacier of time. “We are already overloaded. And the fact is that the world is going to go from 7 billion people to 9 billion people by 2050. That’s a million more people a week, every week for thirty-five years. If we don’t have infrastructure keeping pace with that, what’s our world going to look like?”
Massie sighs. He is on his soapbox a bit, but trucks and goods movement are his fascination and his livelihood. He is a problem solver in his own shop, and it frustrates him to see the larger problems that he cannot control hurting his business and his country. He finishes his thought: “And just to be clear, we are not keeping pace.”
Then he glances at the clock, and the minutes passing, ready to move on to the next cycle.