Door to Door

Edward Humes

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062372093
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Transportation Industry
• Index: Business

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Garbology explores the hidden and costly wonders of our buy-it-now, get-it-today world of transportation, revealing the surprising truths, mounting challenges, and logistical magic behind every trip we take and every click we make.

Transportation dominates our daily existence. Thousands, even millions, of miles are embedded in everything we do and touch. We live in a door-to-door universe that works so well most Americans are scarcely aware of it. The grand ballet in which we move ourselves and our stuff is equivalent to building the Great Pyramid, the Hoover Dam, and the Empire State Building all in a day. Every day. And yet, in the one highly visible part of the transportation world—the part we drive—we suffer grinding commutes, a violent death every fifteen minutes, a dire injury every twelve seconds, and crumbling infrastructure.

Now, the way we move ourselves and our stuff is on the brink of great change, as a new mobility revolution upends the car culture that, for better and worse, built modern America. This unfolding revolution will disrupt lives and global trade, transforming our commutes, our vehicles, our cities, our jobs, and every aspect of culture, commerce, and the environment. We are, quite literally, at a fork in the road, though whether it will lead us to Carmageddon or Carmaheaven has yet to be determined.

Using interviews, data and deep exploration of the hidden world of ports, traffic control centers, and the research labs defining our transportation future, acclaimed journalist Edward Humes breaks down the complex movements of humans, goods, and machines as never before, from increasingly car-less citizens to the distance UPS goes to deliver a leopard-printed phone case. Tracking one day in the life of his family in Southern California, Humes uses their commutes, traffic jams, grocery stops, and online shopping excursions as a springboard to explore the paradoxes and challenges inherent in our system. He ultimately makes clear that transportation is one of the few big things we can change—our personal choices do have a profound impact, and that fork in the road is coming up fast.

Door to Door is a fascinating detective story, investigating the worldwide cast of supporting characters and technologies that have enabled us to move from here to there—past, present, and future.

Chapter 1

MORNING ALARM

My day starts with a bong—the deep, insistent pull of Big Ben’s bell toll, waking me courtesy of my smartphone. I haven’t used my bedside alarm clock in years, yet another specialized gadget shunted aside by a jack-of-all-trades iPhone, the clock relegated to collecting dust on my nightstand and not much more.

And so my commute begins before I leave the house. Add 160,000 miles of travel to the tally of my daily journeys. That, at bare minimum, is what it takes to bring an iPhone from origin to customer.

My phone sounds a second alarm (the Dive! Dive! klaxon of a Navy submarine) when it’s time to wake my son for school, then a follow-up alert to remind me to prod him toward the door in case he fell back to sleep. A fourth alarm informs me when it’s time to bring that wake-up cup of coffee to my wife. The fifth and final preset alarm—I choose the iPhone’s annoyingly screechy “Sci-Fi” tone for this one—tells me to give the cat his insulin shot (yes, cats get diabetes). This is not the favorite moment of the day for either of us, but family Morning Person gets veterinary medication duty by default, so both cat and I put up with the unwanted intimacy of the hypodermic pen.

In between the various alarms, the smartphone allows me to peruse several morning newspapers, check e-mails, read news feeds and Twitter lists, attend to online banking or bill pay, and, as I go about my morning routine of coffee making and dog feeding, listen to either National Public Radio or my latest audiobook. Today is also my wedding anniversary: time to check with the florist’s Web site to verify the bouquet I ordered remains on schedule for delivery at Donna’s office later this morning. A little later the phone’s Google Maps app will direct me to the right time and place to catch a bus to a conference in San Pedro on the future of ports. (Hint: that future is both promising and troubled.) After the conference, another handy app will summon a driver from the rideshare service Lyft for the return trip home. Serendipity being what it is, my driver will turn out to be a moonlighting longshoreman with an entirely different view on the future of ports. He sees them as rapidly changing, frequently unsafe, roiled by congestion and labor disputes, but, most of all, as a haven for a vanishing breed in America: a truly financially rewarding path for a blue-collar middle class. His smartphone is his vital link, too, for working in both harbor and rideshare universes.

Such high-tech wonders as the iPhone have extraordinarily complex and far-flung supply chains. The specifics of suppliers and components are often closely held company secrets, but starting in 2012, Apple began publicly disclosing information on its top two hundred suppliers.¹ What that in turn reveals: smartphones may have more transportation embedded in their production and distribution than almost any other widely used consumer product other than the modern car, which has more (and far larger) globally sourced parts in its recipe.

Unlike cars, smartphones are also prodigious transportation reducers. They have accelerated the substitution of digital newspapers for physical newsprint, which otherwise would have to be transported by rail and semitruck to the presses, then physically delivered to homes and points of purchase after printing. The energy and carbon footprint of a single copy of a newspaper is roughly the same as driving a car one kilometer²—not much on its own, but it adds up pretty quickly over time and across whole subscriber bases. Phones do the same for the physical media of books and music as well as for paper bills and the physical transportation of the proverbial checks in the mail. In the U.S., about half of smartphone owners bank and pay bills with their phones,³ which amounts to quite a few people going paper-free (and therefore transportation-free) on payday and balance-due day. Of all 243 million adults in the U.S.,⁴ 64 percent own smartphones. For adults under fifty, the smartphone adoption rate is a stunning eight out of ten Americans.⁵ Put the numbers together and it turns out that 78 million American adults are going paper-free and travel-free when it comes to bills and banks, at least some of the time. That’s a big change from essentially zero in 2007.

Beyond that, smartphones have become the Swiss Army knives of the tech world, displacing a host of specialized devices: music players, alarm clocks, radios, cameras, calculators, tape recorders, GPS navigation devices, calendars, date books, Rolodexes, handheld gaming devices, metronomes, egg timers, flashlights. When smartphones and apps supplant a stand-alone device, that’s not just one less thing we have to carry around personally. It’s one less thing someone else has to carry to us. In short, thanks largely to smartphones, the bottom has fallen out of whole categories of products, business models, and jobs—and their corresponding transportation footprints.

And then there are the travel and mapping smartphone apps that simplify, and thereby encourage, the use of mass transit, ridesharing, biking, and even walking. They don’t shrink transportation per se, but such technology can shift drivers from cars to less wasteful, less energy-intensive options that, among other things, lower demand for parking. This is no small feat. Cities that have studied urban traffic in recent years have found anywhere from 30 to more than 60 percent of drivers on congested city streets are clogging things up because they are searching for parking.⁶ This is one of the many counterintuitive aspects of moving door to door: the process of taking your car out of traffic can make traffic worse. This rule of the road flips, however, if an app points drivers efficiently and quickly to waiting parking places without all the searching, jockeying, and frustrated braking when an enticing spot turns out to have red paint on the curb. Other apps guide drivers to the least congested routes, which doesn’t shrink miles—it may even add them—but it does shrink time on the road and keeps drivers from making traffic jams worse, thereby easing congestion and gasoline consumption for all.

On the other side of the ledger, the birth of smartphones is an exercise in profligate transportation consumption. Their twenty-first-century materials, along with the routine, even blasé sourcing over vast distances, overturn the methods and economies of the past, which generally shunned distance as an added cost and risk. Not so the iPhone. Its components collectively travel enough miles to circumnavigate the planet at least eight times before the phone receives its first call or sends its inaugural text.

Cracking open my iPhone 6 Plus—Apple’s version of the big-screen “phablet”—reveals not just a marvel of globally sourced miniaturization but also a high-tech road map that touches just about everywhere. Along with the processor and graphics chipset and the rechargeable battery (the most massive internal part), there is a long list of individually sourced components: two cameras, a video recorder, a digital compass, a satellite-navigation system, a barometer, a fingerprint scanner, a high-resolution color display, an LED flashlight, touch sensors, a stereo system, a motion sensor/game controller, encryption circuits, an array of radio transmitters that connect via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and near-field communication bands, and, last and also least, the guts of a cellular telephone.

At least two dozen primary suppliers on three continents and two islands (Japan and Taiwan) provide these parts.

The transportation complexity is magnified further because many components do not move in a simple path from supplier to final assembly. Some go on a hopscotching world tour from one country to the next and back again as one piece is joined to another to create an assembly, which is then moved elsewhere in the world for another part to be inserted or attached. The phone’s innards are put together much as a cook assembles ingredients for a dish that becomes, in turn, a component of another chef’s course, which is then incorporated by someone else into a larger meal. Ingredients move back and forth from high-tech equivalents of refrigerator, cutting board, stove, and plate.

The fingerprint sensor embedded in the iPhone’s home button—Apple’s Touch ID system, which allows a fingerprint scan to replace a typed password—is a good example of this sort of Top Chef supply itinerary.

The home button journey begins in Hunan province, China, at a company called Lens Technology, Ltd., in the city of Changsha, where superhard transparent artificial sapphire crystal is fashioned into the button cover. This is the part of the button an iPhone user physically touches, made of the same synthetic sapphire used in high-end watches, avionics displays, and missile systems because of its near–diamond-like hardness, durability, and scratch resistance. The sapphire cover is then bonded to a metal trim ring brought 550 miles from the LY Technology factory in Jiangsu province, and then shipped 1,000 miles to the Dutch-owned NXP Semiconductors assembly and testing plant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. There the sapphire-metal ring combo is married to a driver chip imported from a Shanghai factory (another 600 miles) and a Touch ID sensor chip from an NXP silicon wafer fabrication plant in Europe, which tacks 5,000 more miles onto the itinerary.

Next, a button switch imported from a Panasonic subsidiary is brought in 1,500 miles from Japan, along with the springlike plastic component called a “stiffener” from a Shanghai factory (another 600-plus miles) owned by the American company Molex. These pieces are combined at another Taiwanese manufacturer, Mektec, which adds in its own part, called the flex circuit.

Mektec then ships this assembly 1,500 miles back to Japan, where a plant run by technology giant Sharp laser-welds all the pieces into a sealed and functional Touch ID module. The completed assembly ships about 1,300 miles to the Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, China, a virtual high-tech city of 128,439 factory workers where the iPhone’s final assembly⁷ takes place (and where allegations about bad working conditions—some accurate, others fabricated—sparked a media sensation in 2012).⁸ The finished iPhones are shipped to customers and retail locations in the U.S. and around the world to stores, cell phone service providers, and other outlets using virtually every transportation method known to man. Most of the U.S.-bound phones move by air freight through Hong Kong and Alaska, where UPS and Federal Express have major hubs. (The curvature of the earth makes Alaska a direct and ideal transshipment and fueling stop for air cargo moving from Asia to the U.S.)

This is the partial origin story of a collection of parts commonly known as the phone’s home button, with about 12,000 miles required to get it to the place where the iPhone is assembled. All that is for one button, perhaps the least sexy part of a smartphone. And this triptych is just a partial accounting, because it does not include the movement of raw materials for individual components, nor their packaging, nor the movement of energy, water, and workers at the various factories, all of which could easily double or triple the mileage on that little button below the phone’s touch screen.

Similarly epic journeys are attached to other parts of the iPhone: a barometric sensor and accelerometer from Germany; the Corning “Gorilla Glass” from Kentucky; the five different power amplifiers from California, Massachusetts, Colorado, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania manufacturers; the motion processors from Silicon Valley; the near field communication controller chip from the Netherlands; and many other components from Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and China.⁹ The production of the Apple-branded A8 processor semiconductor chip is split between the world’s largest contract chip fabricator, TSMC in Taiwan, and Samsung’s immense new chip plant in Austin, Texas—a $9 billion investment by the South Korean technology company to make computer chips in the U.S. Samsung is offshoring to America.

Those parts, along with the Touch ID components, combine for that 160,000-mile commute embedded in the iPhone—two-thirds of the distance to the moon. And even that is still only part of the story. The movement of these components does not include the mining, processing, and shipping of the rare earth elements that are so vital to so much of our twenty-first-century technology, or the movement of the vast quantities of energy and water needed to obtain them.¹⁰

These materials, most with unpronounceable names that sound like minor Greek gods, are difficult to mine and pricey to extract from raw ore. Once refined, they can be worth many times their weight in gold. In recent years, China has dominated this rare earth market that the U.S. once led, though suppliers in California and Australia have been reclaiming market share of late. These “rare” materials—which are actually quite plentiful in the earth’s crust, but rarely in sufficient concentrations to make mining practical—have almost magical magnetic, phosphorescent, and catalytic properties even in minute quantities. They are essential ingredients in everything from giant wind turbines and electric cars, to miniature electric motors, semiconductors, and rechargeable batteries of all stripes: phone-size, Tesla-size, and utility-scale–size. The iPhone contains a chorus of eight rare earth elements: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium, gadolinium, europium, lanthanum, and yttrium. These are not households names, but they are everywhere in the modern household, unseen yet invaluable. These elements can be found in a smartphone’s color screen, various parts of the phone circuitry, the speakers, and the mechanism that causes a phone to vibrate when it receives a message or call.

Then there are the better-known precious metals inside each iPhone—a couple bucks’ worth of gold, silver, platinum, and copper¹¹—and the anodized aluminum enclosures. Together, the mining, refining, and transport of these materials—and all the chemical agents and systems needed to produce them—could easily double that 160,000-mile footprint on the iPhone (and any other high-tech product), as the precious metals, aluminum, and rare earths must be shipped from the sources to refineries and processors and then to the individual component makers around the world.

In the end, the iPhone has a transportation footprint at least as great as a 240,000-mile trip to the moon, and most or all of the way back. The wonder of this is compounded by the fact that this transportation intensity is a strategy to increase efficiency and lower cost.

On the face of it, that seems absurd. Yes, entrepreneurs and empires have traded goods across long distances for thousands of years: the ancient seafaring peoples of the Mediterranean, the merchants on the Silk Road, the classical Romans with their empire-wide network of paved highways larger than the U.S. Interstate Highway System. But back then, every mile added cost and risk. So only certain goods—rare fabrics, wine, art, jewelry, exotic foods, and bulk goods that simply could not be sourced locally—were worth global trading. Peppercorns were the original “black gold,” not petroleum, and were once so rare and valuable that they stopped being merely prized goods and were used as currency, collateral, and even ransom in the ancient world.

The customer base for global goods in centuries past was almost as rare as the goods themselves. The vast majority of people until very recently consumed local and regional goods for most if not all of their needs. Sourcing everyday apparel, food, or common tools from distant locations—routine today—was out of the question and would have been outside the budget of all but a wealthy few. As much as such devices as the iPhone are the result of advanced design and engineering, they are also creatures of a supply chain that could only be imagined and afforded in this unique era of logistics and outsourcing in which traveling great distances for choice parts and processes is no longer a barrier. The real breakthrough that makes the iPhone possible—along with most of today’s consumer goods, right down to the cheapest pair of boxers in your drawer or the salt-and-pepper shakers (and their contents) on your table—is a breakthrough of transportation.

It has not been this way very long. The dominant technology company of its era, the Radio Corporation of America, operated very differently. For decades after World War I,...