Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation Read Online Free

a new head for the city’s transportation department by stealing her from in-state rival San Francisco, where she had become famous (or infamous) for her dedication to pleasing pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders as much as drivers.
    Then there’s the wild card in the mix: the driverless cars (and trucks) now being developed and tested on highways and city streets. They appear to be just a few years away from consumers,with the potential to change everything—from drastically reducing highway deaths, to transforming car ownership as we know it now, to ending the need to devote a third of our urban space to parking. Think about that a minute: the most interesting thing about autonomous vehicles is not what they do while taking you somewhere. It’s what they do after they drop you off. Carmakers are racing to bring these wheeled robots to market even as the technology terrifies them as an extinction threat to their century-old business model—and to the millions of jobs that business model creates. Every shiny new evolution in our door-to-door world has exacted a price along with its promise: the invention of the steamship that ushered in the first wave of globalization; the discovery that gasoline could be more than its first incarnation as a remedy for head lice; the containerization of cargo that enabled the second wave of globalization—our age of outsourcing and offshoring. The game changer of removing human drivers from the transportation equation could easily be the most disruptive evolution of all, fraught with as many challenges and fears as opportunities and boons.
    The hidden side of our commute, the flow of goods, has become so huge that our ports, rails, and roads can no longer handle the load. They desperately need investments of public capital that the nation does not seem to have. Yet it’s an investment that must be made, as logistics—the transport of goods—is now a vital pillar of the U.S. economy. Goods movement now provides a greater source of job growth than making the stuff being shipped.
    â€œYour kids will never go hungry if they have degrees in global logistics,” says the head of UPS for the American West. “But we have to leave them a transportation system that works.”
    At the same time, new manufacturing technologies—the science fiction turned fact that is 3-D printing—are pushing in the opposition direction. This “unicorn” technology gives businesses in Brooklyn, Boston, and Burbank the power to manufacture afantastic range of products—from surgical implants to car parts to guns—and to do it cheaper than a Chinese factory can 12,000 miles away. New local businesses are emerging almost daily, stealing manufacturing from offshore factories and the eyes of Angels Gate. It’s just a commercial trickle, this “re-shoring” of offshore manufacturing, not enough even to register statistically, much less hurt the business of ports and shippers—for now.
    These countervailing trends have the power to upend our brilliant and terrible global flow of goods and people, not in some misty, speculative future, but in a very few years. Which means our transportation-immersed door-to-door world and every aspect of it—culture, food, economy, energy, environment, jobs, climate, your cup of coffee in the morning—is at a very large, very vital fork in the road.
    That’s the commute we’re all riding now, and whether the choices and trends now in play lead to a global Carmageddon, or Carmaheaven, or a bit of both, is one of the great unknowns of our age.
    As one of the nation’s leading transportation scholars, authors, and bloggers, David Levinson of the University of Minnesota, sees it: “We’ve been slow to change. But change is coming.”
    Buckle up.

Chapter 3
    MORNING BREW
    â€œT he Industrial Revolution absolutely ruined coffee,” Jay Isais is saying over the basso roar