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July 24, 2005
Night Hours
Even before Starbucks opened one Monday morning about two weeks back, David and several of the producers set off for the Long Beach port to interview truck drivers queued up outside the terminal gates, waiting for their 7 a.m. work orders and access to the port.
Before that day, everything I knew about port operation I learned while watching Season two of HBO’s "The Wire." As good as the show is, it fails to capture the sense of scale you feel at the port. Everything about the place is massive. Containers piled in stacks of three and four, cranes that seem to descend from the sky, a docked ship so tall you have to lay your head all the way back to see the top of it, and sounds that are as massive as the machinery. Your perspective is instantly changed. You are small and insignificant in comparison. Small and insignificant is sort of the way several truckers felt that morning about the changes that were happening at the ports.
Monday is the first night the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will be open past 6 p.m. The change to OffPeak hours is an effort to reduce congestion on the freeways. We spoke with a small group of truck drivers outside the Long Beach Container Terminal. Some were looking forward to the changes, others dreaded the new hours, but they all felt like they didn’t have much say in the matter.
It will take much time to assess the impact of the OffPeak program, but one change was going to happen quickly. The owner of the lunch truck was preparing to work nights, "I gotta follow my customers."
Posted by Aimee Machado at 10:53 PM
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There was a post recently on "Mayor Sam's Blog" about this topic. I spent a lot of time talking about this issue with a guy named Noel Park - one of the San Pedro activists responsible for helping to clean up the air in that region.
Here is a link to that blog post:
http://mayorsam.blogspot.com/2005/06/some-light-reading-material.html#comments
Posted by: ubrayj02 on July 25, 2005 5:50 PM
