Free Shipping Isn’t Free for Everyone
Online retailing delivers a public health problem
When Angelo Logan was growing up in the City of Commerce, California, in the mid-1980s, there was a time of the year that he and his friends called “truck season.”
“It was the two or three months leading up to the holidays,” he remembers. During truck season, semitrailers loaded up at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, unloaded their goods at storage facilities, and transported them to local department stores.
As warehousing expanded in the region, so did truck season. Commerce was an ideal hub, centrally located among railyards, highways, and maritime ports—and the trucks began to come and go all year long. But traffic was still limited to certain times of day. “It used to be that we’d see drayage trucks coming from the ports to the warehouses and railyards in the early morning. Then at a certain time at night, you’d see transloading trucks that would go from the warehouses to the railyards.”
Now, Logan says, “the types of trucks and operations are constant…”
