Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation

by Edward Humes

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business, Economics, Transport, Urbanism, History, Urban Planning

384 pages, Hardcover

First published April 12, 2016

About the author

Edward Humes is a Southern California author, journalist and writing teacher whose most recent nonfiction book is “The Forever Witness.” His next book, “Total Garbage: How to Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World,” will be published in time for Earth Day 2024. He shares his home office with a pair of rescued racing greyhounds, Valiant and Dottie.

Reviews

[Atila Iamarino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comprei por sugestão da Audible, com base no que já tinha ouvido, e foi uma boa surpresa em uma assunto que não esperava ler. Humes explica a jornada que tudo o que consumimos precisa fazer para chegar em nossas mãos, passando por alguns exemplos como o celular, o café e a latinha de alumínio. É impressionante o caminho que os itens fazem, às vezes indo e vindo para a mesma região.

Outro ponto muito legal é a discussão sobre meios de transporte, como é planejado o sistema de transporte público, o sistema de navios e containers, até a UPS e o sistema de entregas rápido que a Amazon praticamente criou e alimentou. Ainda coube no livro uma discussão sobre o papel do carro na sociedade, como aceitamos acidentes horrendos, falta de segurança, uso de espaço público e mais uma série de problemas em nome da mobilidade individual, e como carros elétricos e auto-dirigidos podem mudar isso no futuro próximo.

[Jerry D. Vanvactor, DHA · Rating 1 out of 5]

For me, a professional logistician, this book is not of much value. This work leaves a bad taste in my mouth from its very beginning as I quickly realized that even the title of the book is misleading - the author has such an affinity for LA and southern California, that the book is marginally meaningless to anyone who lives outside of that epicenter of insanity. Properly, the title should read "Door to Door: the magnificent, maddening, mysterious world of transportation from the port of L.A. to consumers in southern California"; likely, the publisher did not actually read this manuscript, or was sold a bag of goods that did not actually get delivered. This book speaks little to how the world of transportation actually influences and impacts everyone's day to day life concerning everything from consumer goods to hospital materiel. Little emphasis is placed on the multifaceted intricacies of a dynamically complex world that spans an entire globe and is seldom impacted, when at all, by the infrastructure isolated in LA. Again, as a professional logistician, while this book had a few (and I am being generous) nuggets of worthwhile information, unless you live in southern California or somehow worship (as this author seems to do throughout his book) LA, you may not find much value in wasting the time reading it. While the book does seem to be well-researched for the already specified geo-sphere in which it is centered, there is little mention of multiple significant logistics nodes, logistically-focused institutions, logistically significant processes and practices throughout the US; as a matter of fact, there is little substance concerning anything about transportation or logistics - outside of Los Angeles - emphasized. I am not impressed with this book at all and will find a satisfactory place to file it among the other refuse that will be leaving my home....logistically speaking of course.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is little question that America is overloaded and underprepared for the demands of modern consumerism. I'm just not sure that Edward Humes addresses these issues with conviction, despite tiptoeing politely around the implications of the choices Americans make every day. The first half of Door to Door is heavily weighed down by his gimmick of attaching a numerical mileage footprint to every product and aspect of your life. It gets so tiresome and repetitive that any potential shock or interest he might have elicited initially is quickly lost, along with any meaningful significance of these numbers. But along the way, his discussions with many blue and white collar workers from the various intersections of transportation and commerce are representative of the many conflicts and demands and obstacles that prevent this society from progression. It's easy for these people to see the cliff we have long been rapidly heading towards, and disheartening to see how much the rest of society fights back any attempt to swerve even slightly away from this self-destruction. We are terrible decision-makers behind the wheel, literally and metaphorically.

I was much more captivated by the second half of the book, which addresses self-driving cars, and I would have appreciated a deeper discussion regarding its integration into society. I was also sheepishly enlightened of the difference between a 'street' and a 'road'. I came away with more sympathy for truck drivers and cyclists, and an even lower opinion of Congress and all levels of bureacracy. There are some things about a society that should not be left up to a democratic vote, and the infrastructure of transportation should be one of them. Unfortunately, driving is something that Americans have long felt entitled to, even though there is indisputable evidence that we are absolutely awful at it. I, for one, welcome our new self-driving car overlords.

This book is less about transportation and more about an imminent implosion. I just wanted Humes to come out and say what he'd been dying to throughout this book: pay more taxes, be less entitled about driving, give up your cars altogether, be mindful of the true cost behind your stuff, etc. Alas, it is up to the reader to ruminate over what kind of bleak future we're looking at, and what we are willing to do on an individual and collective scale to change it.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one has some good stuff mixed with the dreck. I'm not quite sure how to deal with it, or even if I have the patience to do so. Caveat lector!

Another book on an interesting topic, marred by preachy environmental activism, only loosely connected to reality. Plus a lack of basic attention to detail -- the author, who lives in California, writes that the soda-can deposit here is 10c. It's actually a nickel a can. Duh, and bah.

Read the better 2-star reviews here to see the problems others have noticed. Abandoned about half-way through -- skimmed some of the rest.

[Ryan Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

planes trains and automobiles (and boats)

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mostly fascinating and refreshingly activist-minded overview on how things like horrendous consumer demand for cheap goods that no one needs, late-stage capitalism and globalization, and America's toddler-like possessiveness of and demands for the "right" to own (and park, and drive) private automobiles is completely overwhelming our infrastructure to the point of disaster and--bonus!--hastening the destruction of the planet. Not that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Edward Humes phrases it all exactly like that (though pretty close... he clearly has no patience for people who refuse to face reality which, unfortunately, is most people). Humes builds his arguments with on-the-ground reporting (at insane-busy UPS hubs and the even more insane and vast LA/Long Beach sister ports), with facts and figures (sometimes to the narrative's detriment, as the numbers come at you so fast and so large that it's impossible (for me) to put them into any relatable context), and with solid storytelling skills.

Several highlights include a look at automated/robot cars, coming soon to a road near you, from all angles (Humes is VERY pro-these); at how UPS solved the "last mile" problem in a global shipping relay-chain (did you know UPS trucks never make left turns? I did not); at why the shipping container is likely the most significant invention of the 20th century; at the appalling carnage wrecked by idiot/distracted/raging/speeding drivers who then refuse to take any responsibility, and why our judicial system is complicit in the slaughter of tens of thousands of people eaxch year in what we insist on calling "accidents". And on.

Could have used tighter editing, as when back-to-back chapter cover pretty the same thing (those SoCal ports) with repetition of facts and stories as well. But still: The door-to-door transportation of people and goods is literally going to kill us all unless bold changes are implemented immediately. Humes's book will make you think and, hopefully, take action.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this a lot. The best book on transportation I've ever read.

Learned so much about transportation.

An excellent read.

Very well researched book.

The research reminded me of that of Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup - Humes is a powerful journalist.

Really inspired me to not drive unless essential - a good thing to be doing now anyways!

The maddening aspects of transportation are driving me in this book:
Driving a car to work. Having it sit there unused for 22 hours a day. Carbon issues with owning a car. Not taking public transit. How adding lanes is a detriment to the environment, and how there should be massive gas tax increases - based on vehicle size (if possible).

If I can commute to work via public transit (1.8 hours just one way), there's almost no excuse that everyone else can't as well.

Not only was this book packed with elaborate details on the issues, but also on the solutions.

Memorable Sections of the Book
- How coffee comes to your home
- How many times around the world your phone goes before it receives its first text
- The crazy world of automobiles
- The road systems
- Marine life and how it is affected
- Ships
- Public transportation
- Future of driving (autonomous driving)

Solutions I Loved
- Ask if you really need to own a car
- Increase gas taxes
- Driving big vehicles SUVs are dangerous to smaller cars - tax them more
- Make less lanes on roads
- Dedicate lanes for bikes and public transportation
- Take public transportation when you can
- Buy local, buy well-made products, not dollar-store / Wal-mart goods (see more about that in Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America's Cheap Goods)

It was also interesting to read this during the Evergreen Suez Canal issue, which was actually mentioned in the book as a potential sore-point!

4.7/5

[Johan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really great comprehensive look at the state of transportations in the US. From ailing roads and congestions to driverless cars.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book would have been a much better book had the author not tipped his hand repeatedly to show his bias against passenger vehicles.  Adopting the usual arguments by those who want to promote public transportation and large amounts of walking, the book attempts to scare readers through presenting horror stories of vehicle accidents, and doesn't really have any real proposals to support important infrastructure except the familiar leftist desire for more taxes and more burdensome regulation on the behavior of drivers, all of which means that this book is likely only going to appeal to those who happen to think the same way the author does, an audience that does not include me.  The book mixes generally sound and intriguing discussion of logistics with unsound discussions about personal transportation, and the author's whining about the inefficiencies that result from freedom is particularly galling and offensive.  As a result, this book is a mixed bag, not as good as it could have been had the author approached the desire on the part of Americans in particular to be able to drive where they want to go and buy what they want to buy and have it shipped to them with any degree of understanding and approval.

This particular book of about 300 pages or so begins with an introduction wherein the author complains about the crazy commutes of Americans, who spend a lot of time and money on their personal transportation.  The author manages to spend some time talking about Carmageddon and the way that Americans are carpooling less and less often and struggling with the transportation infrastructure that would be necessary to support both our personal and our logistical transportation.  The author spends some time talking about the port of Los Angeles (showing off some feminism and environmentalism) and also talks about UPS' ORION efforts at saving on gas, which I was involved in personally.  There are lots of discussions about car accidents and their causes and the author shows a great deal of outrage at the way that injury and death via an automobile are seldom prosecuted to any great degree unless the driver was distracted by a cell phone or drunk or otherwise impaired.  Quite honestly, this outrage becomes increasingly tedious, even when the author speculates on a future of automated vehicles that are nevertheless not owned by people.

Books like this are driven by the dyspeptic feelings of their authors, but when the author's point of view does not correspond with that of the readers, and when an author has a great deal of fondness for promoting mass transit and logistics but a decided animus towards personal transportation, that bias makes a book like this impossible to take seriously.  Look, we get it.  You walk and bike and don't like feeling hunted down by drivers who are trying to do too much at the same time.  Or you drive and are a hypocrite because you can't appreciate the importance of freedom for others the way you enjoy it yourself.  You casually adopt the language of the stroad from Strong Towns and likely buy into their dream of high-density life, but that is not the sort of life that Americans want.  We have the dispersed living and driving patterns that we do because Americans want space of their own and the ability to move freely around it in with vehicles they happen to own.  The author appears not to appreciate that fact, but unless he wants to move to Europe or Japan he can learn to deal with it.

[Emilie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found particular chapters in this book more intriguing than others. I really enjoyed the chapter on driverless cars. It's fascinating to imagine a future where we won't need massive parking structures and people could conceivably share cars or just participate in ride shares. I also appreciated the chapter providing a detailed look at shipping and ports. While I appreciate details, I got mired in the sheer magnitude of facts and statistics provided in this book. So, overall, interesting information, but a bit dry.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

1) Our door-to-door lifestyle is literally nothing short of a miracle
2) I desperately want to be a LOL
3) I pretty much never want to drive a car again
4) The book drags a little sometimes, and often geeks out on its own stats, but it's basically a must read for everyone.

Counting down the days till self-driving cars...

[Francesca DB · Rating 4 out of 5]

2026 learning book #1
Top contender for my favorite nonfic book of 2026 and it’s only January. It’s turned me from a traffic-problem-curious and passive-pro-walker-and-biker to an evangelist of a new infrastructure to save lives, time, and our planet.
When I was talking the other day about how my favorite nonfiction books are by journalists, I didn’t even realize Humes was a journalist — now it checks out. Though very number heavy (just be prepared, it enhanced the experience for me but can be easy to get lost in), this book revolutionized my understanding of global off-shoring and port systems, the lethality and risk of car driving, the supply chain, environmental, and transport aspects of the economy, the limitations in our transport plans and the brilliant (often women!) mind challenging stagnant norms, and a slew of potential solutions for the future. Also opened my eyes to the Waymitos of the world— yes, my intrinsic what-if-they-get-hacked and I-love-talking-to-uber-drivers aversion to self driving cars still lingers, but the understanding that “95%” of our traffic fatalities are caused by distracted driving and how autonomous cars can revolutionize this and save life’s (IF IF IF done right), I’ve certainly come round a little bit.
Overall fascinating book — would recomend and wish he could write a slightly more bite-size version (I wanna say all Americans should read this and understand, but if most US Americans are reading at 8th grade level idk if this book would have the widespread appeal).
Oh! And traffic circles! And always better to go in person to buy the thing than do the UPS. Buy local! Drive less! Walk more!
My one regret: reading this on kindle! I wish I had read it on a bought copy so all my highlights and notes could be pulled off a shelf forever rather than disappear back to the library.

[Jocelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was definitely not what I expected. The focus was on moving goods rather than people – and the author successfully made the argument that moving goods is something we don't think about enough but that has a huge impact on people and the way we move ourselves around. I knew nothing about the shipping industry before reading this and now I know enough to know that it's way more complex than I've been able to wrap my head around.

This was a great primer for getting me up to speed (no pun intended – okay maybe kind of) on basic transportation issues and also for thinking about what major technological advances could do to our existing transportation system. The author also ends the book with a list of recommendations which keeps it from feeling too overwhelmingly bleak, but the odds of any of those recommendations being implemented in our current political climate seems pathetically low.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid book with great examples of how products and people move around the world into today's connected and just in time delivery world. The author points out the irony of how we can deliver a single item to any address in the world but that we still struggle to deliver people on the last mile of their journey. Additionally, the author uses good examples of how we humans rationalize the lack of safety in the personal vehicle transportation system.

Good read, recommend that anyone interested in understanding the global transportation system.

[Indah Threez Lestari · Rating 3 out of 5]

422 - 2018

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hume describes how our transportation system got to where it is today and some of the biggest challenges and opportunities it must face as we continue on our ceaseless path of consumerism - with more than a little anti-personal-car soapboxing thrown in. Read this book if you found Jared Diamond's "Collapse" interesting, if you want to know the true life of coffee, or if you ride a bicycle on streets and are tired of near-misses.

So I judged this book by its cover when I glimpsed it in a bookstore while hunting down Parag Khanna's "Connectography" (I'll get to that soon). Of course, I didn't just buy it there, I ordered it online with next day delivery (not wanting to pay a premium for same day - I could've just bought the copy I was holding in the bookstore if I wanted to pay that price!), drove back home, and continued my lifelong abuse of the transportation system that I only occasionally think about. I thought I was going to get a book about the details of how our online economy has impacted the global transportation system, but it was both more and less than that.

Door-to-Door goes through the cradle-to-use portion of a product's lifecycle a few times to drive home a few points about how complex, interconnected, and fragile our transportation systems really are. Thankfully, that is not the whole framework for the book, it was just used to get things rolling. The focus is primarily on transportation of goods and not people, although it is impossible to mention road usage without think about the passenger cars and bikes that also share them. Several interesting points are made about ports, the impact city growth has on cargo transportation, and how historical trends and technologies have impacted our current system. But it quickly became clear that the focus of this book was not about the door-to-door economy and how it functions, it was chiefly focused on how it is precariously close to jamming up the works.

I'm guessing that "overload" was on the short list of titles for this book because that's really what the book was about (as its overuse in the text reveals). The overload of road networks with trucks in the next few years, the overload of populated areas with singly-populated automobiles, the overload of ports with ever growing container ships, the overload of antiquated air traffic control systems, the overload of parking lots, train traffic, bike traffic, pedestrian traffic. You name it, and Hume paints a picture of how our transportation networks are straining to keep things moving now, and there is little hope looking forward without some serious changes. All of this wasn't necessarily doom and gloom hyperbole, it was pretty clearly tied to facts throughout. If anything, I thought the book suffered from an excess of facts when it came to the lunacy of people driving cars. The point is easy to make - after all, I've lost friends in vehicle crashes and it's a miserably safe bet that you have too - but Hume insisted on ramming it home one anecdote after another. Don't worry though, technology will save the day. But people change slowly (I'd argue they don't change, they just die off and next later generations are better conditioned), aren't always accepting of new technology, and never, ever, want to feel like they're giving up control of something to be at someone's (or some machine's) mercy. While I'm personally on board for investing in our transportation system, I'm just not convinced that the arguments Hume presents will change anyone's mind or illuminate a path to attract more attention (and funding) to the problems.

Couple of miscellaneous points: I was at first confused why the author didn't go cradle-to-grave to capture how much of the transportation system our products really impact, but then I learned that he had also written a book titled "Garbology" which seems like it might deal with product end-of-life. One more thing about judging this book by its cover: I really liked the global-city picture on the dust jacket. Something about the never-ending sprawl and infinite travel simultaneously serve to captivate and depress me. Just like the book itself.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent primer on the transportation needs and crumbling infrastructure of the US. I was familiar with many of the high level concepts addressed but this gave be great data and statistics to back up these ideas and to drive home the urgency if these issues! The chapters on automobiles were chilling and left me scared to ever use roads again be that as a driver, pedestrian, or cyclist. I'm now convinced that from a safety concern and environmental perspective cars may be the single worst thing that ever happened to us and we convince ourselves otherwise for the convenience of being able to drive instead of walking 10 minutes to a bus stop.

All in all, a great read if you want to learn about our strained infrastructure and urgent need to revolutionize transportation and mobility!

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

How does stuff get to your door?

[Al Eden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. Much of what is in this book I more or less was aware of, but it is a forehead slap to see it all in print in one place clearly defined and documented.

Globalization is the first topic, and as an example he describes the more than 160,000 miles of travel that are required to produce an iPhone as the various components are shipped and reshipped during production, sub-assembly, assembly, distribution, and then sale. He then discusses the few relatively simple innovations that have made globalization not only possible, but inevitable.

Everyone who drinks coffee should at least read chapters 3 and 4. First for the description of the amazing transportation and processing network that delivers your coffee, and second for the description of how "The Industrial Revolution absolutely ruined coffee". Apparently most of us (and I think including me) have never actually tasted what coffee is supposed to taste like.

His second topic is transportation in general but especially cars. He is not fond of them. His position is that for the past fifty plus years the car was the star invention that made life as we in the developed world know it, but the time has come to move on. First he goes thru the costs of cars as our star transportation device; the set of which include economic, ecological, infrastructure, health, and energy efficiency but the largest of which by far is the injuries and deaths caused by cars. One in 112 Americans will die in a car crash, 35,400 a year!, one every 15 minutes. An American car crash injury requiring an emergency room every 12.6 SECONDS. An American car crash injury requiring medical attention every 7.3 SECONDS. An American car crash of some kind every 2.8 SECONDS. A third of the book is about cars and trucks, what they have caused to happen, have done, are doing and what we simply cannot support in this model of transportation we have going forward. Yes, he talks about alternatives; some of which need to be acted upon but some of which, like the self driving car, are just going to happen like it or not to improve things.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 4 out of 5]

Transportation is a lot like electricity. You never notice it until it's broken. Packages arrive with two-day shipping? The world is perfect. That package takes three days? OMG the world is over. Everything runs because of transportation, which has exploded with overseas shipping and the bustling import/export business. So it should be no surprise that quite a bit of our carbon footprint is generated by commercial transportation. . . and even more by the precious vehicles we own and adore (hey, I have a car, too).

But with this beauty comes danger, in addition to the death of the planet. Four planes worth of people die every single day on the road. You have a 1 in 112 chance of dying in a car crash—either as driver, passenger, pedestrian or bicyclist. I live in Tallahassee, FL, so my chances are probably 1 in 3 that I'm going to die at the hands of some texting college student with acrylic nails and a baby romper. Things need to change, and I'm not talking about dubious fashion choices.

This book raises a lot of questions about how we do things and why we do things. There are some interesting tidbits, some not so interesting (seriously, cool it with the coffee snobbery), and one main point overall: we should be moving quickly to automated/driverless cars. The future is not so far away, and is not so scary. It means a huge change to car-centric America, but that future could revolutionize how we live and make everything more efficient, productive and safer. Yes, safer.

This is the way of the future. Don't believe me? USDOT and FHWA are getting behind the automated car concept, as is Google and other car companies. State DOTs are also beginning to research how to incorporate automated vehicles into the roadways. It's seriously cool.

[Yvor]

Great read for anyone concerned about sustaining all life on our planet. As the title suggests, it is a comprehensive look at our global transportation system and how it is embedded into every product we buy or use. Humes opens his review with the 2011 Los Angeles traffic apocalypse whose tongue-in-cheek name was "Carmagedden". He goes on to tackle and demystify the unbelievable number of transportation miles needed to produce each modern day smartphone, the huge impact and environmental cost of container shipping, the transportation costs embedded in your morning cup of Starbucks (or other premium brew), the largely unsung “sheroes” of logistics without whom our 21st Century transportation system would grind to a halt, the harbor pilots whose expertise is in such demand that they command major league baseball salaries, the preventable death toll that is the leading killer of our youth and young adults (and it is not gun violence) that we blithely accept, the future of automobile transportation currently being disrupted by Google, Uber, Lyft, Tesla and others, and the amazing transportation feats of the world’s largest parcel delivery service—the one with the iconic brown delivery vans. Humes posits that we are at a real “fork in the road” regarding our transportation choices and he lays it all out with an engaging and compelling narrative from start to finish. Check it out.

[Maynard Handley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeah, it's a book written by a journalist. Amazing how you can always tell within a few pages -- always the same soul-deadening prose, the same unwillingness to actually say anything definite except cliches, the same constant reliance on quoting others.

So what should have been a truly interesting book is anything but. Yes, there are fascinating factoids every few pages through, but what separates them is the same boring page after page of crap that tells you absolutely nothing worthwhile because you've seen it in a million other places: Americans use cars too much, transportation uses oil, widening roads results in more traffic, blah blah. My point is not the truth value of these statements, it is their utter pointlessness, their total lack of novelty. They are the braying of an author in love with his own voice, and with zero respect for the time of the reader. At the very least he could have attacked these cliches via serious research, tried to establish the circumstances under which they are or are not true. But that would have required the mind of an engineer or scientist and he is neither; he is a journalist the official voice of conventional wisdom of our times.

So, once again, my rule of thumb remains true: written by a journalist -- it's (with confidence 99+%) not worth reading.

[Evan Armstrong · Rating 2 out of 5]

Door to Door should be more accurately titled "Anecdote to Anecdote." While this is a topic I've been fascinated with for years, Humes continually disappointed me with how he chose to structure his research. He uses the same old schtick of just tracking various items around the world and telling you how far away they are. While I genuinely enjoyed it once (and will never look a can of pop the same way again) there have to be more interesting ways to explore this topic without repeating yourself.

Additionally, I felt there was to little academic scholarship cited to justify his sweeping conclusions. There are economic studies available that dive more in depth into how traffic functions. Why weren't more economists interviewed? I would have loved more chapters devoted to the engineering behind UPS truck systems, the mapping of Google, or literally anything besides pages and pages of telling me how people die in car wrecks.

I wanted this book to succeed and persevered throughout but there was no payoff to justify my effort. 2/5 stars.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a dour litany of environmental disaster and sheer rants. I picked it up hoping for a look into how the long modern global supply chains work in practice; and while that's buried in here, it comes along with long digressions on automobile fatalities, the inadequacies of humans as drivers, the general wastefulness of our choices, and how horrible modern transportation is.

It's not all bad - the sections on cargo hauling, particularly on ocean shipping and to a lesser extent UPS' delivery dance are interesting. He finishes with a paean to autonomous cars and how this development will truly, finally solve all of our transportation problems. For realz. (Except of course, for the ones they don't, plus the new ones they bring.)

My usual rating system gives books I finish at least two stars, but this book tests that resolve.
(For what it's worth I agree with the author's views; it's just that I don't like how they were presented.)

[Bon Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most fascinating books I've ever read. I knew this should be good, my "reading career" grew to the point where I have pretty good instinct about whether or not I'll like something and even why. But I didn't expect it to be THIS good. It's textbook density of mind blowing facts about the thing so pervasive and deeply ingrained in our lives we take it for granted: transportation. Except, like with everything else, when it doesn't work. Which, incidentally, is a lot of time. But even that we seem to be taking for granted because we take transportation as inescapable fact of life, like necessary evil. It takes lives, and it takes from life. And yet, we resist to some so obvious, cheap and efficient ways to improve it, like roundabouts.

Fascinating. Just fascinating.

[Natanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This expertly articulated book was fascinating and I found it to be a surprising page turner! The concepts Humes discusses are not theoretical - transportation affects more than we often consider and its import cannot be overstated. Did you know that every 12.6 seconds a car crash sends someone to the hospital? And that every 15 minutes someone DIES due to a car crash? Essentially, we have a 9/11 level of death (3,000 people roughly) every MONTH because of our political reluctance to deal with our transportation choices. It's solvable, if only we truly understand whats not working and whats at stake. This book is a terrific starting point for the citizen and political alike.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read it, skim it, underline it. Lots and many numerous beaucoup facts and figures. You probably already know that it is statistically safer to fly than drive. You're going to hear it again. There is quite a bit here that you might not know about shipping and transportation, logistics. I like knowing this, but found it a little bit too wordy and numbery. Maybe not all in one sitting.

[Amy Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very thought-provoking! Talk about a process we should all know about!

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Are you interested in the Port of Los Angeles? Do you hate cars and find hushed reports of every auto death in a single day great reading? Do you long for the day when you can sit in your Google or Uber shuttle doing your sodoku while it toodles down the road? Well, here's your book -- Door to Door, a book which describes itself as being about transportation but which is mostly about the aforementioned port, with a few other essays grafted on, vaguely united in their common theme of complaining about cars and aging infrastructure. What is here is enjoyable to read, at least for people like myself who find transportation fascinating, but it's not a good book; the organization and few topics chosen make it seem more like a collection of essays written by someone chiefly interested in Los Angeles. I've read Humes before, in his Garbology, and according to my notes it was likewise a grab-bag of topics.

In the age of globalization, logistics is a growth industry. Even if robots take the jobs of cabbies and long-haul truck drivers, the demand for consumer goods is such that more ships and trucks will be required to carry them. At the Port of Los Angeles, which handles a third of all goods consumed in the United States (from bananas to smartphones), the managers there are finding themselves in the position of the New York harbormasters in the late fifties: the ships arriving are too large to handle easily. When containerization first arrived, they required infrastructure at so different a scale than the old break-bulk shpping that it was easier for cities like New York and London to build new docks altogether. But now the container ships have outgrown the commercial docks built especially for them.

The roads, too, are problematic, overburdened by the fact that everyone drives everywhere; even highways built to link ports and industrial sections are now co-opted for ordinary through traffic, and the sheer number of cars makes it difficult for transit options like buses to take off. Why would people ride the bus when cars so so much faster? Some cities are exploring ways to create better transit efficiency, like creating bus-only lanes; logistics chiefs like a UPS director interviewed here believe a similar approach for freight traffic would help the gridlock. Humes deplores the relative spending of China, Europe, and the United States on transportation: the US simply isn't keeping up, he says, with a gas tax stuck in the nineties and zero mass infrastructure ideas in the works. If we are stuck with car-centered infrastructure, says Hume, the best alternative may to work to replace the consumer fleets with self-driving cars -- but cars that don't allow humans to take over, because the cars will eventually be better drivers than humans ever can be. And if you doubt that humans are crappy drivers, he has an entire chapter called "Friday the 13th" that tells the story of seemingly every single person killed in the US by automobiles that day. (Auto deaths by year are usually around 40,000 in the US, averaging out to 110 people a day. Guns got nothin' on the automobile.)

A book called Door to Door: The World of Transportation should cover much more than it did. The two paragraphs above give it far more organization than it had itself, because it was mostly about the port -- with odd chapters like the logistics of soda cans thrown in. There are better books written about infrastructure (Infrastructure: A Field Guide) better books written about transit options (Straphanger), better books on shipping, ((90% Of Everything), and so on. Again, this is enjoyable enough to read, it''s just not a good as a book on transportation.

[Matt Hooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2011, Interstate 405 in Los Angeles shut down for a weekend for construction and maintenance – and the city braced for the worst.

More than 400,000 cars and trucks wedge themselves onto the 405 every single day – a number well above its designed capacity. The shutdown was part of a plan to add additional lanes to the freeway (all of the bridgework that had to take place without traffic interruptions would be packed into the two-and-a-half-day shutdown). The plan for what was billed as “Carmageddon” was designed by a military engineer who had built highways in the aftermath of the most recent invasion of Iraq. Hospitals added staff to their emergency rooms, celebrities were enlisted to tweet about the benefits of staying off the road, stoplights were reprogrammed.

And then nothing happened.

The freeway shut down and people … adjusted accordingly. There was no pile-up of cars on surrounding side streets. There was an uptick in transit usage. There was an uptick in bike usage. More people walked and carpooled and got from A-to-B in greener ways. Carmageddon never happened.

Edward Humes uses this anecdote as a jumping-off point for his book “Door-to-Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation” – a delightful, fast-paced snapshot of how people and goods move from point-to-point via ship, railcar, truck and automobile. And this anecdote, with its undercurrent of “what if our conventional wisdom about transportation and infrastructure is wrong?” threads its way throughout his narrative. What if larger cars are more unsafe than smaller ones? What if adding lanes to crowded highways makes them more crowded? What if our instant gratification, door-to-door economy is limited only by our pitiful, dilapidated infrastructure?

You’ve probably heard the transportation soapbox screed before. More than 61,000 of our bridges are structurally deficient, and a third of those are “fracture critical” – which really does not sound promising at all. We’re pissing away $124 billion annually in lost productivity due to traffic. Our gasoline tax hasn’t budged since the first year of Bill Clinton’s first administration. Car crashes are the leading cause of death (as of 2015) for Americans under age 31. Our cars – which cost on average $1,049 per month – typically sit idle 22 hours a day. A tiny fraction of Americans rely on public transit to move about.

To quote Humes: “America’s transportation future owes as much to greed, gamesmanship, and hubris as sensible design. Perhaps more.”

There are simple fixes for all of this. Raise the gas tax and use the windfall to fix our highways and bridges. Bond out improvements for airports. Implement congestion pricing in our cities to reduce gridlock and raise more money for transportation modernization. Invest in public transportation – not just expensive rail projects, but bus rapid transit as well. Encourage partnership between ride-sharing companies and bike/scooter rental companies and local transit systems.

These are proven fixes for what ails us – but, like most government-involved initiatives, political will is a prerequisite.

And that political will is in short supply.