The explosion of the e-commerce economy has created an opportunity for thieves — and a conundrum for the railways.
That’s the title of an extensive report in The NY Times Magazine by Malia Wollan. It's a long article with lots of detail. (Full access at the link above.)
...Some 20 million containers move through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, including about 35 percent of all the imports into the United States from Asia. Once these steel boxes leave the relative security of a ship at port, they are loaded onto trains and trucks — and then things start disappearing. The Los Angeles basin is the country’s undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops and parking lots. Cases of reported cargo theft in the United States have nearly doubled since 2019, according to CargoNet, a theft-focused subsidiary of Verisk, a multinational company that analyzes business risks, primarily for the insurance sector. On CargoNet’s map of cargo-theft hot spots, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta and Memphis show up as distinct, high-incident red blobs. But the biggest blob, a red oblong smear, stretches out over the Los Angeles valley like molten lava.
Freight trains are massive mechanical constructions, but because they’ve been on the landscape for so long, they tend to be part of the background, like hills. In Los Angeles, however, trains roared back into the public imagination in late November 2021, when a local NBC affiliate ran footage from a section of Union Pacific tracks strewed with thousands of ransacked boxes. The video included a man with bolt cutters climbing up onto moving cars and a reporter’s calls to the packages’ intended recipients, as well as their reactions to seeing their emptied-out boxes. “I’m honestly just disgusted in human behavior,” said a woman in Seattle who was waiting for a car seat for her unborn baby. It was like an IMAX-scale version of those now-ubiquitous security camera videos of porch pirates sneaking off with deliveries.
The theft problem on the rails is huge — but also easier to spot than the larger theft problems with trucking which can happen anywhere. Certain rail corridors, especially the Los Angeles basin, are a target-rich environment, especially since thieves have learned how to decipher markings on containers, and possibly have advance information on valuable shipments. But trucking theft is also a problem.
More freight is moved on trucks than on trains, and much more is stolen off trucks, too. Trucking is a chaotic industry, with hundreds of thousands of companies, some as small as a single driver and a truck. Rail, on the other hand, is essentially duopolistic: Just two companies, Union Pacific and BNSF Railway, serve the entire western United States. (CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern Railway dominate the East.) Against trucks, thieves use various forms of digital forgery and cyberfraud, including something called a fictitious pickup, in which someone impersonates an authorized truck driver online and reroutes a truck’s load. This kind of theft increased almost 600 percent between 2021 and 2022, according to CargoNet data. And on the rails, some cargo — coal, grain, cement, fertilizer, petrochemicals, lumber — is just too cumbersome to appeal to thieves. It’s easier to run off with pallets of beer or the newest-issue Nikes.
But railroads have increasingly been vying to move more containerized freight. They want to make the most of the e-commerce boom. The fastest-growing segment of rail traffic is what’s called intermodal, which refers to shipping containers and trailers that move on more than one mode of transit: ships, trains and trucks. These containers often carry merchandise bound for stores or packages bound for consumers. Amazon, for example, now has its own branded containers, in part to meet its net-zero carbon emission goal (hauling a ton of goods on rail produces about eight times less emission than on a truck). Such intermodal trains tend to be long, which can make them more vulnerable.
It’s a big problem — but not so big that the corporate actors involved are willing to cut into their profits to do anything effective about it. The shipping industry resists putting more secure locks on their containers, or tracking devices because of the cost. It adds up when talking about 20 million plus containers a year — much easier to pass the theft costs along to everyone else.
The Class One railroads have embraced Precision Scheduled Railroading, which in practice means cutting operating costs as much as possible. Railroads have enjoyed record profits — at the expense of safety, workers, shipping customers, and the communities through which they pass. It’s behind disasters like Lac-Mégantic and East Palestine as railroads try to pinch every penny to maximize shareholder returns.
Not mentioned in the Times article is that Union Pacific had eliminated the railroad police in 2022 who had been covering the area in L.A. that was getting all the press attention over thefts, dumping the policing problem onto the police departments in the area. They transferred the costs of policing to the communities along the tracks to boost their profits.
From 2022:
However, one major development that may be directly correlated with the rise in theft has continuously been left out: In September of 2020, due to pandemic-related budget cuts, Union Pacific laid off an unspecified number of employees across the railroad system. Including members of its railroad-only police force. Despite record profits in the billions in the last quarter of 2021.
A Union Pacific worker, who asked to remain nameless, came forward to L.A. TACO. In their opinion, the company should “shoulder some of the responsibility instead of just pointing fingers.”
The Union Pacific Police department has jurisdiction over the 32,000 miles of track Union Pacific owns. Many of these "special agents" used to patrol this now infamous stretch of track. According to the source, the number of patrolling officers has been cut from 50 to 60 agents to eight, which the worker thinks has led to an increase in train robberies.
Insurance Companies are not happy with the situation, but have had limited success in getting the companies involved to take more effective action. The thefts are taking place on a scale where police are finding entire warehouses filled with stolen goods.
Railroads do not get enough attention, either from politicians or voters — yet they provide indispensable service and could make a massive difference in getting carbon out of transportation. Despite industry efforts to get more intermodal freight, Railroad Workers United links to a report from TRAINS that industry carloads continue their years-long decline. From the weekly rail news digest from RWU:
Editor's Note: The rail industry was giddy with excitement, boasting increased traffic loadings in the remaining weeks of 2023. That did not last long. Carload traffic appears headed into the toilet once again. Remember, this is a long term trend. The U.S. Class One railroads are moving 24% less freight than they did in 2006! For every 4 carloads we moved 17 years ago, we move just 3 today. This is unacceptable!
emphasis added
America’s railroads could do far better — and we can make a difference. You can sign up for weekly emails and even become a member of RWU. You don’t have to work for a railroad to sign up. If you are looking for practical ways to tackle Climate Change, please take a look at Solutionary Rail, the Climate Rail Alliance, the Railroad Passengers Association and whatever rail advocacy groups there are in your state, like the Empire State Passengers Association.
The absurdity of this entire situation is captured in a couple of incidents Wollan reports towards the end of The NY Times article. The 4 detectives working the cargo thefts were pulled off to the job — to cover the headline-grabbing threat of flash mobs shoplifting at shopping malls. And people getting arrested for cargo theft include homeless people just scavenging the packages discarded by thieves as they loot train containers.
I left the encampment discombobulated by the mismatch between the perpetrators (down-and-out men living in tents stealing goods someone else had already nabbed and discarded), and the victim (a multinational company valued at more than $1.5 trillion). The stuff had been taken unlawfully, yes, but part of the reason these companies manufacture items for so much less in Asia and then transport them thousands of miles in ships and trains and trucks is so they don’t have to pay the costs associated with adhering to environmental and labor laws here. Also, I was flummoxed trying to imagine how a man living in a tent would go about selling a stolen pet-grooming vacuum cleaner. What even is a pet-grooming vacuum cleaner?
emphasis added
Offshoring has made some people very rich — but the costs have been externalized to everyone else, and the carbon footprint is not good for the planet.
We have to do better.