Community activists and environmentalists, worried about air pollution from the trucks, said they were surprised and disappointed to learn about the proposals.
"I don't like it at all," said Val Lerch, a Long Beach councilman who has been working on plans to upgrade the 710 Freeway. "I would much rather see more reliance on trains."
Instead of supporting new routes for trucks, the corridor authority should find ways to entice more shipping companies to use the Alameda Corridor, said Tom Plenys, transportation policy analyst for the Coalition for Clean Air.
"I cannot understand how they can be turning to building additional highways until they have filled this excess capacity," said Julie Masters, a Natural Resources Defense Council attorney who has represented community residents in lawsuits against the ports.
The Alameda Corridor was envisioned as a way to take all the freight not destined for delivery in Southern California off local roads and freeways. By 2015, the corridor was expected to carry about 45,000 containers a day -- about half the port's anticipated volume of 90,000.
Now, just 35 to 40 trains a day run through the corridor, which was designed to handle up to 150. At the same time, truck traffic on the Long Beach Freeway is expected to increase. In 2002, 47,285 trucks per weekday traveled on the 710. That is expected to hit 99,300 in 2020.
In the nearly two decades it took to plan and build the corridor, the shipping business changed so dramatically that the economic assumptions underpinning the project became obsolete, said Doherty and others.
Instead of taking goods off ships and putting them directly onto trains bound for points east, shippers now haul most of their imports by truck to hubs in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
There, the cargo is taken out of its original containers and repacked so recipients, such as large retail chains or automobile dealers, get exactly what they need. The products are then either loaded onto trains or put on trucks that go directly to warehouses for distribution.
Only the simplest shipping jobs -- containers that do not need to be repacked and can be loaded in precisely the order needed to set up a train bound for Kansas City or other locations east of California -- ride all the way through the corridor, Doherty said.
An additional 12% of the ports' imports -- about 2,400 containers a day -- is eventually shipped on the Alameda Corridor after being trucked to a facility in Carson, reorganized and put on trains.
