One reason why the truck traffic out of the LA/LB ports doesn't seem to have declined, despite more traffic going out on trains, is that a large chunk - possibly as large as or larger than the percentage carried out of the basin by rail directly from the port area - of the incoming container traffic is actually destined for the LA Basin or Southern California someplace.

The LA Metro area has a manufacturing and general commercial economy competitive in size with some European countries (smaller than CA as a whole, but still big), and some container-load traffic is in fact used there directly. It goes by truck. Also, there's a lot of that reloading business in the Inland Empire, where they take stuff from marine containers and reload into highway trailers or domestic containers for redistribution. It moves by truck too - been on 710 or 60 lately since the late 1990s?

SCAG at one time had a scheme for a local maglev to move boxes from the ports to the inland warehouse areas, reducing the freeway truck traffic. Never happened (yes, I hear Bob chuckling back there - if it had happened the cost would have been huge with appropriate gold-plating and political grease, and the cost to use it would have made trucks stay the mode of choice). And that short length and distributed-destination type of haul is not a conventional rail market. Oh well.