Shared Thoughts & Shared Mobility

This third episode will focus on expert analyses from a team of expert panelists who we interviewed here at the University of California, Irvine. They were chosen based on their expertise in the field of transportation systems, travel behavior, urban design of transportation systems, and in particular on transportation system sustainability. This expert analysis is paired with our insights as well.

Audio Link:

Transcript

Italicized indicates points when interview transcriptions were included.

Anthony: Welcome back to yet another episode of Shared Thoughts and Shared Mobility. In the previous episode of Shared Thoughts and Shared Mobility we were able to talk to some locals from Long Beach and Riverside regarding their experience with the public transit and transportation systems of the respective cities. I am excited to see how these concepts are contextualized across the disciplines and whether the other professors have touched upon them as well.

Cindy: Today, Anthony and I will be introducing another perspective on sustainable transportation: an expert’s analysis. We had the chance to sit down with some astounding experts in the field of Urban Planning, Public Policy, and Civil Engineering. I personally interviewed Professor Hyland from the Transportation Department of UCI’s Civil Engineering Department.

Anthony: And I interviewed Professor Garde from the Urban Planning and Public Policy department and Professor Michael McNally also from the Civil Engineering Department. Before we dive into the interview, let us introduce the experts.

Professor Hyland

Cindy: Professor Hyland’s work focuses on automotive vehicles and their impacts on sustainable transport systems. We had the privilege of attending a lecture given by Professor Hyland in which he talked about shared transportation infrastructure. He also discussed the feasibility of electric multimodal transportation for sustainability in cities.

Here’s a quick reminder of what we’ve been talking about so far in this podcast:

[Cindy: So I just wanted to ask, in your own words, please define the terms shared mobility and public transportation for me.

Hyland: Ok, great question. I guess I’ll start by distinguishing them: So let’s say that public transportation is maybe a subset of shared mobility. The key word with public transportation is “public,” which typically means “publicly owned”–government owned. Most of the time, [it’s] publicly operated, government operated, but sometimes the operations are contracted out to private companies. Not so much in the U.S., but in European countries, a lot of the operations are contracted out. So shared mobility, the “sharing” being the key aspect there, I think is basically any type of transportation mobility other than where individuals own and operate their own vehicles. So if you buy a car and drive it yourself or buy a bike and use it yourself, that’s not shared mobility. Other types of shared mobility include things like bike share systems, Uber and Lyft. And I think public transportation is also should be considered shared mobility.

Cindy: Oh great! So shared mobility is like the umbrella term and then public transportation is when it falls under the category.

Hyland: That’s the way I see it. So I think the term shared mobility is newer than public transportation and has kind of connotations associated with it and other probably bad terms as new mobility bike share or scooter share Uber and Lyft. But kind of in the definition of my mind is either sharing of assets or sharing of space, in which a train and a bus are certainly examples where people were sharing space–sharing vehicles.]

Cindy: So from what I gathered, shared mobility can be seen as a contemporary concept, falling under the category of transportation sustainability. It’s sustainable because more people can utilize the transportation system in an efficient manner. Hyland then expanded on this idea, by talking about renting bicycle and scooter docks in certain cities. Our UPPP team found this particularly interesting, since these docks serve as another form of shared mobility for residents in Long Beach. However, is renting the docks worth the pay? Here’s what Profesor Hyland has to say:

[Yeah, so the fee structures seem to change city by city, but there’s a reason why they’re changing city by city. So people use bike sharing systems for different purposes. One of the main purposes is for tourists to have ease of getting around the city, particularly if you’re familiar and able to ride a bike, you can see more of a city in an area in a day than you can if you’re just walking. So I’m guessing the Long Beach case it seems to be–I’ve only looked briefly where the station are located–but they’re pretty much all along the ocean. So I think … my guess would be a big portion of it would be for tourists. But in bigger cities, a lot of these systems are built to provide first personal access to transit systems, but that’s another major use of them. So when it comes to the fee structures, so I’ve seen anywhere from the first 15 minutes to the first 45 minutes for free (in regards to renting bicycles and scooters).]

Cindy: Professor Hyland also responded to our questions about a new form of shared mobility we discovered in Long Beach:

[Cindy: I don’t know if you saw the other photo I sent you, but it was about the water taxis, which I found really interesting because it’s currently new to the locals too, so it’s not just me, so I was just wondering what’s your take on this new–I assume boat system–to transport people.

Hyland: Yeah. So there’s a few of these around the country.

Cindy: Oh really?

Hyland: Yeah. So I mean, this is not my area of expertise, but the Manhattan to Staten Island ferry is my guess would be the busiest one. So it’s ferries people from Manhattan to and from Staten Island. Chicago has a water taxi system. So these things can be used for moving a lot of people, which is the Staten Island ferry. But then there’s more niche type services, which is Chicago, and my guess would be most of the ones in California are niche. I mean they’re interesting and they’re kind of a way to travel and see things. If you’re a tourist, you want to get around, but there’s not a lot of people that are getting to work or getting to other places using these types of systems outside of the New York area. I’m sure there are cities in Europe too where if you don’t have a bridge, and you have two relatively dense land masses that connect to each other, then a ferry type system can work pretty well.

Cindy: Yeah, that’s why I was surprised. I’m just wondering what kind of routes these boats are going to. I’m assuming you don’t know either, because say if I was a student going to college at like Cal State Long Beach for example, I don’t think a water taxi would be an ideal–

Hyland: mode of transportation. No, probably not.]

Cindy: So, in Long Beach being a coastal city, it looks like the “water taxi” mode of transportation is not as accessible as it seems and we will discuss this in the next episode. And moving on from those points about shared mobility, Professor Hyland also gave insightful responses regarding some Long Beach locals’ thoughts about riding the public transit system. A common complaint among the locals was that the bus drivers are rude to their riders.

[Hyland: There’s a lot of these challenges that every public transportation system the United States has to deal with when it comes to issues about driver rudeness. I believe that’s beyond my area of expertise, but those are things that are important to riders: providing good quality service to them, I think very important.

Cindy: Yeah, because at least where I work, I work in an office place and we were trained on how to give good customer service, like how to reply in certain ways.

Hyland: Yeah so one thing to mention is that these public transit systems effectively have monopolies in urban areas. I mean their monopoly loses money but they provide the public service, but they’re not really competing with other companies in the sense that most businesses are; they’re not trying to compete on customer service. So it’s just not as stringent–there is not as much, how do I say, the users on public transit that can’t afford to own and operate their own vehicle can only complain so much. They can’t switch over to another service, so there’s not that much incentive for these operators to really push their drivers. Another aspect of this is that there’s a lot of negotiations between bus driver organizations, whether it’s official organized labor or not, in their contractual obligations with the public transit. For some public transit agencies is, I presume, do have mandatory training for their drivers on things like customer service, where my guess is that it’s not true for all public transportation system operators.]

Cindy: Overall, I found this section interesting because this kind of system has been monopolized. To sum up, I learned from Professor Hyland that public transportation and shared mobility have a lot more nuances than we think they have. It’s hard to approach these problems when we cannot define and understand what “shared mobility” and “public transportation” are. The process right now is complex, so it requires complex solutions, which we will address in the next episode. But for now, we’ll turn to Anthony and his interviews with two other experts on our topic.

Professor McNally

Anthony: Thanks, Cindy. So we reached out to another Professor within UCI Transportation Institute, who offered some similar insights, but also would disagree with his co-worker on a couple of instances. He offered other valuable insights into transportation sustainability as it is more related to travel behavior. He’s Professor Michael McNally.

[Ok, my name is Michael McNally, I am a professor in civil engineering here at UCI. Before that, I taught at USC both in engineering and in planning. My interests go way back into not only transportation but also cities, not that I have an overwhelming love for cities but trying to understand. I was raised in a small city in a primarily rural area. I went to school in Buffalo, which is a declining metropoulos zone and I came out to Southern California about 4 years ago. The last of those I have been teaching here at UCI. I am mainly interested in transportation training, modeling, forecasting and the policies that go with that. Transportation is but one component of overall human life, maybe broader than sustainability.]

Anthony: His research primarily focuses on travel behavior. It’s important that the scope of our interview generally was held to the United States and Southern California in particular. In regards to transportation sustainability, when I brought up notions of shared mobility, and the infrastructure and feasibility of transportation sustainability in the near future, he gave some great insight.

[There are projections that by 2020, by 2025 that all cars will be electric and autonomous. Do you see that happening in any possible even dream world. No it’s not. It’s these technologies are very difficult to design, to develop. They’re expensive right now and they’ll stay expensive until we get large markets behind it. Now can sustainability be addressed. Yeah, it has to start being addressed but it can be addressed via such things as electric cars are coming, they’re here already. Maybe we need more incentives for those. When we talk about increasing the state gas tax, which took place a year or two ago,  they were imposing a fee on electric vehicles.

Why not just give electric vehicles a free ride. Let’s encourage that, so people sit there and save  I can save that hundred bucks every year if I can ride that vehicle. That doesn’t seem to do it. They just want people to pay the real costs, but if someone is doing behaviors that are good, you should subsidize those that includes public transit in general and include, I think, electric vehicles even if it’s wealthy people buying them. We need more of them out there. We needed infrastructure built to recharge those vehicles.]

Anthony: So, basically, Professor McNally is stating that it’s important to incentivize people to become sustainable and thus that is one important component of travel behavior. To add on to that, it’s important that in the discussion about transportation sustainability, that the market and economics are also discussed. This is extremely important to facilitating these notions of incentivization that we have been talking about so far in regards to infrastructure as a whole. While general concepts of sustainability such as ‘shared mobility’, ‘greenhouse gas emissions / pollution’ etc. are important to mention, they have to be placed in an existing framework that is driven by economics and by consumers who respond to such incentives.

As we have mentioned the electric car thus far as a material entity, the car in it of itself cannot just be seen as a part of the infrastructure – this is where human behavior also rears its head.

[What about the idea the car goes beyond just a means of transportation. It’s not just a mobility device, it’s an investment you make and it has certain value associated with it. They’re going to change over time, yes, but it’s not going to change overnight. And those are things that we have to start to realize, that these things being thrown out by different worlds where everyone lives in big cities and drives shared vehicles and public transit. Ok, that exists today. Move to New York if you want that, move to San Francisco, move to Chicago, move to most other cities in the world and they have those and tons of other problems as well.]

Anthony: Going beyond the value of a car, one of the main arguments that Professor McNally introduced was the idea of controlling growth as a primary means of achieving sustainability. He first discusses (in this excerpt) about the idea of sprawl, which is a fundamental concept where, generally, people’s preferences for lower density areas causes them to spread out geographically.

[Well, ok, let me give you the classic case of sprawl. Let’s starting with something that’s constrained geographically. Say it’s an island. Let’s say it’s all natural rock formations, hills, swamps, wild animals, trees and then someone locates at the tip of the island, builds a little village there, maybe a little trading port. Then, if it starts growing you need kind of some farmland, you start cutting down some trees and filling the swamps. Now, it’s an island. It’s a long narrow island. You start moving up the island and eventually the farms get taken over by housing and what was housing is taken over by bigger buildings and industry, ports and things like that. It just continues to move up the island and as it moves up, all the trees are being cut down, eventually all the hills are shaved off, all the swamps are filled in and somewhere else slightly less 400 years later it’s called Manhattan. Absolute pure sprawl. But now it’s considered to be, right, the exact opposite of sprawl. Sprawl occurs as a step in the growth process and eventually that process turns into Manhattan and other cities in the world. So don’t consider sprawl to be the derogatory term that’s used to capture some ungainly position in the process. Almost like, you know, it’s a teenager whose face is broken out and he’s clumsy and dresses badly, has greasy hair. He may turn out to be a wonderful person three years later just like he was four years before. It’s a step in the process. Cities are ugly at some point and they change. If you don’t want that ugly stage, control growth or speed it up. It’s all growth.]

Anthony: Thus, the concept of sprawl can complicate sustainability because of its direct and indirect impacts on growth. Growth can be classified in many different arenas: specifically in economic growth, population growth, and technological growth to name a few. Growth is important for transportation sustainability, because as Professor McNally mentioned, growth can be one way in which more sustainable systems could be achieved, or the control of growth in particular.

[All, depending on what part you can start controlling. People want to control the growth and transportation called congestion. That’s growth. If we can control that, to control the people who are driving the cars and riding the buses, don’t let any people live in that area. Why not? I mean growth is the bottom line. So many people that can fit sustainably in an ecosystem. So many species, predator prey relationships that change. If you work with humankind, why do we think we are immune from those laws? You put too many people in an area and what happens is the market takes over in terms of pricing to favor those species that are best adapted to that. So if you’re adapted to have the ability to pay more for congestion pricing, you’ll stay in that area. The person who can’t leaves. That’s why there’s out movement from San Francisco outlying area. If you can’t afford the rents that are increasing because of the tech industry up there.]

Anthony: Thus, growth in it of itself is a difficult concept to grasp – because of its sheer enormity. Behavior as we have discussed so far, sounds like an esoteric and abstract concept, and in fact it is difficult to break down, but Professor McNally does a great job at simplifying this concept with regards to sustainability.

[Human behavior can be totally malleable but if you have something that you’ve basically built habits over time, those habits are hard to change. It’s an addiction of sorts. All right. People are addicted. Even if they chose initially to drive their cars around, it’s a lifestyle that’s developed. It’s not just their behavior. It’s the entire infrastructure you see around you that’s designed at that level. You just can’t snap your fingers and have it disappear. You just can’t add public transportation. It’s doesn’t have the same level of service. The so-called first mile last mile problem, it’s a lot bigger than you think it is. There’s only so much transit that actually works and getting to and from on either end is almost impossible in most cases unless you have something like New York City, for example, other big cities. People that live in those cities, the biggest difference between people who live in those cities and people who don’t, is the people who live in those cities cannot possibly understand why people who don’t live in those cities dumped. They just don’t see it. Why would you want to live in North Dakota. People in North Dakota don’t ask people in New York why would you wanna live in New York. People that want to live in a place like that, they say move to New York and don’t come back. I think people should have choices on that level. Should those choices be sustainable? Yes and it’s the current choice situation sustainable? No, but you can’t change it overnight.]

Anthony: In summary, the perspectives that we have gained from the expert analysis so far revolved around the technical and some psychological perspectives surrounding travel in general. Sustainability is complicated by many different mechanical factors as well as social factors that are important to distinguish and that the experts have done a thorough job of explaining.

Professor Garde

Anthony: Finally, we interviewed Professor Ajay Garde of Urban Planning and Public Policy about how urban planning is important in cities in regards to transportation sustainability. He will give us perspective into Riverside and Long Beach as an urban planner.

[So I am an associate profession in the department of Urban Planning and Public Policy. I initially was trained as an architect and worked, in fact, as an architect. Now, after completing my PhD in urban planning, I now kind of do what is known as Urban Design Scholarship. My research has been addressing all the issues that are generally related with urban design, urban form, sustainability and so on and so forth. It’s really broad in some ways and in fact, we are also going to look into the issue of transportation and urban design access in the next year. There’s a grant that I am co-PI on and that’s also coming up next. So in general, that’s what I’ve been doing all along so far.]

Anthony: Professor Garde gave very pertinent expert analysis regarding Riverside in particular and the sustainability issues surrounding 1. Environmental sustainability and 2. The Economic Issues surrounding urban planning of transportation systems.

[So that’s one side of the story. Riverside City, Riverside counties and San Bernardino Counties, they’ve been annexing county land and so they have more land to develop. That puts more pressure on the transportation system. 91 Freeway, there was one time and actually, I came for the job interview that was almost like 15 years back, I had a friend in Riverside. I still live in Riverside and he takes the metro, by the way, to go to work in downtown Los Angeles. And so I was driving from here to go to his, even no, sometimes when I have to go, the 91 freeway is almost like a parking lot. Nothing is moving. The freeway is stuck and people are wasting time. I think that’s overall why it’s not sustainable. One, there is gas emissions and greenhouse gas emissions. Two, people obviously are wasting time, which is precious time. Physically, it’s tiring, exhausting. Medically, it’s not a very good idea to spend, you know research has associated this with obesity. I mean I am skeptical about it. There is maybe some some evidence there, I’m not sure, I haven’t looked at myself so I’m not going to talk about that. I think that in terms of public health that’s not good. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions it’s not good. Plus we can’t just keep building freeways and you know, there is no end to it in some ways.]

Anthony: The story of Riverside then, to the urban planner expert, is its geographic location and how its history has impacted its subsequent transportation development. Riverside, as we have talked about, has lower population density. The development of the 91 Freeway has impacted transportation systems by providing more opportunities for those to live in more affordable housing in the Inland, while also contributing to congestion on the freeways by going to jobs not within Riverside. Thus, one of the most important things to analyze as an urban planner is how people utilize the transportation system and how the common person can have an impact on the transportation system.

Anthony: To the urban planner, one thing that we can do as laypeople is to make conscientious choices about how we approach transportation. Let’s hear a part of this argument.

[I think most people respond to incentives and disincentives. Let’s just think in terms of more choices transportation. Right now, public transit is not a preferred mode of transportation transit because there are all kinds of issues and problems with it. Right now there are neither incentives nor disincentives. So people take their car to let’s say travel from Riverside to Los Angeles or Long Beach to Los Angeles. That is the easiest most convenient. I’ve been doing that for 20 years why change. When that becomes difficult, I’m stuck in traffic for one hour, this does not make sense. The disincentive is I am stuck in traffic, more GHG emissions admission, more policy saying that you cannot, I mean some of these have been in place for some time. If there is some employer in the region with more than a hundred people you have to come up with policies to reduce the vehicle miles traveled. So they give incentives. UC Irvine actually gives what they call sustainable transportation. So if you’re walking or biking to work, first of all, you’re not paying for parking, so you get some incentive. Some of these policies are kind of geared toward easing up the problem.]

Anthony: Just to break this apart, Professor Garde here is mentioning about how the public transportation system does not really have standardized incentives or disincentives, which was corroborated by our research findings into public transportation. We also think it would be pertinent to introduce standardized incentives or disincentives for having people use the public transit systems, because psychologically, it is more rewarding for someone (just like for taxes).

[Right now it’s not so compelling, the situation is not so compelling that people will take public transit. Public transit is inefficient because the infrastructure and the critical mass doesn’t exist. So what can the layperson do?  The layperson makes choices based on what options they have and what are the most efficient for them, effective for them. Not everybody is suddenly going to move into a hybrid car. Electric cars are expensive, hybrid cars are more expensive, so public transit is one option and those things are another option. Another thing is once once your incentives are no longer incentives, that is, it’s no longer convenient to take your car to work every day, you would probably take public transit twice a week or something or carpool or something else. People have started doing that. I mean they realize that this is more efficient and that they can still do that. So one, your incentives are gone and then there are disincentives that through policy and by personal choice, this is not working anymore. So I think a lot of things need to happen to give more options to the layperson, everyday person who is commuting and most of the commuters commute for jobs from home to work and to go back home. I think that once that is made a little bit easier, other options kick in. People will change. You cannot force change. Policy, incentives, disincentives change and then behavior follows. I can give an example when I was working in New Delhi I was changing two buses to go from home to work. I mean almost from one end of the city to another and I would do that because there were no other options. In fact, private vehicles were too expensive, taxes could go up. Simple things that would change behavior pattern is gas prices or whatever energy you use to drive your car. I mean the prices have been fluctuating a lot these days. A fifty dollars an hour or whatever their unit is of gasoline is, we are not going to see that anymore.]

Anthony: So, in essence, simplifying concepts for the layperson is really important for communicating policy changes and to the urban planner, an important perspective is how cities respond to people’s changed demands and this is what Professor Garde has been mentioning through these pulled excerpts.

Anthony: There is also the general concept of accessibility as the “ability of an individual to reach their desired goods and services necessary” and how accessibility affects different demographics of people in cities such as seniors, those with disabilities, commuters and the homeless. This is but another common string that we saw with our experts and it is particularly important in the sustainability discussion.

Cindy: Well thank you for your information, Anthony, it was super helpful. In retrospect, comparing our interviews, I feel like the big distinction between my interview with Professor Hyland is that he defined nuances between shared mobility and public transportation. I feel like he did skim over a little bit of human behaviors which is what you and McNally talked about right?

Anthony: Right, right. Professor McNally kind of touched more on the human behavior aspects, so how do people interact with the transportation system and how do they respond to things that change within transportation systems and I think that’s good to build off of our definitions of public transportation and shared mobility because those two things are impacted by people. So it’s not just the infrastructure that matters, it is about how people actually use the infrastructure. So that’s kind of the perspective Professor McNally brought to the table. And then Professor Garde took kind of the narrowest approach, which was mostly about how people, or policy makers really, deal with transportation decisions, especially in cities, so I think that is something interesting that they brought to the table.

Cindy: Yeah I’m really grateful that they took the time to give us these insights about the different categories concerning transportation. It just makes me wonder how we could placate all these three together because it does seem kind of alienating that it is us as the locals, the riders, the transportation versus the policy makers that make these decisions.

Anthony: Right, and I think that is very important to discuss and to bridge because, as Professor Garde mentiontined and as we talked a little bit, the lay person doesn’t understand the bits that the policy makers understand. The lay person has to understand things from their perspective and when you put things in the lay person’s perspective it is much more impactful than it is for policy makers to spew facts that could be true, right. They’re probably the ones who have done the research, have done the background to give the evidence for their case, but the lay person, at least for me, I wouldn’t be very convinced unless they actually have looked into my shoes and said, how would you have responded to these changes or how would the common person understand these changes are for their benefit.

Cindy: Yeah, that’s why I think transportation, this field is so important because it’s multifaceted. You need many experts from different spectrums of this field to put in their input. Hylad being from the civil engineering, he needs to give that side to it and with the other experts I’m sure.

Anthony: Yeah. Professor McNally from the same transportation institute that Professor Hyland is in and Professor Garde from urban policy so really I think it boils down to an interdisciplinary approach and so this is kind of the way that we’ve approached this podcast and that type of stuff. But it’s really important to take different perspectives and try to meld them together like we have kind of here, so that we can tackle these problems from different sides.

Cindy: Yeah we’re going to tackle that in episode five so.

Anthony: Yeah. So stay tuned for that. Wow that was quite a lot of interesting input from differing perspectives. We would like to take the time to thank Professor Garde, Professor McNally, and Professor Hyland for taking the time to talk with us. Let’s let this information sink in a little and we will come back to talk about it in episode 4 where we will share our own perspectives on sustainable transportation. See you then!

Cindy: See ya!