Shared Thoughts & Shared Mobility

The fourth episode provides some insight into our research on the subject matter and our analysis. We propose some of the responses to the expert panel and local opinions and continue to expand them further. We dive into the subject of transportation sustainability from an academia standpoint and from our student perspective as well. We have a conversation on proposing the real problems in some depth.

Audio Link:

Transcript

Aidan: Welcome back to another episode of Shared Thoughts and Shared Mobility. In the previous episode, we learned about how experts perceive topics related to transportation sustainability. Well, in this episode we will be discussing our analysis of transportation systems and sustainability as it is related as a whole, and to be specific, Riverside and Long Beach.

Catherine: Exactly. In response to Cindy’s interview with Professor Hyland, I feel that I understand the concept of shared mobility and public transportation on a deeper level.

Aidan: That is really good, Catherine. What are some points do you find significant during the interview with Professor Hyland?

Catherine: One thing, I’m glad that we made some distinctions on a term shared mobility serving as an umbrella term for an aspects that are shared, such as the shared-ride system and the shared-use system. It’s also interesting to learn how water taxis aren’t that useful for people going to work on a day-to-day basis. It makes me wonder why would Long Beach advertise water taxis, when it’s not even accessible. From their catchy slogan, “Go off roading, Long Beach style!”, it seems to encourage everyone to travel on boat.

Aidan: I mean I suppose it goes to show that there’s more to transportation than just creating a new exciting option to go on. The city probably wanted to show people that they are making progress, improvements but in the end, those ads are simply misleading. Well I mean, I personally went to Long Beach to do interviews. So when I first saw the water taxi, I thought it was kind of like a tour boat rather than like a, you know, a regularly used public transportation.

Catherine: Well said, Aidan! Listening to Cindy’s interview with Professor Hyland also made me realize how there’s so many tradeoffs when facilitating transportation systems, for example, since the bus has a monopoly in urban areas, that means you don’t have much competition.

Aidan: Oh yeah I remember that part, but do you mind elaborating?

Catherine: Well as you’ve heard from some of our Long Beach locals in episode 2, people were unhappy with customer service they experienced when taking the bus or Metro. As Professor Hyland mentioned, not all public transit departments would train the drivers about upholding good customer service. I personally think that this is very unfortunate because many customers value a pleasant riding experience from their drivers.

Aidan: I agree that is a big concern. From what I’ve been hearing from the locals and based on what I interviewed with, many of the things that the Long Beach locals want to change about the public transit required difficult tradeoffs. That includes like maybe more training and more civilized drivers.

Catherine: Yeah I believe that this also leads back to incentivizing human behaviors and perceptions. If we create a public transportation system that’s reliable and pleasant, it wouldn’t be difficult to convince people to use it more. But there’s this problem: the act of convincing. Maybe instead of telling people what to do, we should create systems in spaces in which people would want to use them.

Aidan: That is definitely a problem we need to still work on. To back up on our discussion, we are now going to pull together resources and analysis and interviews from different research and scholarly articles. We will first be going over the general concept and problems surrounding transport sustainability and shared mobility, as well as some analysis surrounding those problems. Then we will focus on a comparative analysis of transportation sustainability and shared mobility surrounding Riverside and Long Beach.

Cindy: There are a couple of points of importance in regards to transportation sustainability and how solutions need to be catered to some specific topics. So we did some research on the 2012-2030 Five Regional Transportation Plan by the Southern California Associations of Governments. So regarding population growth, for example, we have an important question. How can transportation sustainability continue to exist when population growth needs to be taken to account? Well, we know that population growth continues to be a major issue and the influx of people moving into Southern California is only expected to continue to grow. Therefore, population density differences in Riverside and Long Beach may change as a result of population growth and the use of transportation can change. Moreover, population growth will unlock other forms of public transit, such as subways and trams, which will be more beneficial to shared mobility in local areas. Regarding multimodal transportation systems such as highways, train rails, cars, etc., we must explore how different modes of transportation interact with one another and how they can work together to produce efficient transportation systems. Currently, multimodal transportation can be inefficient because of the hassle of different transportation systems not being convenient or being as private. Regarding economics, it is a huge field of transportation sustainability that should be addressed because it is at the fundamentals of a lot of how transportation systems operate, such as the financial burdens of infrastructure and taxes.

Anthony: Yeah so for example, I think you brought a great point in terms of infrastructure and taxes. One of the great examples of this is that the California gas tax, which was kind of voted on earlier this year and in previous years. Basically the purpose of the California gas tax was to allow people or to allow policy makers the opportunity to gain some revenue to further improve their transportation systems and so on. This brings us back to the economics point, because it’s important to know where taxpayer money is going in terms of helping our transportation systems improve. And so I think that’s a good point in terms of talking about infrastructure and the importance of economics on infrastructure.

Cindy: Yeah and I see how economics dictate a lot how transportation systems function, like doing some fiscal analysis in these separate cities, in terms of public transit usage and subsidizing sustainable practices. Right, and these can have massive implications at how policy surrounds public transit. So yeah, overall the economy can also dictate the number of jobs that can be generated from new generation of sustainability enforcement, construction, and operations.

Anthony: Okay great. Thanks Cindy for sharing about those three major points. So Cindy has kind of talked about population growth, multimodal transportation systems, and the field of economics. And I’m gonna touch on three more kind of general points in regards to transportation sustainability. So the first point I want to go over is the difference between transportation demand management and transportation systems management. So those are two overlapping management concepts that are outlined in this regional transportation plan. And I first wanted to find what transportation demand management is. So the way that it’s defined in the in the guide is that it’s basically meeting demands in a sustainable way. So how do people or how do policymakers and transportation infrastructure meet the demands for people in a sustainable way? So one great example of this is the HIV Lane, also known as the high occupancy vehicle lane. So when you’re driving on the freeway on the left lane, usually there’s always this carpool sign with two plus people or three plus people. And it’s basically to encourage people to carpool, right? That was the whole purpose of building the HIV Lane. They also in recent years allowed electric vehicles to drive in the HIV lanes as a way to incentivize people to also drive electric vehicles. So that’s a way that demand can be managed because while it doesn’t deteriorate from resources, it just takes the existing infrastructure and meets the demand in a more sustainable way. Next I want to define what transportation systems management is as defined. That is really about how is the existing transportation system? How can that transportation system become more effective for the people that are already using it? So that’s the main question around systems management. And that really has to do it, maybe like traffic signaling, that’s a really important part of this whole argument because when people are driving on the local streets, sometimes it’s very inconvenient when you just go red light after red light. You just want to go straight through. Green Light, Green Light, Green Light. And so traffic signals are actually designed around like peak hours and designed around when there’s gonna be the most demand for it, really. So when traffic signals go based on what the demand is, then the system is more efficient. And so that’s systems management, and you can see that I’ve talked a lot about demand in systems, so you can say that they’re very interrelated. The second point I want to go over is in regards to public health concerns. So transportation sustainability is not only about the infrastructure and the economy, it’s also about how the public health is involved in that. So for example GHG emissions are basically greenhouse gas emissions, are a very important part of this. Walkable streets. For example, for people to practice physical exercise, bikeable streets. That’s a big concern with transportation infrastructure. Also when you build transportation infrastructure, people want to interact with each other and people want to be able to get to places of recreation and people want to go to places, exercise in a nice and convenient manner. So that’s one of the big things in regards to transportation sustainability in general is, how can sustainability address public health concerns? And so we’ve already kind of talked about those things. And then the last point I want to bring up in regards to sustainability is about land use. So land use is a very big part of transportation infrastructure in five different ways as outlined by this regional guide. One is about better place making, basically creating better places for people to work. And when you create more jobs at the places where people actually live, it reduces the amount of congestion and reduces the amount of need for cars, because the distance between when people are living and where people are working is much shortened. In second, this would also cause an economic benefit for taxpayers, which is always good. And then we already talked about public health and the environment and its benefits. That’s another way that when used, could be used to sustainability benefit, and then greater responsiveness to the changing house market, basically meaning that sustainability needs to be adaptive to the changing needs of the people living there and also of the pricing of houses in that general area. And then the fifth point is about access and mobility, which we already kind of talked about making more walkable streets. That’s a big part of transportation sustainability.

Cindy: Well thank you Anthony for all these points, they were super informative. So now we’re going to shift this down to a general analysis of one of the cities. So I’ll be covering Long Beach. So in general, to review what Long Beach offers according to the Long Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau website, they have the following public transportation services, just to review. So one of them is the Metro Link. So it’s called the Metro Blue Line, which is L.A.’s first light rail transit system, which runs from 7th Street in downtown L.A. to downtown Long Beach. So if you guys didn’t know this, bicycles are allowed on the Metro rail system. Yeah, with some restrictions during peak hours, and bicycle racks are available on a first-come, first-serve basis on Metro buses. So it’s kind of cool how that they merge like that, right? Yeah. And concerning the Long Beach transit, which is another word just for public buses, right. It’s available on both land and water, which we’ve discussed earlier, right. And so for only a dollar twenty five for a one way fare, Long Beach transit links people with local destinations, such as Belmont Shore, Alamitos Bay, and Cal State Long Beach, right. And something I didn’t know after researching this was the bright ped Passport shuttle, which offers service to major Long Beach attractions. So this is more like a tourist shuttle and it’s free throughout the downtown area and takes people quickly to downtown cultural spots. So this is more convenient for like summer months, where you can hail water taxis, which is the water part I was referring to. And they’re usually called like Aquabus or the Aqualink, with services between the Queen Mary and Alamitos Bay landing. As we mentioned in the previous episodes, these Aquataxis, although advertised, I suppose is more for tourism, even though it may be misleading and it’s not really friendly to going to work or going to school, for example. To delve further into our research about Long Beach, this article from Long Beach Post, written by Jason Ruiz, was about Long Beach’s electric scooter pilot program, which offers some insight into how renting public scooters will be implemented in the city. And when Aidan and I visited the city of Long Beach, we actually saw these electric scooters in person, which was really cool for us. The scooter program will be operated similarily to the city’s existing bike share program, in which users can rent a scooter for a flat initiation fee, typically a dollar, and then pay about 15 cents for every minute the scooters are in operation. And then vendors will initially be limited to 150 scooters each when they officially introduce their program to Long Beach, but they could eventually apply for a second license that would allow them to double their scooter presence. And scooters will be limited to those over 18 unfortunately, and riders will be required to wear helmets while operating on city streets. The vehicles can travel up to 50 miles per hour. And on a similar note, Brian Addison’s Long Beach Post article shows how Long Beach is offering bus trips to UCLA, Las Vegas, and the Coachella and Stagecoach festivals. So aside from just the electric scooter program, there’s also this program to make public transit more relevant to the younger population and incentivizing that kind of culture, such as like Las Vegas and Coachella. But however I wanted to bring that point up, because as we research, we’ve figured that the main audience or the main rider’s population in buses is homeless people, in fact. So the fact that we’re trying to get younger populations to go on, is like important to me because there’s a reason why homeless people are attracted to these buses and it’s for many reasons, right, like the affordability and the fact that it’s public and it’s its own spatial, and to go on to that point about spacialness, according to a research paper titled “Homelessness Travel Behavior and the Politics of Transportation Mobilities at Long Beach, California,” there was a poignant conversation between two homeless regulars in the paper about their experience and why they liked it–the public transportation system, specifically the buses. So one quote by a homeless person named Tim says “I got around on the buses, the trains. Matter of fact, they were my home because I would get a day pass. I’d ride the bus or I’d ride the train until it stopped running, because I didn’t have a place to live.” So I feel like that was such a poignant point, right, like it’s homeless people are mainly attracted to these public transportation systems because it’s like a home to them. They have nowhere else to go. And then another homeless person named Jesse in this research paper says, “I used to sleep on the bus ride all the way to Long Beach. go all the way to L.A. In time, it takes about an hour or so.” And then Tim, the other homeless person, would respond saying, “And then some of the operators would complain, some would just leave us on the streets, you know, because we were regulars. That’s the way we had to travel.” So I feel like this conversation between them shows that like the spatialness is very important to the mobile behaviors of homeless people and travel. In places where they feel included, they will go, but it’s unfortunate how like even the operators are, whether it is because of just their personal preferences or because of policy, they have to remove them. So while we mentioned in our earlier episodes that it’s really accessible to homeless people, in many ways it’s not. So there’s a lot of complexities tied into this, and I feel like this all ties down to behavior mobilities and it ties well with travel mobilities as well.

Anthony: All right, great! Thanks Cindy for sharing about Long Beach. And now I’m going to talk about Riverside, so Cindy kind of just left on the note about how homeless people utilize the public transport systems and kind of in contrast to that, in Riverside transportation is actually very catered towards both aging and the disability population. So on the Riverside transit agencies, and a lot of different transportation guides within kind of the Riverside scope, and you can look this up on a Google search as well, you can see a lot of things in their transportation system are very geared towards helping make transportation more accessible for those who are disabled and those who are aging, which are very important populations to think about when we’re talking about transportation sustainability.  And so like a couple ways that they do this is like they incentivize people to use the public transit systems, with senior discounts and that type of nature. And just to build off a little bit on that population analysis, is a history of the Metrolink. So in 1988 at the very top of the history of Metrolink, if you go into the History of Metrolink website, this is the very first event that pops up in 1988. The Riverside County residents actually approved a measure called Measure A, and it was a sales tax to help make transportation sustainability more available and to help make public transport transit more available for those in Southern California, but also in Riverside. So you can see that Riverside is actually kind of a pioneer in this kind of public transit field and especially since Riverside is from the Inland Empire. They had to be very innovative in terms of transportation sustainability. And so now I want to kind of go over a little bit of our research into a 2012 document from the Western Riverside Council Governments that addresses some sustainable goals in transportation, and they have four goals in particular. So I’ll go over them in a little bit of detail. Sustainable goal one was about just overall transportation programs. So the way that they were imagining this goal, it was that they would have collaboration and program administration in order to deal with basically the pressures of increasing growth in the Inland Empire and increasing traffic demands, basically congestion on the freeway. So they were going to do a lot of collaboration with the Riverside transit agencies with the our CTC, with a lot of different kind of sub private sectors within the transportation agencies of Riverside. And I think that’s actually a very important thing because in sustainability, it’s important that lot that the public and private sectors discuss things with each other in order to facilitate policy. The second sustainable goal that they covered was about how many vehicles or how many vehicle miles that were traveled by cars basically. So they wanted to reduce how many miles were traveled, which makes sense and also improved mobility for other modes of transportation such as public transit bicycling and pedestrians. And we touched on this a little bit with the general transportation sustainability, but it was explicitly stated in this document that they wanted to make better land use, to improve air quality, and to provide a network with which sustainability could be better achieved. And so all these working pieces come together to help meet this goal possible. And the third goal was about goods movement. So this is not something that we talked a lot about, but goods movement is basically how do goods move about in terms of industrial goods. So how do products come via boats, via airplane, via the railways, in those you know, those big box cars. So what they were going for was how can we be more sustainable with our movement of goods. And so they were anticipating having a rail infrastructure change and warehouse changes to make warehouse operations more sustainable as well as adopting industrial principles as well. And then the last sustainable goal is air transportation. So air transportation is basically they wanted to maintain and improve access to sustainable air transportation. Yeah so, Aidan, what do you think about Riverside’s goal to improve air transportation access?

Aidan: Well for me, on the one hand, airplane transportation is kind of necessary nowadays, in the United States, right? Because you need those flights to go to another city, if it’s like not in California, but on the other hand, if we think about the airport transportation by themselves, we can see that even for those flights, it’s nonsense to not do it all. If we think about the perspective from like gas consumption, carbon emissions. So the real question here is if this measure, like this intention to improve the access to the airport and transportation, can make Riverside more sustainable.

Anthony: Yeah I would I would tend to agree with what what you said. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. And that was basically the four sustainable goals that I want to talk about with regards to the Riverside Council of Governments.

Anthony: OK. Great. So now we’ve kind of talked a little bit about the city of Long Beach. And we talked a little bit about the city of Riverside. So now we’re going to just kind of do a comparative analysis of the two. So Cindy, I kind of noticed that Long Beach, you talked a lot about like water taxis, the electric scooter program, so kind of a common theme that I saw was just Long Beach has a lot of different types of transportation and lots of different types of shared mobility.Well yeah, I feel like it’s mainly because of not only the picturesque location, is also the demographics of Long Beach because well, everyone likes the beach, right? So Long Beach gets a lot of tourism. So I feel like policymakers need to try to gage their own transportation systems, like according to what the tourists want. So that’s why there’s a lot of new bus programs right now, that like brings them to the coastal areas for a nice view or just to have bikes ports and scooter parts to have a nice quick trip for a day to look around. And I think if it wasn’t for that these scenic views, like there wouldn’t be such a like, variety of these transportation systems.

Cindy: Well yeah, I feel like it’s mainly because of not only the picturesque location, is also the demographics of Long Beach because well, everyone likes the beach, right? So Long Beach gets a lot of tourism. So I feel like policymakers need to try to gage their own transportation systems, like according to what the tourists want. So that’s why there’s a lot of new bus programs right now, that like brings them to the coastal areas for a nice view or just to have bikes ports and scooter parts to have a nice quick trip for a day to look around. And I think if it wasn’t for that these scenic views, like there wouldn’t be such a like, variety of these transportation systems.

Anthony: Mmmm. Yeah I think you kind of mentioned like Long Beach being a kind of almost a more touristy city. And so that’s definitely probably in contrast to Riverside, Riverside as a part of the Inland Empire, their very recent kind of development there. And so it’s not as much as like a touristy background. It’s more like “this is a place where people like find affordable housing” and then they go to the coast to find jobs, so they go to Irvine, they might go to Long Beach, they might go to L.A.–just basically cities almost new, near to the coast so that they can find jobs and then they just go back to Riverside for the day. So public transportation is pretty important in Riverside, but in ways that are different than showing it for maybe like flair. Is that the right way of putting it?

Cindy: I feel like even both cities, like with the colleges that they each have, like you know Cal State Long Beach, right? And UC Riverside. Like with Cal State Long Beach, it’s a commuter kind of school. There’s not really an incentive to like live in housing there so, that’s why most college students would take the busses, back and forth from Long Beach. For UC Riverside, I’m not too sure though.

Anthony: Yeah. UC Riverside, it’s not as much of a commuter school, so actually they have like a trolley, like an electric trolley, and they have a Riverside Transit Agency, which actually partners with UC Riverside to provide like free transportation to UCR students, like along the corner of the campus, or along the perimeter of the campus. So it’s definitely sustainable transportation, it’s integrated at UC Riverside for sure.

Cindy: Definitely both cities would need some improvements, regardless. I mean with Riverside, there’s the sprawl problem, like we said earlier in our episodes, the density in Riverside it’s much less dense compared to Long Beach.

Anthony: Right. Right. I would definitely agree with that and maybe like to add something else to that: because of that population density, it might make it a little bit more difficult for RIverside to achieve sustainability, but I think that as people are starting to, again, find the more affordable housing near Riverside more in the Inland Empire area, that population density is going to maybe be an equalizer between the two cities. But that’s just like really projecting at this point.

Cindy: Yeah ’cause like that’s just one aspect. I mean with Long Beach, even though the population density is higher, I mean the tourism aspect could also be a curse because if it’s just for tourism that means the bike ports and the scooter ports aren’t used to go to the workplace, which is a daily task. So that means not everyone’s going to be using the bike or electric scooters for example. And then the bus systems are a whole ‘nother thing, with its own problems and then advantages, right?

Anthony: Yeah. Yeah I would tend to agree that. I just kind of want to maybe I ask one more thing, and we’ll talk about what we’re doing. In your discussion of Long Beach, you talked about like the homeless population and I suddenly noticed that like in Riverside, we couldn’t find as much research on the homeless populations and I’m wondering like why? Like I guess Long Beach has more like stuff on like homelessness or, you know, the culture on homelessness.

Cindy: I mean from the, I believe it’s the Jocoy et al. 2010 research paper that I talked about earlier, they talk about the certain kind of environment in which homeless people feel included. So that means they would most likely frolic to like the parks or the beach because it’s not only open and public, it’s like it’s the closest thing to home to them. So and also although like there are some rules with, remember the operators when they kick them out, things like that, like even some cities would try to have these policies like “no homeless people allowed.” So they literally drive homeless people from one city into a different city. So I feel like Long Beach is one of those cities where other cities move like homeless people and unfortunately, like yeah and I feel like it’s really unfortunate like especially from where I live in Santa Ana, that’s the same case. So I feel like some certain cities are just designated for these kinds of movements and mobility.

Anthony: Yeah, so like kind of as you talked about homeless population demographics are very important when we talk about transportation sustainability, just like the types of transportation systems that or the types of populations that these systems cater to, or are more favorable for providing incentives and disincentives, maybe in subtle ways as well.

Cindy: And yeah and I feel like, with transportation, it has to do a lot with motion, you know like with the homeless, like there’s not really much to do all day besides moving around. So that’s why they rely on those buses to either sleep on or like just sit there because they’re moving and it’s something to do, and that’s why they–with Long Beach being a beach–it’s like somewhere to go to and walk around on.

Anthony: Ok, so that’s basically our kind of comparative analysis. So stay tuned for the next episode, where we’re going to talk about solutions to transportation systems.