The fifth and final episode of this podcast series is about proposing real solutions to both Riverside and Long Beach City Council based on all of the information that we have gathered up to this point. These solutions are based on research-based transportation studies and how the cities could be individualized to maintain sustainability efforts. We offer solutions on a grand scale and keep it general, so that future sustainable transportation systems may thrive.

Audio Link:

Transcript

Cindy: Welcome to Episode 5, the FINAL EPISODE of Shared Thoughts and Shared Mobility. Until now, we have listened to local opinions on public transit in Long Beach and Riverside. We’ve also listened to some expert opinions from an urban planning and civil engineering perspective, and provided our own analyses of the cities’ transportation systems.

Aidan: So in this last episode, we are going to talk about our solutions and visions of shared mobility in Southern California.

Catherine: We propose the following policy solutions that can be both practical and effective. As a disclaimer before we start talking about these solutions, our solutions are based on our own research. So for the first solution we propose to increase the frequency and the amount of destinations that are offered for both metros and trains for more convenience. A lot of our interviewees prefer to drive because they cannot reach their destinations by direct and short transit bus or train. Public transit agencies should therefore focus on providing services to more destinations that people frequent. What do you guys have to say about this?

Aidan: Well I mean I remember Prof. Hyland (2019) pointed out during the interview that these transit agencies only have a limited budget, so they can only run certain frequencies on certain lines. There is this process. There are a lot of trade offs right? If they add more bus lines, you have to reduce frequency on those lines. And another very important thing is the concept of “stop spacing”. So if you have more stops you have more chances for the system to get behind on reliability, like there will be more delays. And also because you’re stopping at each stop you’re going to need more buses to provide a certain headwear frequency. So like 15 minute frequency versus 30 minute frequencies.”

Catherine: Therefore, it is important to keep a balance between affordable costs, more stops and preventing traffic congestions. Governments and public transportation agencies should do thorough researches on local traffic conditions and population density. Coaches can also be considered for intercity or mid-range commute.

Now let’s move on to the second solution. So the solution is to start late night bus services. Our research Broussard says that people do not take public transit because they cannot get home by bus when they get off work late at night. Public transit companies should therefore consider adding more late night services to satisfy the needs of those generally working early and those who are too tired to drive.

Aidan: Well I mean this solution, based on my memory, mostly derived from that survey done by Congressman Mark Takano right? Because we talk about this in Episode 2 that people cannot get to their home when they got from their work because there was no night bus. I mean like no night bus services means that people will be less incentivised to utilize the public transit system and that can be an issue. The Riverside Transit Agency should address this.

Anthony: I think it’s also like a safety concern too. So when people are feeling too tired to drive that’s basically what I’ve kind of heard the phrase that like tired driving and almost like drunk driving. So it’s like a kind of a safety thing as well so I think that that would be good in the long run to have late night bus services for the health of people in general.

Catherine: So for the third solution we propose to set up a dedicated bus lane directly to downtown in order to reduce delay. So during the rush hour only buses can use this lane which will considerably reduce the impact of traffic on the operation of the buses. Together with increased frequency they can alter the public perception of buses from a slow and unreliable form of transportation to being efficient. And so Cindy or Anthony would have to say about this?

Cindy: Well yeah it kind of makes sense right. If there is like a designated bike lane there should be that designated bus lanes and so it makes it easier for especially the bus drivers to know where they should be going on the streets and where to turn and things like that because it’s, uh, it’s already there.

Anthony: Yeah I agree. Like even just in Irvine there’s OCTA when they do bus stops they always take up a large part of the right lane. And so when cars come up behind them they always have to maneuver to the other lane. So I definitely think having a dedicated bus lane would help make the bus transportation more efficient as well not only for people getting on and off, but for drivers as well to decrease the congestion that having maybe slower modes of transportation like the bus wouldn’t possibly bring to the city.

Catherine: Yeah that makes sense. So the next solution deals with safety on buses. So we propose that periodic police patrol occur on buses to increase safety. Many people told us that they did not feel safe on a bus as there are people who had mental issues or behaved badly or even people who just look suspicious in general. So patrols would improve the situation as they provide a sense of safety.

Cindy: I mean as someone who personally commuted my bus like for a whole year last year I could definitely emphasize with that feeling of like, being unsafe because I would actually use to go home by 11:00 p.m. at night.So I would actually appreciate having like occasional like inspectors or like people from authority like just checking in once in a while. So it just improves that like spatial and environmental factor as I discussed in previous episodes.

Catherine: Yeah I agree with you because I’ve actually taken Metro as before and people just hop on without like a ticket because it’s an open environment. So you don’t you don’t really know who’s going to be sitting on the bus with you especially if nobody’s supervising whether you buy a ticket or not.

Aidan: I mean we can look this solution together with the second solution, which is adding night bus services right? Because for the night buses, people will be more concerned about the safety issues. They will be afraid about will there be any other bad people or there’ll be theft or other crimes happening. So altogether when we added night bus services we should also consider this solution to increase the safety of those public transit system.

Catherine: So our next solution is to utilize bike sharing more in business districts and bike sharing with low rates to be specific. So bike rentals can be a useful alternative to buses. It is cheap, convenient and it’s also mean to traffic jams. It is great for commuting between only a couple of city blocks or visiting nearby buildings. When working class comes out of their office or goes out for lunch, they therefore no longer need to drive because riding bikes will be more convenient and possibly faster as during lunchtime there are a lot of cars going to eat.

Aidan: So previously we talked about how we can find alternatives of buses as other means of public transportation, right? And in those downtown area sometimes there are those places to work and places to eat. They’re relatively close but not that close. And at this time, some people will they prefer to drive because this is it’s not a short distance to walk. But on the other hand they don’t want to take buses because they need to wait a long time. And it also takes them a long time to go there. My thought is that we can use that bike services to make their way to their lunch and their relaxing time more convenient.

Anthony: Yeah. I think that that’s also. But it’s also contingent on creating more bike friendly lanes and in busy business districts that might be a little bit difficult to accomplish because obviously in business districts it’s basically made for cars for car transportation. And so when you introduce more bike sharing you would have to also introduce more bike friendly lanes or bankable streets. So that’s also something that cities can really consider when they think about utilizing more of these bike sharing mobility assets.

Aidan: Right. And another takeaway here is the low cost right. So people will be more willing to ride the bike and incent cars because when I went to Long Beach with Cindy we know that there were a lot of rental bikes but that price was a kind of expensive for people sure. So actually not so much people used those bikes despite the fact that Long Beach was one of the top 25 best bike cities in the United States.

Catherine: Okay so moving on to our next solution we propose to encourage businesses and leisure places located near train stations, bus stations or metro stations to boom more. Reducing walking time between bus stops and people’s destinations can make share mobility more attractive to residents as they will offer more convenience Municipal governments and public transit agencies can achieve this through reducing the rent near stations, giving some dividends or offering some special kind of subsidies.

Cindy: Yeah I feel like this leads back to our comment in previous episodes. I like the economic aspects of this because we can’t just do this alone right. It’s not just the policy makers it’s not just the locals. We need the businesses too. So I feel like this is kind of what got us into relationship thing where we need to work on like what to locate certain places and how to form these certain streets to make this possible.

Aidan: Yeah so based on our research and our interview we found that a lot of people are not like they hated public transportation. It was just like OK if in order for them to take buses or metros they need to first go to the station, they take the transportation and they get off the bus or Metro and they need to walk to their place which can create a lot of hassles. By Making things closer to the public public transit system that will be more attractive to working class mostly so they can take public transit more.

Anthony: so like you said like encouraging businesses and leisure places. But could that also be extended to like housing. Because I know in a previous interview or and also in our research, when you build high density housing next to transit quarters that appears to have economic benefits for sustainability purposes. So would it be OK to extend this solution to affordable housing or just high density housing in general not just like businesses and leisure places.

Aidan: Yeah I totally agree. In fact That is like our next solution. We’ll address that. So even though apart from providing more housing near those public transportation hubs we can also, like, because right now there are already a lot of housing that are already built right? So for those communities we can provide more shuttles to the train station to the bus hub from theses large residential areas. So for example, Metrolink and Riverside and Metro in Long Beach they were used for people to go to L.A. right? People leave in those two cities. If we want to encourage them to take the Metro as more so we can we can provide free shuttles from those communities to the station so which will give them more convenience so they don’t need to drive or to even walk to the station. And that and that convenience will convince them to love the metros and buses more.

Anthony: Yeah well I think just playing devil’s advocate for a second. Like if you build more shuttles in residential areas would there be kind of the concern of like noise and possibly there being a lot of people and then people being paranoid about the amount of sound and the amount of people that are in their residential areas because usually people prefer residential areas that look like a cul-de-sacs and like low density places where they look aesthetically nice and would it impact the value of housing as well.

Aidan: First of all we can try to use electric cars and hybrid cars to reduce the noise because at UCI The hybrid version of Anteater express produces much less sound than the gas one right? And for other aspects those shuttles are only for like the working class and the students. So we can only provide the free shuttles during the rush hour, like in the morning and the afternoon but not in the middle of the day. That can also reduce the traffic concerns.

Anthony: OK I see your point.

Catherine: Build “Park’n Go” parking structures near transportation hubs. For those who do not have access to shuttle or prefer to drive themselves, governments and public transit companies can build parking structures near stations for people to park. This can increase the demand for train hugely as people will prefer to rest or do something they like in a train, rather than being stressed and tired behind the wheel. To expand upon the solution, I think that based off our interviews from Riverside. This is especially applicable because we interviewed some people and they said they preferred to just relax on a train rather than having to pay attention. And so I guess changing like the overall atmosphere or perspectives about public transportation that it’s a place for you to do your own thing or to even work before getting to work that is something that could you know incentivize people who start using public transportation right.

Cindy: Yeah I like that part where you mentioned that it’s either it gives them access to a shuttle or access to preferred driving themselves because it reminds me what Hyland told me is like people don’t like being told what to do. So I like it gives people that choice and the option to pick their mode of transportation. So it’s not like they knowingly are doing something sustainable but more like they’re indirectly doing it so it’s like it works both ways. So it’s not like they’re being forced to do it like they’re doing it because they want to.

Catherine: And then now we’re gonna talk more about shared mobility services such as Uber and. So we want to encourage wider applications of UberPool which is the cheaper option of Uber X. This allows people going to destinations with close distance to share a ride. It is widely used in the East Coast cities like New York, Washington DC and Boston as the rate is so low that sometimes it is even cheaper than the price of gas. And so by paying a lower fare people will be more inclined to use shared mobility than driving themselves.

Cindy: Yeah I think this is a great compromise because I remember Hyland talking about like assuming that everyone decides to use Uber instead of driving their own vehicles that could actually be worth for sustainability. So I like this compromise between being in that comfort like a private car but I’m putting as many people as in one vehicle as possible which is the concept of UberPool. So I find that really useful and that’s something maybe slowly cities can adopt.

Anthony: And I think in the future I mean this may be like very stretching into the future but when we introduced the concept of self-driving cars that might even make them whole privacy thing that Cindy was talking about even more relevant for sustainability.

Aidan: I mean this is helpful to both reducing traffic jam and reducing the pollution right because the less cars means less carbon emission means less cars on the road so that can be pretty helpful. Well maybe not only for Long Beach and Riverside, I will be very glad to see UberPool is kind of introduced to the Southern California, like in Irvine there’s no UberPool but I actually found the service very useful when I traveled to the east coast cities. So yeah. So UberPool will be very helpful.

Catherine: Yeah and to expand upon that I feel like Uber and Lyft are more targeted towards the younger generation who are more likely to use technology to get public transportation because you don’t often see young people going on Metrolinx or buses to get to places they’d rather Uber and Lyft because they’re just more accustomed to our tastes, I think, because we’re so used to being on our smartphones And so I think this is a very good solution.

Now continuing on. Another solution is in future urban planning, 2e need to avoid building a sprawl community but increasing density. Sprawl is essentially a reason why people cannot reach their destinations by bus or metro as the density is still high. In order for a better utilization of shared mobility. We had to locate business areas, entertainment areas and residential areas closer to each other so that a bus route can reach more places.

Aidan: Just like you said, sprawl is the essentual reason why there are many people prefer driving to the public transportation and why there are so many problems existed in the shared mobility and public transit system in Southern California.

Anthony: Yeah but I think it’s also important to consider that people’s typical preferences are for lower density areas. People like to sprawl, like they like to go to lower density because they don’t like being around people. So I think that one way to approach that is that basically people respond really well to incentives, so we should make incentives for people to live in more high density areas so definitely more affordable housing when that becomes apparent and also encouraging an atmosphere of giving each other privacy and that could be like something with culture change or something like that. But I think that human behavior has to change a little bit further to accommodate that suggestion.

Catherine: And so far our final solution we propose is that we should build more transportation hubs near major plazas, large residential communities and famous buildings. Governments and public transit agency should research on where people go most and build transportation hubs near these places. This will satisfy the needs of the majority as well. People could just get on a bus stop next to the exit of the plaza with minimal walking. Public transit can provide a more convenient option than driving as people need more time and energy to walk to the garage and find their cars.

Cindy: Yeah I feel like this point strongly alludes to the environment in Long Beach especially, as I mentioned, it’s a tourist place because of its landmarks right? It’s famous for his beach, for example, in this downtown plaza and it’s food plazas. So I feel like the more purpose we put the city, the more likely them residents are willing to take public transit to go to these places.

Aidan: Altogether, these solutions, we believe, will alleviate traffic congestion, improving air quality, and making public transportation more efficient in those two cities and in Southern California. However, as Matthew Barth et al. (2000) point out in their articles, shared vehicle systems “place an additional burden on users and system operators”. Therefore, in order to maximize the user-friendliness of these solutions and enable an efficient public transit system management, an Intelligent Transportation System should be implemented for local public transit  system.

Aidan: Moreover, Long Beach and Riverside can take after and learn from cities that have done well in encouraging people to use shared mobility more often. An example of such city is Hong Kong. The essence of Hong Kong’s public transit lies not in the fact that anywhere can be reached through bus and metro and subways, but rather that everything is already built along the transit. As businesses and plazas rely on the Mass Transit Railway, which is Hong Kong’s metro system, to provide customers with transportation, they share a proportion of profits with the metro companies. We suggest that this type of business/transportation model is one that authorities such as Long Beach Transit and Riverside Transit Agency can consider adopting as a means of increasing earnings to provide for better services and receive more incentives to expand their networks.  

Catherine: Yeah, as a group of Southern California residents, we truly hope that this series of podcasts has had some influence over policy-making processes that regard the building of more convenient and efficient transit systems. While having a car has its perks, we should be mindful of the amount of pollutants that are emitted by vehicles and how these pollutants can create unhealthy environments that are harmful to everyone. For our listeners who are commuters, it must be stressful and quite upsetting having to deal with terrible traffic jams and the constant honking of cars on the daily. However, while commuting may be a necessity and a somewhat embedded part of our culture, it is necessary to make changes that will not only allow us to breath fresher air but will also make our lives easier and make the future a more sustainable place.

Cindy: That’s right! That brings us to the end of this series. We hope you have learned a lot, just like we have in the process of creating this podcast. Change starts by bringing awareness of crucial issues to those around you, so please, if you find this podcast inspiring or educational, feel free to share it with your friends and family. Should you have any questions, please ask in the comment section on this website.

Aidan: On that note, we would like to thank everybody who has stuck with us for all five episodes of Shared Thoughts and Share Mobility. We sincerely hope we can make changes together towards a better shared mobility system and a more sustainable society in Southern California.

Everyone: Thanks everyone!

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.

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!

This second episode focuses on the local opinions of people who we interviewed (kept anonymously) who wanted to provide some insight into how the public transit systems of Riverside and Long Beach could be improved from their perspective or how it had benefitted them. Our insights are also paired with the local opinions to give context.

Audio Link:

Transcript

Aidan: Welcome back to Shared Thoughts and Shared Mobility! Today we will be travelling!

Catherine: Yeah so we were able to travel to both Long Beach and Riverside and interview locals about their thoughts on the transportation systems of the respective cities.

Aidan: Well. Cindy and I drove to Long Beach a few weeks back in a very sunny afternoon, so let us begin by listening to what locals of Long Beach have to say about the city’s transportation system.

The first person we encountered was a homeless woman, who was sitting on a bench near the bus stop, so we first approached her. When we asked about her opinion on how good she thought the public transportation in Long Beach was, She responded very passionately, saying,  

[“The transportation here is very… is excellent… they are efficient, they are usually on time, they run every 15 minutes, well some of them, and yeah, they take you where you want to go…”]

Well our observations were very similar to what she said: there were a lot of buses downtown that can be seen at every intersection. At the bus stop, they lined up at final stops and drivers were chatting with a bunch of their colleagues, waiting for their next departures. At the bus stop, we noticed a route map which displayed the available routes in Long Beach and there were quite a lot. The density of routes even reminded me of the bus map I once saw in Manhattan, where, you know, has a very advanced bus transit system and one can basically see buses and coaches on every street.

Catherine: Umm that’s interesting, coz although I’ve never been to Manhattan, my impression of Manhattan and New York in general is that it’s probably much more dense than Long Beach, so I am just wondering why Long Beach has so many bus routes. Do a lot of people take the buses in Long Beach?

Aidan: From what we saw, we saw many students and workers getting off the buses. We got to Long Beach at around 4pm, so that’s like the beginning of rush hour. Which, this reminds me, while interviewing the homeless woman, we also asked her how many people take the bus each day. She gave us an estimate based on what she had observed.

[Woman: Oh my god there could be hundreds of people. I’ve been sitting here for a week and there’s hundreds of people that take the bus on Saturdays.”]

Aidan: She also mentioned that most of the passengers were either veterans or students. There were some working class, definitely,  but not that many. Indeed, when we interviewed people who worked in Long Beach or nearby cities or local communities, most of them responded this way:

“Blonde Lady with a kid: I don’t know much about public transportation. I mean I live here but I do not take it…

Man with a suit: I have no idea, sorry. I just drive here and go…”

Catherine: Oh, that’s an interesting difference between Long Beach and Riverside, because all of the locals we interviewed belonged in the working class and while we were at Riverside, a majority of the people taking the train were actually working class individuals as well.

Aidan: Yeah, that is a very notable difference. I mean there is metros also in Long Beach that go to LA downtown, but the thing is when we got there the metro was broken. It was uhh, it wend over a renovation thing, so we did not have the chance to interview people that got off from the metro.

Catherine: Oh ok that’s great news I’m glad that they have the funds to fix the metros because I heard that Long Beach metro are worn down and kind of broken. So far you’ve only mentioned good things about Long Beach’s transportation system. So Aidan, did some locals express any negative concerns about the transit system?

Aidan: Absolutely! We asked some local students who frequently ride the bus, and this is what they had to say:

“Male: In my opinion, it could use some work… it could really use some work. Umm, certain buses come every few minutes, which is good, but other buses, like, would be really extremely late, especially if you want to rush somewhere they can be really late. I’ve waited as long as 30 minutes for bus and it was like 30 minutes late.”

“Another Male: Time. I feel like, uhh, you get out of school at like four ish and if you miss your bus – yeah that’s what I would say. I used to miss my buses sometimes, and when I missed it I would have to wait another whole hour. Sometimes it gets delayed.

Aidan: So there isn’t enough frequency.

Male/Female: Yeah. ”

Aidan: The main concerns, according to them, are insufficient frequency and serious delays. By analyzing the situation, Cindy and I posited that those problems are largely due to insufficient demand for buses locally, potential high cost to purchase new vehicles for public transit agency, and a serious downtown traffic during rush hours.

Catherine: Hm so it seems that our solutions should focus on reducing the impact of traffic jams for public transit, and encouraging people to take buses more by making it more convenient for them.

Aidan: Yeah I believe so. On the other hand, we should also consider if there are alternatives for buses that are also locally convenient, efficient and minimally affected by traffic conditions such as bike. We saw some rental bikes down the street but I didn’t see that much, you know, that many people used them.

Catherine: Yeah, I agree. Now we will switch cities and listen to the perspectives of Riverside residents. The first local we interviewed was a man working in Cyber security. When asked how he uses the train, he replied with quite an extensive travel route:

[I take it from Riverside to Union Station, then from Union Station, I transfer to the red or purple line, which is the subway. I go three stops to sit on the Metro, so I can then go upstairs to the Expo line and take that out to Culver City and then from there, I take an Uber for about five miles to get from the station over to where my office is.]

Catherine: He also provided some feedback on other potential types of transportation.

[I’m actually looking forward to the automated cars, so I can just ride that, but I also, being in cyber security understand the possible pitfalls.

You could also do shared cars where you could maybe summon one and it would be somebody’s from down the block because there’s plenty of them obviously and most of the time they’re sitting in a parking lot. But there’s going to be a need for some cultural changes and things because not everybody’s going to want to say, “Yeah, I’ll donate my car out.”]

Catherine: I actually found his comment on shared cars really interesting because it relates to what we talked about in class, about how we’re proposing these potential solutions to the issue of transportation sustainability, but to actually implement these solutions may require that people make lifestyle changes or cultural changes and because of this, I think that these solutions may not necessarily work or work as they were intended.

Aidan: Right, right your point makes sense. Going off what you have just said, this is, I belive especially applicable to transportation because how we travel is ingrained in our lifestyle and our behavior which are developed over time, so, therfore, it will take a long time for people who commute daily to get adjusted to using the bus or train instead of driving.

Catherine: Yeah exactly. So during our interviews, we also asked locals why they prefer taking public transportation instead of driving and almost everybody said the same thing.

Aidan: Let’s hear them out!

[Middle aged women: I did it originally to get out of driving and so much traffic, but I like that it helps the environment.

Cybersecurity Man: Well I use the train because I don’t feel like sitting on the freeway for two and a half, three hours.]

Aidan: It seems like a lot of people would rather take public transportation because of traffic.

Catherine: Yeah and I can see why. So we actually drove to Riverside at 5 am in the morning.

Aidan: Wow 5 am!!

Catherine: Yeah and even then, there was already traffic on the 91 heading towards Irvine and when we came back around 7 am, it still took us 2 hours to arrive at Irvine.

Aidan: That is insane!!

Catherine: Yeah so we were trying to beat traffic there but we still got caught in it. And so I can completely attest to what the locals were saying and why they take the train to work instead of driving. We also asked locals whether they would drive or not if there was no traffic, most of the locals said yes but some had other opinions.

[Microbiologist: Maybe? I mean it depends on the price of gas.

Man: It’s a 50-50 on that. I mean the best part is the lack of traffic but honestly, also just having your mind at ease and not have to worry about, you know, the wear and tear on your vehicle or just people cutting you off. I reada read a book or I get to watch a show or something on Netflix versus having my mind on, you know, driving or I can sleep.]

Aidan: Well, so it seems like locals don’t see traffic as the only motivation for using public transit, although it is indeed a huge factor. Based on my understanding, locals also regard public transportation from comfort and economic perspectives, which we should also consider when addressing the overall issue of shared mobility and transportation sustainability. From that, we should also explore other ways to improve public transit systems.

Catherine : Great Point! We asked locals if there was anything they would change about the transit system at Riverside and this is what they had to say.

[“Woman: It’s not always on time. It needed to wait for other trains to come through.  If it was on a better, more regulated schedule that would be perfect and if there’s more trains coming through more often.”

Man: “I would just add Wi-Fi.”

Woman: Probably have more trains at different hours.”

Cyber Security Man: “Right now, there’s a problem. They have purchased new engines, but the engines that they’ve been using on some of these trains are still really old from when they first started, so they break down quite often. They might need to also do more separation because I’ve been on several trains that have hit people.”]

Catherine: So it seems that a lot of the improvements that need to be made to the Riverside transit system is to increase the frequency and punctuality of the trains and the overall maintenance and services available on the trains.

Aidan: Yeah, but I also noticed that most of the people you interviewed only use the trains or metro but not buses.  

Catherine: Yeah, even though the buses were running at that time, we noticed that nobody was really taking them. A lot of the buses were just parked while those that were running were empty. It may have just been the time that we went though because it was quite early.

Aidan: Umm that’s interesting because I read a performance report from AMMA Transit Planning (2018) on Riverside public transportation. Well, according to the report, Riverside is now seeing declines in bus ridership in which the ridership levels were 4.18% below that of last year. Do you know the reason for that?

Catherine: Hm I don’t quite know the exact reason but I think it might have to with the fact that most people aren’t traveling to very closeby cities, so for example we interviewed people who were traveling from Riverside to Anaheim or Culver City which is quite up north. And so I think because of that taking the train is just overall faster and more convenient.

Aidan: Well I think there’s also a problem exists in the system itself. So Congressman Mark Takano did a survey in Inland Empire asking people why they didn’t take a bus that frequently and most of the respondents said that there was no night services for the bus so they could not take the bus to their home when they got off from their work, right? That is also a huge problem. And if the local government and Riverside transit agency want more people to take buses, that is a problem that they need to solve.

Catherine: Yes I agree with you. We actually interviewed a local who talked about how she didn’t like the fact that at night there were less trains and because of that she would always have to come back earlier. And so I think what you just said is not only applicable to the bus system but also the metro as well. So having heard perspectives from both cities I think we have some valuable insights on how we can help improve the transportation systems of these cities.

Aidan: Let’s note all those problems and opinions down, and stay tuned for our next episode where we will have special guests, Professor Garde, Professor Hyland and Professor McNally from UC Irvine discuss their expertise on this subject of transportation systems and shared mobility.

This first introductory episode focuses on a general background of the two different cities of Riverside and Long Beach, how they are related, the different characteristics of those cities, and how they are involved in the transportation sustainability issue.

Audio Link:

Transcript

Anthony: As residents in Southern California, do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you only took the bus or the metro to go to work? Have you ever wondered how shared mobility can be improved to make your community more convenient and sustainable? Welcome to Shared Thoughts and Shared Mobility, a podcast that focuses on different aspects of transportation sustainability, more specifically, shared mobility. Our group is from the University of California, Irvine. My name is Anthony and I’m a third year neurobio major, and I come from Irvine.

Cindy: And my name is Cindy. I’m a third year English major from Santa Ana.

Catherine: My name is Catherine and I’m a third year computer science major from San Jose.

Aidan: And I’m Aidan. I’m a third year economics and international studies major and I’m from Beijing. We will be your hosts for this series of podcasts. To start off, mobility can be defined as transportation services and resources that are shared among users. This includes public transit, bike sharing, car sharing shuttle services, ride sourcing, scooter sharing, and more.

Cindy: For today’s podcast, we aim to introduce the cities of Riverside and Long Beach and briefly compare the transportation systems of these cities. Upon researching these two cities, we have decided that they’re comparable because of their broad relationship to transportation systems. While both cities have positive aspects in this field, they also have distinct characteristics which reflect their different approaches and achievements toward sustainability.

Catherine: Most notably, both Long Beach and Riverside show similar demographics. Long Beach has roughly 470,000 residents while Riverside has roughly 320,000. Not only are their population sizes close, the age distribution of those living in these cities are almost identical as well. Their median household incomes are likewise similar. In Long Beach, the median household income is $58,000 whereas it is $62,000 in Riverside.

Anthony: And so while you can see that Long Beach and Riverside are quite similar. One of their biggest differences is in their population density. So with Long Beach, it has roughly about 9,000 people per square mile and Riverside has about 4,000 people per square mile, according to the world population review. Riverside’s population density is less than half of that of Long Beach’s. The difference in population density demonstrates how Riverside is more of a sprawl city in comparison to Long Beach and serves to explain why most people drive in Riverside as opposed to using public transportation. According to Congressman Mark Takano, 77.6% of surveyors responded that they drove, 14.9% responded that they used another form of transportation in their daily commute to work, and only 2.5% responded that they took the bus. The average travel time to work in these cities likewise differ slightly, as individuals typically spend about 26 to 20 minutes traveling to work in Long Beach, while Riverside residents average around 33 minutes.

Aidan: So based on our research and interviews, we found that Long Beach has various means of public transit that are both affordable and well known in the general public. To add, bicycles are one of the most widely used modes of transportation in the city. In fact, Long Beach is ranked as one of the top 25 Best Bike cities in the United States. Despite this, local residents still complain about major issues that prevent them from taking public transportation more often, including frequent delays, insufficient frequencies, limited destinations, and concerns for safety.

Cindy: For Riverside, there are various means of public transportation, including buses operated by Riverside Transit Agency trolley services around UC Riverside, Metrolink trains, on-demand taxis, and ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft. As an educational institution-based city, Riverside also offers free or unlimited rides to student communities in local universities on fixed routes through Go Pass and U Pass programs provided by Riverside Transit Agency. However, according to Mark Takano, residents have expressed concern with the transportation system, stating that while they wish to use public transportation, they find it hard to use and end up driving instead.

Anthony: Now that we have defined the cities and their transportation backgrounds, we will talk about the main problem that we will try to propose some solutions to, and that is the general problem of transportation sustainability. Transportation sustainability can take on many different forms. One way to approach the topic of transportation sustainability is to look at the infrastructure involved with transportation systems. This includes everything from different personal modes of transportation to how roads are built and maintained, and how human behavior dictates how transit is established in both the public and private sectors.

Catherine: The Southern California Association of Governments is an important resource that we can use to frame the city transportation infrastructure discussion. By looking at the geography of these cities in relationship to their use of public transit, with Riverside being the Inland Empire and Long Beach being near the coast, we are able to gain more insight into how transportation systems operate and where they are feasible places to have interventions. Transportation sustainability can also be included within the discussion of previous shared mobility, such as Uber andLyft, as well as public transit. The main question is how can we accommodate current and future populations with our current and future transportation systems?

Cindy: That’s a good point. It’s important for the future of the U.S. and for sustainable efforts, because cities need to adjust to growing populations and for economic growth. With the advent of new technologies, it’s important to see how our transportation systems can change in a quick span of time. Sustainable transportation systems require careful planning and policymakers who understand the nuances of their city and adapt to sustainable efforts. Some possible efforts could be focused on higher density public transit, for example. It’s clear that current transportation systems are not sustainable because of the amount of environmental pollution congestion and overall inefficiencies weaved into the system.

Aidan: So now we are going to give you a brief overview of the next following episodes. In episode 2, we’ll be going to Long Beach Riverside to interview residents there. We’ll hear about their opinions about shared mobility and public transportation in both cities. And we’ll be talking more about what we have found by interviewing the experts from UC Irvine, which are in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy, and Civil Engineering. We hope to get their insights on how public transportation systems are managed, how urban design is crucial to these types of transportation systems, and how transportation and mobility can be structured more effectively.

Catherine: In episode 4, we’ll be sharing our own opinions regarding the subject matter and respond to local and expert perspectives. We’ll also analyze the condition of shared mobility in both cities, based on our studies and research. In our final episode, we’ll summarize what we have done, and present our sustainability solutions and hope for the future in transportation sectors. This includes policy suggestions, recommended community actions, and our visions for a better shared mobility in Southern California.

Anthony: All right so now that we’ve kind of talked about transportation sustainability and the cities of Riverside and Long Beach in the generic sense, let’s talk about like why do we even think that this topic is interesting or important or relevant to society.

Cindy: Well I think it’s important because it’s in our daily lives, right? All of us has to get somewhere from point A to Point B. And I think we all have different experiences, right? Because for me, last year I used to commute by public transit myself, so I would take the bus everyday, back from home to school, and I feel like everyone else has their own experiences, right?

Catherine: Yeah I like to agree with you cause prior to coming to college, I’ve actually never taken public transportation because back at home, I would just drive everywhere. In here, I have to take the bus to school or like bus to everywhere else. And I think this is really applicable, especially ’cause, like you say, we all have to travel somewhere. So I have to travel from school or to work, and so I’m just curious as to how we ourselves can help make transportation more sustainable.

Aidan: Well I mean I also have some points on that. For me, I commute to school, right? And I have my own car, but it’s not like I want to drive. It’s like I have no other choice but to drive. It’s like now in Irvine, I used to take a bus to school during the fourth quarter of my sophomore year but I thought, that is very inconvenient, and there were very, very many like delays and there are not enough frequencies. It’s very inconvenient for me, but on the other hand, when I drove I always encounter many traffic jams coming up like I-405, and that always made me annoyed. I’m from China, and I’m actually from a metropolitan area where I took buses subways to my school every day. But after coming to Irvine, I found that the public transportation system is kind of almost non-existent here. So I kind of like wonder why is that. And I kind of wonder how can we improve this situation, especially considering that because of the sprawl, because of those commutes, Southern California has been one of the most polluted regions in the United States.

Anthony: Yeah I think just to add onto that, like transportation sustainability is a very kind of general topic and is a very like broad topic, and there’s a lot of ways to go about like examining transportation sustainability or researching transportation sustainability, and then we treat it like this very big broad topic that only policymakers can deal with and like big government people can deal with. But as Catherine kind of alluded to this, I’m very interested in how the lay person or the common individual is able to contribute to sustainability. Because I think that we can all make some changes too, like how we approach transportation sustainability or even change kind of our viewpoint on it, that it will kind of benefit us in the long run. Cool. So do any of you have any I guess personal experiences using the public transit, or just with Riverside or Long Beach in general?

Cindy: Well yeah, as I said before I used to commute by the OCTA, so the Orange County public transit, because I don’t have a car and personally since I’m from Santa Ana, the commute from my bus–it’s a lot longer. So for me, it averaged around at least 40 minutes of like sitting there in the bus. Yeah. And if I would ever miss the bus stop, I would have to wait an hour for the same bus to come back. So yeah I was like it wasn’t fun, but I would say the only benefit was just to relax in there and saving a lot of money, because I bought the year pass for UCI students and I believe for the whole academic year it was around like one hundred fifty dollars. So in comparison to like buying three parking tickets, it’s a lot cheaper.

Catherine: That’s true.

Aidan: So my hometown is Beijing and I had my high school in Hong Kong. And in those two cities, I always took public transportation, like subways, like buses, like taxis. And I felt that … ok, so first of all it’s not like private or quiet as driving a car, because driving a car you have personal space, right? But public transportation is very convenient in a way that in those two cities, it can physically get you to everywhere you want. And more importantly, like different from Irvine, we have a lot more frequencies, like maybe five minutes a bus, like that kind of thing. And it’s cheap, it’s cheap, it’s affordable as students, and I mean public transportation has many of its own problems, but I still prefer taking buses, subways to driving.

Catherine: I guess like me personally, because I don’t have a car here and not a lot of my friends do, I think I rely a lot on shared mobilities such as Uber and Lyft. And so prior to this, I’ve only ridden like once or twice back home. And so I think it’s really convenient especially because I don’t have a car and you can just ask someone to come pick you up with you. And especially because I split with people I think it’s pretty cheap compared to like, yeah if you were to take like trains.

Aidan: On the other hand if you drive, you have to focus on the road, right? But in public transportation, you can do whatever you want. So yeah when I took the buses and subways I always like read something or studying or reading the iphone.

Catherine: Or you can take a nap.

Anthony: Yeah. So thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. So that’s it for our first episode of Shared Thoughts and Shared Mobility. So tune in to episode 2 to hear what local residents have to say about their city’s transportation system.