Shared Thoughts & Shared Mobility

Professor Ajay Garde is a Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine under the School of Social Ecology.

This is the full Interview Transcript of our (indicated by Anthony) interview with Professor Garde, which was held on Monday, May 13 at 11:00 a.m.

Transcript

Anthony: So if you could just introduce yourself in terms of your profession and what types of research that you’re involved in.

Garde: So I am an associate professor 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: In terms of urban planning, our focus is on Riverside and Long Beach so maybe I could give some context as to why we chose these two cities and maybe you can expand on it? We chose Riverside and Long Beach because they have two main metro systems that branch to different parts of Southern California. Especially in Los Angeles, they kind of branch and then you have the Riverside Metro and the Long Beach blue metro. They tackle those two things very differently. We compared them on the basis of population and median average income, but we do know that they have very different densities. Riverside is more sparal and has low population density and Long Beach has more population density, so we kept these things into account. For Long Beach, for their sustainable transportation initiatives, they have a lot of measure in place to encourage biking. They were actually ranked one of the top 25 bike cities in the nation. That was very interesting to us from a transportation sustainability perspective because that’s just implementing a different mode of transportation. We have yet to dig deeper into the biking perspective of transportation sustainability but in Riverside, especially, since it’s inland, it holds a different geographic perspective in terms of transportation. When they built the 91 to Riverside, that kind of encouraged people to use more transportation, so there’s this whole problem with congestion and traffic to Riverside because of the building of the new freeway when in reality, the 91 freeway was meant to relieve people of congestion and to encourage business to go inland where there’s cheaper land inland. We thought that the geographic dynamic between the two cities as well as there different approaches to sustainable transportation allowed for a kind of compelling comparison. That’s kind of the perspective we’re going for, so we were wondering what type of knowledge you have regarding Riverside and Long Beach that could add to our perspective.

Garde: So you described some of these things and I have been looking at Southern California and other cities, but especially Southern California in particular and how it has been growing. I have looked at how cities are different in Southern California and something you should know is that, in Southern California, development first occured along the coast, like most places. Once the coastal areas have received more numbers of people and jobs, slowly the coastal cities become what we call a built out form and the development slowly has been moving inwards, inlands. So cities in Riverside County and San Bernardino County have been getting more development. Much of that development, however, is residential. I’m going to generalize a lot and this is a key to what I’m saying, you cannot give a specific example to make an argument so therefore I’m generalizing, both these counties, Riverside and Bernardino, and Riverside includes the city of Riverside, initially developed as bedroom communities. Some people would go there and they would have homes there and they would have their jobs somewhere else, most likely. Initially the development in this region, there would be one principal city, as they would call it in our field. One principal city that was Los Angeles is still Los Angeles and then other cities and kind of places grew as suburban development. To the very low density residential commute was not that big a problem because population had not lead a certain level. Then what happened was that as the population grew, and California is a very attractive place for a jobs or industry, they taxed a lot of people from all over the US but also from other parts of the world. What has happened is that the population in this region has been growing. When the population and these two counties,  Riverside and San Bernardino County, have been growing at a much rapid rate, much faster. So what does that mean for transportation? What that means for transportation is that it puts more pressure on the transportation systems, puts more pressure on freeways, especially, and if you’re working from home, you would first have a typical system: cul de sac going to arterial street, arterital street collects all the traffic, leads to the freeway, people get on the freeway, they go to a job in the city and then they come back. So that was the system it was built on, but over time as the traffic congestion has hit us and these cities, although there is this idea of redevelopment, that are along the coast typically are, you can use the word buildout or there is no, what I call, vacant developable land, meaning it’s not like there is that much land to accommodate the population growth and stuff. 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. There are two sides of the argument. There is a market argument which is debated very strongly from both sides. The market argument doesn’t let the market decide. The others have been saying that the vehicle miles traveled has not been increasing at such a rapid rate although it has been. Things have changed in the last, I would say, 10 years. So the previous arguments are not as compelling anymore. I think just let people drive and go, those kinds of things. Vehicle miles traveled have been increasing. People have been spending a little bit more time. Even though on an average it may look like maybe only 4 minutes, but when you disaggregate those data you realize what’s coming. Plus the other side of it is that we need to accommodate a lot more people. You know, in the next 25 years according to SCAG, which is Southern California Association of Governments, we will be adding a population of roughly two Chicagos in high county Southern California, which means Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura Country. The population of the size of Chicago, two Chicagos are going into this region. Imagine what would that do. Those are estimates of course, I mean imagine what kind of pressures would it put on. Number one, we need to accommodate that population, so there needs to be both jobs and housing. You know, housing of course you have to have housing.

Now let’s kind of get out of this region and start looking at what’s happening at the federal level. Populations in cities have been growing all over the US. This is based on some of the stuff that I recently written on and it’s under press for publication, but population has been growing and the cost of living or at least the land values in most cities where there are jobs, growing cities where there are jobs, has been going up really rapidly. So one, there is not enough land, two the land that is there is very expensive, so it’s hard to build housing. Three, the transportation systems and any, I mean you can call it the entire system basically, including the different modes of travel and stuff, there’s too much pressure on that. So in some ways this as whole, you know the population growth, expected population growth, the value of land going up, is kind of impacting the economy negatively. This is something that other economists have studied and they’ve been saying that, you know, some of these cities that have been growing are becoming not affordable anymore, so people who are looking for jobs or are in the job market are moving to other places because the cost of living, because the housing prices have been going up.

Now, what’s that got to do with transportation? Southern California Association of Governments has  suggested that we need to build higher density housing along the transportation corridors because I mean what do you need to make transportation or public transportation or public transit feasible. Right now, wherever you have public transit, it is heavily subsidized. It’s not feasible. You hear these arguments that it’s not sustainable and we can’t just keep doing this.

Well that’s because you don’t have the densities, critical mass along the public transit to make it more feasible and to make it more efficient. How do you do that if, on one hand there is not enough land and on other hand there is this NIMBY opposition from the community. But I think some of that is being overcome as, in fact, a recent lawsuit by the state of California against the city of Huntington Beach suggests that the state is serious about this thing, that we need to have more housing and more of that housing has to be accommodated. Of course that has to be accommodated by all cities but much of that housing is going to be along transit corridors, near transit stations, along transit corridors. As B 827 which was a bill that was proposed but never actually go through, basically it was a proposal that if a developer wants to build certain higher density housing, then the city will not be able to stop that development. The upruin was almost like automatic and densities were considerably higher. City of Los Angeles was not in favor of it. So what do we need for sustainability and transportation in this region. If you want to have public transportation work, if you need public transit to work efficiently or at least more efficiently than it is right now, you need critical mass. For that, you need higher density along transit corridors. Not everybody is going to take public transit, in fact, not many people are going to take public transit, butt I think there is a proportion of the population which is going to rely heavily on public transit because other modes of transportation are frankly too expensive or not feasible for them. Either they are going to be too old and stuff. So now we’re moving on to transportation systems. These infrastructure that is already in place, you are not going to have many more freeways built in the next, let’s say, the next five years. We are not talking about 20 years because nobody really knows what’s going to happen in 20 years. All these plans are interesting and you know, we don’t know how they would work out basically, how things will play out. So then we have most of the other transportation infrastructure in terms of, I would call it, hard infrastructure, meaning streets, freeways, whatever, that are already generally there. These things don’t change that fast. I mean, it’s not going to. If you’re looking 5 years out in the future, street system is not going to change that fast, the freeway system is not going to change that fast. In fact, the most you will have sensors and some of that stuff placed in some of the cities. These things cost both a lot of time and lot of money to actually do it well. So I think in general we are looking at relying on public transportation to improve the transportation and to improve the sustainability. A long answer to your short question, but I may have covered more than your question.

Anthony: So you talked about how it might be more sustainable to build along transit corridors and near public transit. How do we explain that possibility with maybe the counter argument that people prefer lower density areas and people prefer to sprawl and people prefer to live away from high density areas.

Garde: Sure, you’re talking on my territory here and why I’m saying this is that this is an old argument now. The argument that I will provide is that sure, I will want to live in a palace, which is like sprawling at least 20 acres of land. Guess what? Can you pay for it? No. So  I think this argument is at least 20 years old now. I’m not saying that people don’t. People’s preferences almost don’t count anymore. I mean this is a big sweep I’m coming up with. Are you able to be pay a part of those kinds of homes. The short answer is no. Most residents or persons are going to have to pay either a lot of money to live near their jobs, fiven the current conditions or they will have to live way outside and spend way too much time in the commuting. So these are the choices, you can have your quarter acre lot, we are not even talking about one acre lots anymore, way out from where, if you need to go to a job in downtown Los Angeles or Los Angeles in general, you’ll spend at least one hour in commute, most likely more. So if that kind of life is acceptable to you, fine. How many people would want that kind of trade off? Not possible anymore. So I think that argument is out of the window and you can’t keep sprawling. Southern California, there is a very interesting, it’s an old old report now, it’s called Sprawl Into the Wall. Basically you can’t keep sprawling endlessly, it has its own limits. Sprawl is also, I think that on the other side those problems,  there is almost compelling evidence that sprawl is not, for one, energy efficient. Sprawl is not just not energy efficiency but also in terms of what are cost per linear feet of development, is also more expensive because you have to lay out the street, you have to lay out the infrastructure. So I mean governments are now beginning to rethink that strategy. Eventually residents will have pay for it, but it will have to be shared across regions. Taking the old model is seriously being questioned that you know, you want a big home in a nice suburban community away from the major city, you can keep going outward. Yes, you could have done that until about 1990s. In fact, there is enough evidence that I talk about in one of my writings which is coming up soon in press, is that Millennials, although many of them want to live in cities some cannot afford while others still prefer suburbs. I think that it’s not like nobody can afford to live in suburbs anymore, some housing is there. And there is this I think life cycle stages when you know people typically when they have a household where there’s parents and two kids, they want to have a front yard and backyard, so they live in a suburban community. So that’s playing on one end and on the other end, you have these people who really want to live near their jobs and access urban amenities like you can go to the pool, barbecue, museum, and all the kinds of urban amenities which are currently not there in the suburbs. So I think some of that is also playing into that, but when you are focusing on the school and I want my own backyard, front yard, people want to be able to go in and out of these kind of situations basically based on what it is that they are looking for.

If they’re looking for large or medium sized lofts, they go for suburbs. In the city these days and in urban areas a large loft is getting smaller and smaller and that’s another problem.

Anthony: So I remember you also talked about how Southern California, it’s projected to add about two  Chicago’s size worth to the population. When we interviewed Professor McNally from civil engineering, he kind of said that the solution to a lot of sustainability issues is to control growth and so I’m wondering what your opinions are on that.

Garde: This is an idea that goes back to almost a hundred years back to the garden cities idea. I think what he may be referring to, I don’t because I don’t know what he said, is carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is the idea that these places or cities, for instance, have a certain carrying capacity, beyond which they become unsustainable. So in garden cities they were saying these cities will have a population of 30000, they will commute to principal cities and so on so forth. That has been questioned, the idea of carrying capacity has been questioned. How do you stop people from, I mean, how do you control growth. You don’t. I mean the market does control growth. In fact, I’ll tell you a similar argument was made and I am suggesting this not as a counter argument but as a factual statement that I came across.

There was this plumber who came to fix some plumbing issues in our house. I think we had him fix a new water filter we were installing and we came out we starting chatting and this issue came up about how housing is very expensive in Southern California. He said there are too many people, we should control it somehow. Well, how do you do that? Can you actually physically stop? In China they used to do that. Then you cannot move to urban areas. Even there, they are slowly going off of that. You cannot control population growth, not through policy. I mean, in an indirect way that happens because of certain policy. Right now zoning regulations are kind of contributing to that and the regulations that are in place discourage people from moving in because housing is too expensive. That’s the only way you can actually control population. There is no other way you can control population growth. If I want move to Chicago and there is a job, who is going to stop me from doing that. I mean these are interesting ideas and I think there are ways to do that which have been tried in the past and you know in China even. I guess there is a market argument that you know, when there is saturation in terms of jobs and population in a certain place, jobs will move someplace else and people will move along with that. Again I’m not a believer in that. I haven’t seen that happen. Not everybody will move and in fact there was an article in the New York Times earlier that there is, again these maybe anecdotal examples, but the article talked about how some folks were encouraged to move to West Virginia with the incentive that there would be jobs and coding jobs in West Virginia. Guess what, when they found out, you know, that’s not happening. I mean some of these things are interesting ideas, but in reality, it doesn’t happen. These don’t flush out as simply because you know, that there is this idea of agglomeration economy. Basically if you have one industry, the supporting industry comes and locates in the region or in the nearby area and so on and so forth. It’s really hard to move activities or people to other places. I mean it happens but slowly. But while that process is going on slowly, you have this big problem here. How do you address that? So it’s not as simple as it sounds like.

Anthony: Yeah that makes sense. So I guess I just want to ask you one last question and that’s how do you think that a common like lay person or a common just individual could maybe become more sustainable with transportation.

Garde: 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, soyou get some incentive. Some of these policies are kind of geared toward easing up the problem.

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.

Look at the gasoline prices, they’ve gone up again. Some of these things there is that unpredictability but behavior does change. I mean if densities change, if the gasoline prices go up and the incentives are not there anymore, you will see behavior change in transportation that would make it maybe more sustainable. We still don’t know whether it will lead to sustainability. That may make people change their behavior and that may work.

Anthony: So I guess that’s everything I wanted to ask. If there is anything else that you want to add or anything like that. Appreciate your time.

Garde: Yeah. So I think that people will always want to know what about the electric vehicle, shared mobility, scooters. Some of these things are catching on. I myself, I walk to work. In fact, I was for some time, I started coming here on an electric scooter. That was faster, so instead of taking me 15 minutes, I could be here in 10 minutes. I was saving five minutes but then my doctor told me that you need to exercise more so I stopped using the scooter and started walking again, unless I needed to save those five minutes. And parking is impossible. It’s an incentive right, unless I need to bring equipment or something or it’s raining and that’s when I would bring my car and I would save maybe 5 minutes. Now, parking is so hard to find that, once or twice, I’m wasting half an hour looking for parking. So what happens? It’s a disincentive right? What do you do then? You either walk or you take other modes of transportation. These are options, choices. So I think other electric scooters, or scooters ,or bikes, I mean they can only make so much as a dent. You are not looking at even 10%. Does it make a difference, yeah but electric cars are too expensive, too in the future, so there is work to be done and more research, so I think that’s where we are right now.

Anthony: Ok, yeah that’s perfect.  

Feature Image Credit: Professor Garde