Shared Thoughts & Shared Mobility

Professor Michael Hyland is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine and is involved at the Transportation Division at UCI.

This is the full Interview Transcript of our (indicated with Cindy) interview with Professor Hyland, which was held on Friday, May 3 at 2:00 p.m.

Transcript

Cindy: Here we’re gonna have Michael Hyland from the Civil and Environmental Engineering department. He’s going to be answering some of our questions about our topic, so thank you for coming!

Hyland: You’re very welcome.

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, 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 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 like public transportation is when it falls under the category.

Hyland: That’s that’s the way I see it. I mean. 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: Ohhhh. Wait sorry. With scooter sharing and bicycle sharing, do you mean as in I have a bicycle and someone else can use it too, or we are both riding the bicycle at the same time?

Hyland: So that’s–I’m glad we’re getting into distinctions because that’s pretty important particularly for sustainability issues, when it comes to kind of fuel powered vehicles. But so I think sharing is encompassing. Like. So the bike share system is where I usually kind of call the “fourth generation” ones. Public sector owns that there’s bikes out there on docks and you can go from one dock to another and now there’s kind of these free floating bikes where no one owns them. Our company owns them or the public sector owns them and people use them. But I think historically like there were people that just literally shared their bicycle with people in their neighborhood, so one person went on it but so when it comes to actual sharing of space in a vehicle I like to call that like shared ride systems and then like an Uber driver making money with their personal vehicle I’d call that like shared use. So they’re sharing the use of their property. So I think Airbnb would be another example of a shared use–you rent your home out of someone.

Cindy: That makes more sense, thank you for clarifying that. I personally was a little bit confused myself.

Hyland: There’s a lot there, yeah.

Cindy: Yeah! Speaking of, I’m going to skip down to my question about the scooters and the bikes because while we were in Long Beach, we actually saw those ports with the little bicycles you can rent out, and the scooters. And so while exploring the city of Long Beach, we saw that these bicycles and scooters are rented out for a fee. So I don’t know if you looked over the photo I sent you, but as some background, according to a news article: Long Beach riders, for the first three rides I believe, for scooters are free and then up to 15 minutes per ride.

Hyland: Yep.

Cindy: And then if those rides go beyond 15 minutes, riders will be charged the standard rate of 15 cents per minute. And after those free rides the service costs like a dollar to start per use. And 15 cents for every additional minute. So this is a lot of numbers here.

Hyland: Yeah.

Cindy: So I was just wondering like what do you think of these kinds of fees and…

Hyland: Yeah, so the fee structures seem to change city by city and even kind of to the changing 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 kind of 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 it’s–oh that would be–my guess would be a big portion of it would be for tourists. But in bigger cities it’s also … 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.

Cindy: Right.

Hyland: I’m kind of depending on what types of trip the owners of these systems want to make. I haven’t seen this where you need to pay a dollar per trip after you kind of were a member of the system. So usually once you become a member you pay a certain annual fee and then you can make as many 15 minute, 30 minute trips as you want. But I mean it all depends on the purpose. That’s kind of how you price these different systems.

Cindy: Yeah I was actually surprised myself because like at least where I live I didn’t really see any bicycle ports so I’m just not very like–how come some cities don’t have them?

Hyland: Yeah, yeah. We also, I’ve noticed, don’t have these electric scooters in Irvine.

Cindy: Yeah, yeah!

Hyland: And I’ve seen them all over San Diego and I guess I haven’t been up to L.A. too much but I presume they’re in L.A. as well. So I don’t know how these companies make the decisions about where they’re going to put them but I know there’s a lot of negotiations with local governments. A lot of times as to whether or not they’re going to allow them to operate in their cities.

Cindy: Mmm. Because I assume with those kinds of vehicles like laid out like it’s more efficient for denser populations.

Hyland: Yeah so that’s the–density certainly is a big factor. You want to have a lot of opportunities for activities, so working, going out, doing things within, I don’t know, one and a half to three and a half mile radius. That’s where these bike share systems seem to work really well. If things are really spread out and you have to bike 15 miles from your house, they can’t really do anything you want to do, then they become a lot less useful.

Cindy: Yeah that makes sense! And on a related note, I don’t know if you saw the other photo I sent you but it was about like 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 like what’s your take on this new like–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, I don’t, 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 are kind of, they can be used for moving a lot of people which is the Staten Island ferry. But then there’s kind of 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. You see these types of systems outside of the New York area. I’m sure there are cities in Europe too where there’s–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 saying I’m wondering like where, like what kind of routes these boats are going to. I’m not–I’m assuming you don’t know either, because like 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. The other one is the Boston area has water taxis that go out to Cape Cod so you can even fly into the airport in Boston and take a water taxi. And some of the water taxis–the larger ones, the ferry type ones–you can put your vehicle on them.

Cindy: Oh right!

Hyland: Yeah. And then I guess the more kind of smaller vehicle we can just get like seven or eight humans than with your car.

Cindy: So I assume it’s more sustainable we have a lot of people going on the boats.

Hyland: Yeah. Yeah I don’t–I don’t know the relative sustainability or environmental impacts of water based vehicles versus land based vehicles but in general the more people you can shove in a vehicle, the better it is for sustainability.

Cindy: Thank you for that. And I just want your opinion for like these questions for now.

Hyland: Sure.

Cindy: So I’ve told you before that we’ve recently interviewed some locals from Long Beach who use mostly public transit on a regular basis. So I’m going to give you some negative points that they gave me and I’ll give you some positive points. So some of the negative points about the public transportation system is the bus slash metro system that hardly arrive on time, and riding them takes up a lot of time. And they don’t come as frequently as people would like them to come and taking Lyfts or Ubers, although reliable, are too expensive for daily use. There are quote un quote “crazies” on the bus or strangers. Drivers on the Metro are rude. The Metro is worn down, unkempt, or dirty. People do not feel safe on the metro or bus. So these are very like speckled opinions and don’t take them to heart. I was just wondering how would you respond with your thoughts on these points.

Hyland: So I guess I’ll start, maybe the 10000 foot bubble, for me to think about like what the purpose of a public transportation system is and kind of the challenges it has. So, it has a limited budget. All these public transportation systems in the United States basically operate at a loss. They subsidize–they subsidize with taxpayers money, the trips for other people. There is a number of reasons that why most places in the world decided that a public transportation system–some people think other humans have a right to move around. Some people can’t afford to own their own vehicle and it’s still beneficial for society to provide access to jobs and opportunities, medical care, groceries to those people. So that kind of gets them to some of the challenges to public transportation systems have when it comes to making decisions. So you can either–it’s not an either/or, but there’s not 100 percent overlap between trying to serve the people that need to use public transportation while and then trying to get people who actually have the choice between a personal vehicle and public transportation–trying to get them to come over to the public transportation system. So things like reliability is a major concern and I think there is actually the possibility that technology can help with improving reliability of buses, by way of better estimating traffic times, communicating more effectively between bus drivers and the same route.

Cindy: Right.

Hyland: But in the end, these transit agencies only have a limited budget, so they can only run certain frequencies on certain lines. There’s a lot of trade offs they have to make. If you add more bus lines, you have to reduce frequency on those lines. [And] another thing, an important aspect is the “stop spacing” of buses. So if you have more stops, then you have more chances for the system to get behind more on reliability, and also because you’re stopping at each one of those [stops]. The way a bus line works [is that] you’ll need more buses to provide a certain headwear frequency. So 15 minute frequency versus 30 minute frequencies. 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 it’s those are things that are important to riders: providing good good quality service to them, I think very important.

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

Hyland: Yeah.

Cindy: I know not every occupation is like entitled or like expected to learn these kind of little nuances.

Hyland: Yeah.

Cindy: I’m just wondering like maybe like you it would help to have that kind of training for like maybe like public transportation drivers, but I don’t know.

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 agency 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: Oh yeah I totally agree. Because like on the positive points like some people say really good things about the bus drivers.

Hyland: Right, right.

Cindy: And like on that topic, I’m just going to list out those points like really quickly. Yeash so like some people said like the bus slash metro systems’ fees are affordable, and there’s even discounts for college students. And lately people can ride the metro for free, so that’s a big plus. Bus/Metro are accessible to the homeless. I think we interviewed like a couple, couple homeless. So they attested to that and the drivers are friendly, some people said that. There are enough routes to get as close to the places many people would want to go. So some people think that they do come frequently and also on the flip side, the bus slash Metro is good for getting to faraway places for cheap, so if people would want to go to like a Chargers game or going out for drinks, they could use that option.

Hyland: Yeah exactly. So yeah public transportation in general can provide very good services, some people and you know, it’s just that a lot of times there’s tradeoffs. So if you decide to move a bus line from one area to another, you’re going to provide worse service to group of people and better service to another group of people. So when you’re designing these types of systems you want to kind of maximize across all people, taking into account equity considerations, so you want to provide as much access mobility to as many people as possible. Oh I think there’s also this hopefully implication that you should provide even, maybe better people who can’t afford other mobility options. Yeah. So I mean from speaking from personal experience about the long distance trips. Yeah for some type of tranportation systems from the U.S. you can pay two dollars and go 35 miles, which is not possible for basically any other mode of transportation unless you want to walk or bike, and in that case, the amount of energy you need to do all of those things has got to cost you more than two dollars anyway. So yeah I mean there’s a lot of public transportation lines that provide very good service to a lot of places for a lot of people, which is great.

Cindy: Yeah like I know that in Long Beach at least that they are having some renovations for the Metro. I don’t know what kinds, but I find it interesting, like wow it’s actually taking place and it might come back in the summer so…

Hyland: Yeah, L.A. Metro is investing a ton of money into public transportation. They’ve passed multiple taxes and bills to fund these things. And people voted for them, so people seem to want better public transportation. Which, yeah in my mind, it’s good.

Cindy: I agree. All right I’m going this shift this to when you visited our class you as a guest speaker. Thank you for coming for that too.

Hyland: Of course.

Cindy: And so my group and I all agreed that this one line that you said struck us as very important and I wanted you to explain. So you mentioned a phrase along the lines of–if hopefully I’m correct–but “it’s better to have 10 jobs that are one minute away than 100 jobs that are 30 minutes away.” So we found in our research that most of the Riverside area requires people to drive around more than 33 minutes to work from wherever they live to work, whereas most of the Long Beach area, people drive around 26 to 28 minutes to work, which is a slight difference, but you know, it’s a difference. So I was just wondering like can you help us explain what your analogy is and like how does this relate to what we found.

Hyland: Yeah. So it’s funny that quote struck you. I don’t remember saying it but I guess the thing to mention is like I said 100 jobs within 30 minutes. I would contrast that with like having a hundred jobs within 30 minutes and then ten of those are right near you, whereas in the initial case like they’re all around 30 minutes away. So the general idea is that if you have holding constant one hundred jobs within 30 minutes you, you want those hundred jobs to be as close to the people as possible.

Cindy: Oh okay.

Hyland: But no I think the quote you have there is instructive and insightful in the sense that when cities are designed, there are significant benefits to putting jobs relatively close to residential areas. From a couple of perspectives, not all perspectives, one perspective being just potentially environmental emissions, traffic congestion, etc. People having to drive farther to work or, you know, use any mode to go farther away, they’re going to consume more energy. They’re likely to emit more negative emissions and are likely to have a bigger impact on traffic congestion. So the closer those jobs and opportunities are to where people live, that’s going to reduce the amount of miles they have to travel, that’s going to reduce congestion, that’s going to reduce environmental emissions of energy consumption. To the point about the average commute times for people in Riverside and Long Beach, yeah I mean that’s not terribly surprising that that’s how far the average person goes. So the thing is like to differentiate between the types of jobs that are located in certain places. So for example, the cities in the US, probably New York City and Chicago for instance, where you have kind of low income housing that’s only a few miles away from the downtown area central business district. But those people don’t have the qualifications to work in those jobs, they’re only a few miles away from them. So while they’re effectively close to a huge number of jobs, they don’t have the qualifications to access those jobs and actually has a kind of implication for the way you design your public transportation system, because oftentimes a lot of public transportation systems are meant to move people from residential areas to the downtown area. But now since a lot of the downtown areas are mainly in the service sector, there’s a lot of people in these areas that are relatively close to downtown that actually can’t work in those areas. They have to move out. They have to go out to the suburbs to find other jobs. So you want jobs near where people live. You need the right types of jobs near where people live. But there’s also issues with the economics. So if you provide very good jobs close to a certain residential area, then the value of the land in the residential area is going to increase. The value of the homes are going to increase. So you’re going to basically price out the low income people from the areas of the city that have good access to jobs. So it’s–they call it a wicked problem. A lot of–there’s economic issues, there’s social issues, there’s political issues. So these are real challenges, but in general there are many benefits to what is called kind of mixed use land development, where the jobs and residential areas are relatively close together.

Cindy: Well thank you for your insight on that. I know that’s a tricky web to like wade through!

Hyland: Yeah, well put!

Cindy: Because I was–most of us are actually curious about what we can do to address this kind of problem. How do we get people to, you know, be more motivated to take more public transit, or you know, taking the more sustainable route, for example.

Hyland: Yes.

Cindy: Because a lot of other locals that we interviewed, they just said well we don’t want to take public transit because it’s not direct. But it’s not something that we could tell someone to fix and expect an immediate outcome. So I find that tricky.

Hyland: Yeah. So I think, you know, you say like what can we do. So then I’ll go ask like from what perspective you’re coming from? As a student, as someone who would work in the public sector, as someone who is a voting citizen? Kind of what perspective you actually think you’re coming from with that question?

Cindy: That’s a good question. I think for now let me start with like me as a student.

Hyland: So I think I would say just group yourself as a person that would then be interested in working in the transportation world. I think the key would be to understanding how people make decisions is a first step. Basically telling people they should live a certain way doesn’t seem to work very well, telling them you should bike, you should use transit, you should walk. It just doesn’t work. So you’d understand kind of what, how they’re currently making the decisions, what might make them change to another mode and then take those, that information you’ve gained from individuals and make better design decisions, make better planning decisions with your public transportation system–with your road network, with your bike share system, to kind of make those services better for people so that they will choose them. And it’s a free country so you can’t make people do things. You can incentivize their behaviors in different ways. So I mean one thing that cities are considering now is congestion, things like congestion pricing, just all about kind of making it more expensive to travel via a personal vehicle such that people will shift to other modes. That’s kind of very much a political and public sector thing to do to change behavior. But there’s other things to do which is, do something like L.A. Metro is doing: raise more tax revenue build better public transportation systems. That is one way to likely get people to hopefully shift to public transportation systems or more sustainable modes of transportation.

Cindy: I like your point about behaviors because I think I found this one article about like how the homeless population moves around and it’s the behaviors are based on how like socially included they feel in certain areas and that like affects how they move around. So it’s interesting.

Hyland: Yeah there’s been a big push actually kind of in the research community to understand entire social networks. So basically. So that’s in general but it, particularly in transportation, it’s been an issue as well. To understand kind of where people like to go, how can we forecast and predict what people are likely to go. And it’s important to understand what their cohort or their people, where they work, whether they live with their friends with do, so we can understand how they’re likely to behave so you can influence kind of warranted people in that cohort. You can also potentially influence the entire cohort.

Cindy: I see. That’s a long process.

Hyland: Yeah I mean, I think a lot of the design implications are relatively similar but it’s maybe about more targeted marketing for these types of services.

Cindy: And I assume the funding to do that research.

Hyland: Yeah there’s funding definitely for sure. So yeah I mean it’s especially when there’s like an influx of data because of, I mean going back eight nine years, Twitter and Facebook, there was other social media back then that I forget what it is, so they’re willing to share us data. You could buy geotag–where people are going to and coming from, who their friends were. So you try to do all types of correlations and associations to figure out where was person A influencing person B based on decisions–where they’re gonna go and where they’re going to travel.

Cindy: Well hopefully that works out in the long run.

Hyland: Yeah.

Cindy: Let’s see. I think we’re about to wrap things up. OK. So I’m going to end this interview with one last question.

Hyland: OK.

Cindy: So this is kind of like an over reviewing question. So how can shared mobility plus new public transportation programs, if there are any new programs, can be a potential solution for sustainability? So not really solutions, but like maybe a push towards sustainability, if that helps you. So basically is there any other kind of information you would like our viewers to think about?

Hyland: Good question. So kind of the key is designing a system that makes people want to use more sustainable modes. I think I’ve highlighted this a couple of times earlier, but I’m gonna harp on it here. So unsustainable child behavior is kind of important to identify, and that is traveling a lot alone in your own personal vehicle is the very the most part unsustainable travel behavior option. You’re consuming a lot of energy and you’re emitting a lot, so ways to move away from that include sharing space in your vehicle, so basically using the same amount of energy to transport more people. It’s very beneficial having people switch to public transportation by way of hopefully providing better public transportation systems. Having them use active transportation modes. So that’s like bikes, walking, scooter, which conserve a lot of trips with a lot less energy and emissions than a personal vehicle. And then also you also think about how you design your cities. So the hypothesis and there’s some mixed results in this is these mixed density areas can reduce overall miles traveled. Use of personal vehicles, etc., which have important sustainable implications. So one thing to kind of avoid is a shared mobility system, something like Uber and Lyft, where you’re not actually reducing any amount of travel, you’re actually increasing the number of vehicle miles traveled associated with each person trip, because these vehicles need to move kind of unproductively between the job application of one traveler and the pick up location of another travel. So if we just switch from owning your own personal vehicles to just using Uber and Lyft, and not sharing rides in those systems, that can actually potentially be worse for sustainability.

Cindy: Oh geez.

Hyland: So yes there’s a lot of uncertainty going forward, but hopefully we can move towards a more sustainable system, with more sharing of space, more sharing of assets, and more use of active transportation.

Cindy: Yeah that plays into like your previous point about mixed views. So maybe using a little bit of everything.

Hyland: Yeah absolutely and that’s, I mean for these quote un quote wicked problems kind of throwing everything at it. Collecting data, understanding what’s working, what’s not working, incentivizing certain types of behavior that are working well for sustainability is all really important.

Cindy: Yeah. I think well you mentioned that like the way you plan a city’s important and that’s really tough because once they already designed it and constructit, you can’t really change it.

Hyland: It’s hard, it’s a lot harder to change it. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think you hit on it. So one example is like you’re not really going to change the length of your city blocks, which is something that you know seems to have implications on whether or not people will drive with the personal vehicle or walk or live near there, where they’re working. And as you point out, that’s something that’s likely not going to change going forward. You’re kind of stuck with it. So that’s why it’s also challenging because the the solution for sustainability in New York City are gonna be different than they are from Los Angeles. Those are gonna be different than the ones that are needed in Phoenix and the ones that are needed in rural areas. So we kind of need a lot of smart people working on a lot of these problems is, I think the only way we can really kind of make progress.

Cindy: I mean I assume like in the end, like hopefully shared mobility plus, you know, public transportation is like a good turn to at least trying to curb whatever’s happening in the future. Yeah.

Hyland: And one thing is like finding the right partnerships between the private owners and operators of shared mobility. Examples are Uber and Lyft and public transportation systems, and making sure that those contracts between those types of companies serve the public very well. They, you know, Uber and Lyft aren’t going to get involved in those contracts unless they allow them to make money. The cab companies, they want to make money. The goal was to try to find the right types of relationships that benefit individuals with travelers. The benefits for society, in terms of sustainability, and to benefit the private companies in terms of them being able to make money. So if we can find kind of the right combination there, that’d be great.

Cindy: I agree!

Hyland: It could be challenging, boldly challenging.

Cindy: Well thank you for coming to our talk. We really appreciate it.

Hyland: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Cindy: Thank you.

Feature Image Credit: Professor Michael Hyland