Shared Thoughts & Shared Mobility

Professor Michael McNally is a Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

This is the full Interview Transcript of our (indicated with Anthony) interview with Professor McNally, which was held on Tuesday, May 7 at 11:00 a.m.

Transcript

Anthony: So thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to me about sustainable transportation systems. We’re very interested in sustainability in general and how transportation systems are planned because the lecture Professor Hyland very kind of on the surface, so in order to go into more depth we wanted to interview some experts in the field who might know more about transportation systems. I was wondering if you could first introduce yourself in terms of your profession and what types of research you are interested in regarding transportation sustainability.

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: Is there a specific sector of transposition that you are most interested in terms of sustainability principles or I guess what type of planning, forecasting or modeling do you do?

McNally: I’m mainly involved in travel behavior, individual behavior. That is the angle of transportation that most fascinates me, given that it is not as rigid in terms of mechanical behaviors, which makes it interesting and ultimately all things good and bad derive from human behavior. So if we have problems with sustainability, it’s not really a transportation system problem, it’s a human problem, and it needs to be adjust by changes in human behavior.

Anthony: So if you do know, how are transportation systems planned and I guess from your angle of human behavior, how does human behavior affect how transportation systems are planned?

McNally: They haven’t been planned for that long. If you go back in history, you will find that most transportation systems are there out of the convenience of people’s choices, whether it is farm roads into cities or the ways city’s form and by cities I mean they are generically small hamlets up to giant metropouloses. It probably really wasn’t until the advent of certain human problems of either disease, accessibility, but mainly when the car came around was when people started planning cities to accommodate these bigger changes. It’s interesting that ever since the car around, we haven’t really changed the way we plan cities even though many other larger changes have come along such as technology, the way we build things, etc. So planning has been more of a recent thing. In this country, it strated predmondatliy after WW2, trying to accommodate a booming economy because of the war, people coming back from war, moving back into cities and adjusting issues such as quality of life and the like. All these seems seem relevant at that time. That was when the government started getting involved at the different levels and that’s when planning a little less formalized. That’s when planning came along. Sustainability was never really an issue from the beginning, it only became an issue when things become unsustainable and maybe the first steps in that direction would have been the early 1970s with the environmental protection act and the clean air act when people started realizing that our behavior was creating serious problems.

Anthony: I guess adding on to that, transportation systems have they started changing ever since 1970s since when we wanted to become more sustainable?

McNally: I think they change continuously. I think the biggest problem is that the various systems that are important which would be land use in general, housing in particular, transportation systems of various sorts, it is not just one system, information technologies, utilities such as water. Most of these things are done independently. Even though planning engineering and planning theory should be hierarchical, but these things are done independently so we build roads based on where things are now not where we think they might be, but we don’t control land use. The controls of land use tend to be at the local level, the decisions to build roads are all the way up to the federal level in terms of funding. Some are local but most are not when it comes to transit systems, most of the decisions for any kind of rail system are on the federal level. Bus systems are at the regional level. So we don’t do a very good job of comprehensive planning at all. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that sustainability has become an issue.

Anthony: Yes. Would you say there is a tension between the public sector and the private sector in terms of how to approach sustainability?

McNally: Yeah there’s always been a sector problem because the private sector exists primarily, and I don’t see this in a negative way, for profit and the public sector really exists to fill in the holes of the private sector doesn’t do very well when it comes right down to. In our economic system as it exists needs both. It won’t produce anything but both amounting to a point right now where we’re starting to look more back toward the private sector. Things like you know public private partnerships and the like. But the primary is kind of a false concept when it comes right down to it. Most infrastructure have always been built by the private sector but owned and operated by the public sector. But the private sector has done the design and done the actual construction, sometimes even operations. So what they’re trying to get into now primarily is let’s add profit to it. Not just a profit of doing the project but a steady stream of money and that’s just going to reduce the utility of the transportation system because some of the money will be skimmed off the top to go into profits and placed elsewhere.

So I have a problem with the private sector getting too involved in those areas. The key concern of course is that right of way is the public quality and not a private one and if you lease out the right of way to someone then you’ve lost the ability to do what you might be best down the road. So there’s all issues with that when it comes down to planning the like and it’s also just having different levels of government.

Anthony: Yeah, yeah that makes sense. I guess in terms of the private sector having a for profit motive, can that ever be paired with sustainability.

McNally: Yeah because of externalities if they don’t need to deal with something you can…  There’s an article in the paper today about you know mining or looking for a lithium mountain some desert area. Well if you’re allowed to mine like they were allowed to mine historically, you dig what you want, toss the crap and big parts and not worry about it and that’s a sustainability issue. What it comes down to it, you have to pay the full cost. They want car users to pay their full cost and they’re not right now.

It makes sense right. People that dig up holes in the ground should pay the full cost. People that pollute pay should pay the full cost. When the Obama administration put controls on fossil fuel power plants, they were trying to force them to pay the full cost and now they could try to reverse this saying that it’s gonna increase electrical cost. Of course it’s gonna increase the cost, because you’re not paying the full cost now. Either pay today with cheaper electricity and also pay tomorrow with poor health or you pay today for more expensive electricity and maybe not such poor health in the future. It all comes down to basic differences between what a capitalist system does well and what it doesn’t do well. It does well by creating wealth. It doesn’t do well by the distribution of that wealth period.

Anthony: So in terms of like health outcomes do you see a future where health outcomes could be improved or is it always going to be kind of that capitalist notion?  

McNally: No it will be improved because health now is becoming a bigger issue relative to the environment. Before it might have been disease and what happened to that, you know private sector and public sector both stepped up to handle those issues right, although that’s also turned into a profit and an argument. When it comes down to quality and things like climate change, sea level rise whatever else,  those are issues that can’t be ignored and nd so that will be something that will come out of that as far as that goes.

How long will it take? Unfortunately it’s not going to be tomorrow or next year or five years but down the road, it’s going to be a decision we’ll have to make.

Anthony: So I’m going to switch a little bit to the feasibility of transportation system sustainability. From a civil engineering perspective, what do the concepts of shared mobility and automated cars, how does that factor into your view of sustainability or those concepts.

McNally: Shiny little lights that at once fascinated. That’s what it comes right down to. Are these technologies that are probably going to be around in the future? Yes because the private sector sees a profit motive in that and it fits in well with our current systems. Some of those things do fit. Are they going to explode soon? No because there’s fundamental problems with them. Number one is infrastructure. The amount of infrastructure in this country, I’m just focused on transportation, let’s not worry about the other ones, are just as important as far as other public systems. It’s literally poured concrete it’s not going to change. We just can’t tear it out. Even things they say like, well autonomous vehicles can drive a narrower lanes, therefore we can we strip all the freeways and how much would that cost to replace every single car today or every car that’s necessary. Right. It just isn’t feasible in any world, in any history, anywhere. It’s not going to change rapidly. There’s also problems with these technologies. These are technologies that people are forwarding and saying this is the future, make money on this and it might be, but when’s the future’s going to be. I’m telling you right now it’s not going to be in five, ten or fifteen years.

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 say 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.

So those are all issues that are very important, same with autonomous vehicles. We should keep testing these thing, we should keep developing these things. We don’t expect it’s going to change things. Shared mobility is a project. We’re trying to make some money off a concept that human beings just don’t behave that way. People don’t share their houses and they don’t share their cars, they don’t share their personal belongings and they’re not about to when they don’t have to. Now when you’re traveling maybe you’ll be happy using a shared vehicle somewhere, but do you want someone taking your vehicle or when you have a vehicle that’s not even yours.

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: I know you talked about positive incentivizing like subsidizing things that are good. How does the other way around. So I’ve learned about congestion pricing being something that European models have seen in terms of like charging you for how much you basically make the environment congest. Because when you are a part of congestion you are not economically productive in any way, you just sit in a car and you aren’t doing anything unless, maybe you’re doing something in your car. So how does this like making prices on things that are not good, does that —

McNally: Well I have a big problem with congestion pricing because all techniques we do to try to address, say for example congestion are doomed to fail. With congestion pricing, you’re basically forcing people away from decisions they like to make, which means you’re giving a benefit to those who are able to pay or have someone else pay for that. Where do those other people go? Does it spread out the peak? Do they go to all the other routes, other modes? It’s nice to say, “Well gee, if we let wealthy people pay for the roads and no one else can use them and let everyone else ride public transit, won’t that be a great system.”

It wouldn’t be a great system, it’s just not going to work. Congestion pricing as a theory of sorts that economists forward and in theory, yes, indeed it will work, it will force people off the roads. But when it comes down to mobility and transportation, we’re supposed to be providing those resources, not restricting those resources. Do we congestion price schools? Do schools fall so we’re going to charge more and your kid can’t go anymore. I think about what’s the difference between school and the transportation system when it comes to a public good being provided.

So a lot of these these options of trying to make people pay, first of all they’ve only been applied in a very small number of cities and in core areas, not in general. It’s a huge equity issue. Is it sustainable from an economic viewpoint if reduce the number of vehicles travelling? Perhaps. You want sustainability? It’s called growth control. You control growth. You don’t price. Anyone that wants to be there can be there. You control growth. No one’s willing to do that. You want to talk about sustainability, start talking about growth control.

Not everybody can live on the beach, not everyone can live on the mountaintop. Not everyone can live in Southern California. You want sustainability. You can’t have that level of growth. Not everyone can live in a big city. I love the argument that I alway make in New York City. You live in New York City, you don’t need a car, you can’t afford a car, you can’t park it anywhere. So what do you do with all the money you save? Number one, you don’t save any money whatsoever, it all goes toward housing. There’s a very separate relationship between housing and transportation. The closer in you live, the easier it is to get around, the more expensive it is to be there and that’s held over time. So does overall technologies and policy areas or whatever else. You don’t save money because you don’t have a car in a big city. You trade off one thing for the other.

Anthony: So there’s the argument also that if you expand like the freeways, if you make more lanes, that will increase congestion.

McNally: Right, induced demand. Well if you do have induced demand that means you already have before that a condition called impeded demand. People just don’t all of a sudden decide, you know I’m just gonna drive to L.A,  I don’t need to, but it’s cheap so I’ll do it. You drive and you increase the amount of travel you’ll have, maybe when income changes. You definitely have more travel when growth occurs, more people are travelling there. Do you make certain changes in terms of behavior between different modes and destinations and times. Yeah. That’s called travel behavior. People are not going to be induced to make more trips for no reason at all if they’re already making the amount they want. If they’re not already making the amount they want, by dropping the price, of course it is going to increase that. The number for our result is gonna increase if you drop the price in half. Do you need to drop the price in half? No because there’s probably less people who are with that that don’t have Ferraris that want Ferraris. I think most people are traveling about the amount they want to travel and I just don’t think it makes any sense to think that people are going to travel more just because it’s cheaper. If the price of gas comes down, maybe in that case you travel more but only because you’ve been traveling less before and because gas prices have gone up. If the price of houses goes down, do you buy extra houses. No, would you buy extra anything. There’s a limit to that sort of consumption. We don’t need to travel more. Just as you said, travel takes time and by the way, sitting in traffic does not necessarily reduce the amount of time you spend working. It reduces the amount of time you spend maybe sleeping, recreating as you like. So congestion is really taking away from leisure time, not from work time. Your boss doesn’t say, “Congestion is getting better, you can work an extra hour or less next week.” No, it doesn’t work that way and those are issues we failed to take into consideration.

Anthony: So I guess, how does travel behavior factor into average commute times, I mean just talking about Southern California. I think what I’ve heard is the average commute times can range from 25 to 30 minutes, so does reducing commute time contribute to sustainability or is it just travel behavior that people are going to always commute 25 to 30 minutes.

McNally: Well first of all it’s an average, some people might commute an hour and a half, but most don’t. I mean how many people do you know of have a two hour commute or a bit longer than that. What it comes down to is commuting behavior. Behavior in general when it comes to travel is almost as set in concrete as the infrastructure itself. People develop a lifestyle and things change over time. You decide to live in a certain area, your kids go to certain schools, the certain patterns you have. There’s a high probability that a household with a long commute probably also has another worker with a shorter commute, that both probably don’t have long commutes. If they do live in the same direction, you tend to travel together. For other directions,  you tend to locate somewhere differently over time. So the idea that commute times are some sort of a solution to problems is true in the sense that it never really gets any worse than a certain level and it’s about 26 minutes currently now.

Looking at all the cities around the world it ranges between low 20s to high 20s. When it’s higher than that it’s because public transit drives it up even higher because transit takes longer than other modes do. The bottom line is that it never gets any worse than that. At some point people start to move away as there is outmigration of the domestic population in California right now, believe it or not. There’s a limit or maybe supply changes, so you have this function where commutes get higher and they drop lower than they get higher than they drop lower and it never gets much worse than that. 19:13

Can you believe that they rationalize a change in the 405 Freeway, building more lanes based on the fact that they if they didn’t do this commute times on just the 15 miles of the 405 freeway in 20 years would be two hours long and just that 15 miles. There is no possible world where that’s ever been observed or would be observed. It’s not going to happen but that’s what they used to base their decision on expanding that. So think about it. We need more thinking is what I think we need. We need less wishful thinking and more down to brass tacks thinking.

Anthony: Yeah that makes sense. So I guess now since our project kind of focuses on Riverside and Long Beach, I don’t know how much you know about Riverside and Long Beach, but if you could describe maybe the cities or your knowledge of Riverside and Long Beach and their transportation systems.

McNally: Well you know Long Beach has been around a very long time and it’s kind of a classic design for a city on a what turns out to be a natural port area. It probably was, outside of San Francisco, probably I’m guessing one of the first cities in California that developed. It has the core area, essentially a grid type transportation system where older cities tend to build on, especially when it was relatively flat. It has freeways into and out of it. It has a light rail line terminating in Texas, LA, has its own bus network. I don’t have any idea what any kind of social analytics for the city. Population wise it’s probably about a half a million ballpark figure and it’s, to be honest I’m not sure if it’s growing or shrinking in terms of that change but it used to be an oil city. Because all the oil was extracted from the ground, the city dropped about 10 feet in elevation believe it or not, seriously. Now it’s driven in large measure by ports and those ports create a huge sustainability issue. Things come in on containers and either move out of Long Beach and L.A. ports on trains or trucks, trucks that typically are not non-polluting and trains that are not electrified either. That’s a big issue. I’m not sure why you paired Long Beach and Riverside because Riverside being inland, was not necessarily a natural place to start a city even though it was sitting on a so-called river, Santa Ana River. It’s not a year round flowing stream for example. It gives you close proximity to low density areas, the desert, the mountains. I have no idea how big Riverside is. I would probably guess at least a quarter million but probably not as big as Long Beach, but it’s in an area/county. The two counties out there are growing very rapidly. Both have gone from maybe half a million 20 years ago to well over a million, maybe getting close to 2 million now, so the whole inland empire probably has on the order of 4 million people living on it right now. Those people are primarily living there because they can’t afford to live in Orange County and L.A. County, the more developed areas. Cheaper land translates into long commutes and there are long commutes between Riverside, Orange County, San Bernardino coming into some degree as well, but then going there are still long commutes between L.A. and Orange County, which by the way are about equal in direction as there are just as many people commuting into Orange County from L.A. as the opposite way.

But Riverside has had more of a recent growth, probably in the last 30 years. There probably wasn’t much to say before that whereas Long Beach has been steady for a very long time so in that regard they’re a bit different. Riverside is at kind of a crossroad of major freeways. It has Commuter Rail running through it,  Amtrak runs through there, not through Long Beach, so it’s a lot of similarity I guess on that level but I’d bet most people wouldn’t think those two cities were comparable even though on a certain transportation viewpoint they are.I would guess that the average commutes associated with Riverside are probably significant longer than for Long Beach.

Anthony: Yeah so I guess we wanted to compare the two cities because their transportation systems are similar in the case of the train but they’re different in that Long Beach is more biker friendly. So they do a lot more kind of that, I guess you can call it sustainable transportation in terms of the mode of transportation, whereas in Riverside, there’s lots of, as you said, there is very low population density in Riverside and so that leads to a longer commute times. So I think that dichotomy is pretty interesting now, that’s why we wanted to compare those two cities.

McNally: Low population density does not necessarily lead to longer commute times. Low population density outlying areas when there’s a courier of employment might do that. I bet if you looked at some small towns in Wyoming and North Dakota you’re not going to get long commute times associated with those low density. So don’t tie that together directly. And this whole idea of balancing jobs and housing, just because you have the same number of jobs and housing in the area doesn’t mean you don’t have long commute times. It doesn’t mean that the people that live in an area work in the area.

Anthony: Unless it was a City of Industry.

McNally: Well it just feels different because nobody lives there. Take Irvine as an example. It’s about the same, roughly speaking, same number of jobs as people here but people commute in and out of Irvine all the time. It’s not like we have a balance here that’s been achieved and people all work and live in the city. It’s not the case unfortunately.

Anthony: Would that be sustainable to have people work in the same city that they live in.

McNally: Yeah it’s called socialism. You make people live where you want them to live. Make them work you want to live and that’s not the way capitalist societies work, but you do have to have full cost pricing on things. If you’re going to build housing in areas where there’s already a huge demand, maybe the answer really is simply controlled growth, everyone can afford to live here. Or when you do build growth, put it in areas where you can’t support it by means of transportation that are more sustainable, such as trains, for example. You know a train hauling a large number of people, preferably electrified, over a corridor that’s well-defined makes a lot of sense but that’s not how most transportation planners look.

They look at how many people live a long corridor, how people work along the corridor and therefore they’re all going to use the train. No, none of them may use the train. They may all be traveling normal to the corridor and not ever getting there. They don’t look ahead to these numbers. They don’t. I don’t think people really understand the way people behave, the way the cities work as well as they should when they’re making these decisions, especially the decision makers themselves, politicians.

Anthony: So we’ve kind of talked about human behaviors as this general thing that masses of people may be accomplished but on an individual level how does individual human psychology play into their use of the transportation system.

McNally: The net result including congestion is the accumulation of a lot of individual decisions to travel and the net result does impact those decisions. If there really is congestion in the area as some people forgo travel to that area, doesn’t mean they’re going to not travel, it means they’re not going to travel necessarily at that time on that corridor by that mode. They might be making alternative decisions and therefore changing capacity could affect those decisions. That’s why there’s this one general theory that says if you’re going to add capacity, try to add it as uniformly as possible, so it basically accommodates any sort of trouble existing already, instead of forcing people to make major changes to decisions and now join the 405 traffic instead of staying where they were to start with.

So travel behaviors is fundamental to any type of behavior. There’s an economic angle to it; there’s income coming in, there does need to be resources. You need to access those resources, you need to get to work. A pattern of work that we have now that’s gone from 50, 60, 70 years ago with a single worker and household to multiple workers in a household. The people working at home or working in different patterns, big economy, et cetera, et cetera. All these things are changing the way people behave to some degree, but the fundamentals have remained the same.

People tend to want to live in safe, lower density communities and those people will choose that Those that want to live in safe, higher density communities will choose those. Those that have kids will choose communities with better schools, maybe parks and things like that. People are making rational decisions. That doesn’t mean they can all make the same decision. People that want to live somewhere may not be able to live there because of things like income availability, travel times and things like that. I think people try the best as they can to make those decisions. Once they make those, they get locked into a large degree.

There’s a cost of making changes to where you live. Pulling up families, changing commuting patterns and the like. So it all comes down to behavior at some level and it can be addressed by incentives as well. You know, carrots and sticks can both work to some degree.

Anthony: I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about the Tesla Hyperloop. I just wanted to know what your opinion is on that.

McNally: I ran our CO design course for several years here and one of the projects the last couple years was actually building a pod to be tested with them. Like a lot of the technology you talked about earlier,  autonomous vehicles and the like, it’s something that has promise but it’s not going to exist tomorrow and its promise is mainly over long distances because it needs to get to a certain speed. To a certain sense, look at the bullet train, high speed rail. When the end of designing a system that swerves to hit certain cities to get votes they needed to get there,  I mean you start adding more places. There’s that tradeoff between the more times you stop the less fast you go. But the greater audience you reach that may be riding on your system, that’s always the tradeoff here. Hyperloop would be an extreme of that. It’s not going to stop at all in between. There’s even going to be a difficulty of not just stopping but getting people in and out of the system that’s working out in a low density air environment wherever else to move at high speed. So that technology will work in cities not in moving on trains.

If technology can work between cities, possibly right now air is the dominant technology out there, but it is very polluting, uses a lot of fuel but already has had an extremely high level of service and are extremely low cost when it comes right down to it and that cost is born by the travelers in full. There’s no subsidy of airlines and for that matter, even airports there are mostly public owned and mostly make money.

Anthony: So I think that I remember in class we talked about airplanes. Is there ever a world in which airplanes won’t be used and basically we just used a bunch of Tesla Hyperloops.

McNally: Possibly, I think that’s too far off in the future to think about that changing because how long would it take to build an infrastructure of hyper loops that’s comparable to what we have right now and in terms of airlines. There’s a map you can pull up online, I saw on the news the other day, that basically is just a dot indicating every airport in the world that has essentially, I’m not sure if it was commercial flights, but some level of quality in terms of flights and just showing those dots on a piece of paper traces out the world perfectly. Every continent, every area is traced out and you can do that with lights and power energy use and whatever else. The system is so huge as it sits right now, how do you go about changing it? I mean, could you? Yeah. One way to change it of course is not to try to replace it, but to control the extension of that system and maybe not expand airports that exist now. Control growth in the same manner there. Maybe not build these giant two storey aircraft, that they’re no longer building by the way, maybe start addressing private jets, which are extremely polluting and carry very few people at a great expense mainly to people that are flying them but also in terms of takeoffs and landings at airports. They are trying to make some changes now with John Wayne airport to accommodate more commercial jets. That’s going to have impacts on a lot of things. Not to mention those that live underneath the flight path because commercial jets are below the threshold of noise but just below the threshold of noise. So you still hear them just as much, but just below the threshold and they’re not restricted in terms of takeoffs and landings at John Wayne Airport as commercial jets are. So there’s a lot of issues there with sustainability.

Anthony: So how can the common layperson like I guess how would you ask a common layperson to make a difference in terms of the sustainability of transportation systems and just within maybe Southern California.

McNally: First of all think. Which means my idea is never going to work as much as we don’t think and you do what’s right. I’ve been in California like I said for 40 years and ever since I got here I’ve been recycling newspapers and aluminum cans. Does it take a little bit of effort to do that? Yeah. Does it by itself just me doing it help the world out? Unmeasurable, right. But the bottom line is you do it anyways because it’s the right thing to do. That’s what all comes down to. It comes down to transportation as well. I have a household with four people and we have four cars but with that said, I drive less than 6000 miles a year. That may sound like a lot, but typically people in the United States drive 12000. The car I now owned for 10 years, most of it was long distance traveled, either Arizona or Santa Barbara, when my kids were going to school back and forth. Over half the miles come down from just that alone, so I don’t drive very much. I live on campus. I can walk back and forth. I don’t always walk back and forth but I can walk back and forth. I make decisions on that level. So I have a house that the price is controlled. I don’t determine the selling price. It’s on leased land and I can walk back and forth to work with the decision I made and I’ve been there for a long time now. I took steps that I thought made sense and if everyone starts behaving in that way, things will slowly turn around. No major change is going to come along, driven by what people want. The only way we’re to force any change in sustainability, if we start having, you know,  islands disappear below raising sea level, if you start having rashes of strange weather patterns that are destroying things and you can’t just look at what’s happened so far, whether that’s definitely climate change or whether it’s just a perturbation of normal patterns, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure climate change is occurring but unless someone comes along and says we have to make major changes now it’s not going to happen.

It’s not going to be either the public sector, the private sector but everyone has to come together on this and one step in that direction is going to be as simple as it seems. This will take some time still, replacing burning fossil fuels and cars. It’s a lot easier to control pollution coming out of 2000, fossil fuel burning power plants, the general electricity, than it is to control the number of cars in this country, which is about 250 million burning fossil fuel. To me that’s an obvious change. Most travel could get by even with range limitations imposed by their batteries right now. Most could be accommodated by that. Soon the future will be accommodated by that. Autonomous vehicles, if they come along, are gonna be able to address a lot of other issues. Those that can’t drive or have, you know, have any sort of other restrictions, but there will be costs associated with that. I think the electric angle is going to be something that will be just as affordable in the short run and I think that’s going to be the biggest change that occurs in terms of all the things we’re doing.  

Anthony: That makes sense. I mean we kind of talked about in class how the reason why fossil fuels have been so, I guess, dominant now is because some power plants might have been just recently born and they could extract a lot of value for the next 30 to 40 years. So there’s no incentive for them to shut down just for sustainability purposes because the wear of the technology is just still so new. It’s going to encourage people to still go to fossil fuel plants because, for the lifetime of that power plant, they still want to extract as much money from it as possible. I guess policy makers find it difficult to try to justify a reason for shutting them down.

McNally: You make it sound like the policymakers are thinking about the people and the air their breathing. It has nothing to do with that whatsoever. Look at the change in administrations. All of a sudden coal’s good, “Bringing back coal! Burn as much of it as you want.” It’s a question of political viewpoint and where the money flows. It’s that simple, it truly is that simple. You can put any plant that exists now that may have a 30 year life lifespan, that burns coal and you can control a large portion of pollution that’s currently not being controlled right at the source. Will it increase the cost of doing that? Yes, in fact it could probably increase it to a level that it might not be financially feasible to keep that plant open. Already the energy was changing over to natural gas. Now natural gas, it’s unbelievable how rapidly that has grown due to fracking and things like that. It’s replacing coal and it is much cleaner. Still a fossil fuel, but it’s much cleaner. So in the short run it makes perfect sense to get rid of coal, kill it so it never comes back. Coal’s great as long as it’s in the ground. That’s where it should be. Like I said, when Trump got elected, if he keeps the coal in the ground and the missiles and the silos, everything will be fine. So yeah, the power plant argument is B.S. These companies, of course they want to make money.

These are not forward looking people. People that run businesses, especially conventional businesses, typically are not forward looking people. They’re not looking at new technologies. You know, utilities used to be one of the best investments you can make in terms of annual dividends paid on stock.Not so much anymore because big changes are occurring both in nuclear, both in coal and to some degree maybe even hydro right now because of the problems associated with that.

Anthony: So what are some like typical counter arguments that are made in regards to some of the research that you’ve done and then how do you respond to it. I’m sure that you’ve done presentations where people sometimes don’t agree with your views, so what are some typical views that people have and then how do you respond to those.

McNally: Almost everything we’ve talked about, my views run contrary to what most people are espousing because mainly they’re just taking ideas that are floating around. It sounds good on the surface. You throw it back out there. So things like induced demand, I don’t think it’s a real thing. Well, it’s a real thing, it’s not an important real thing. Most of its growth based. You want control, induced demand control growth. If the demands being induced by improvements in the transportation system, it’s because it’s been impeded to start with, probably due to too much growth in the area that runs contrary to most other areas. Things like Uber and Lyft. All right. Those are technologies that came out. They were not and they still are not sustainable. I’m sustainable from an economic viewpoint. Why? Because the average salary made by those drivers is somewhere between 8 and 11 dollars an hour, which pretty much puts them the lowest 10 percent of the U.S. economy. And what they’re not doing is paying off the cost of their resources. They’re not depreciating like factories do,  those cut coal fired plants? Their car is depreciating but they’re not building that into their tax structure in the life. From 60 cents per mile, roughly speaking, to drive a car. You drive 10 miles six blocks. You could pay 10 bucks to drive, that you’ve made four. You do it twice in an hour you made 8. You’re at minimum wage. So we have a system that says that that’s a good idea. It’s a great idea because people are benefiting from that system. We’re getting a higher quality ride for less money. That’s not sustainable. It’s not paying the full cost. You can say the same about cars. We’re getting a higher level service than what we’re paying for it. Probably so. All right? That’s why things like that are not necessarily sustainable from an economic viewpoint. There’s a lot of arguments to make about modes that work the same way but other issues as well. The idea that we’re not paying full cost. Most people aren’t even aware of what that cost is. I just gave you a figure I saw somewhere, eight to eleven dollars an hour. Try to find out if someone’s done a systematic study of what Uber drivers are making and Google wants to get rid of all the drivers right because that’s where all the money goes to. Well they do realize that the cars are owned by those drivers. You get rid of drivers, you have no cars, unless you start buying fleets. Now the cost of buying fleets might be cheaper in the long run than the cost of having drivers with their own cars, but you take care of maintenance, you take care of insurance, you take care of all those things. Those are your cars and the lifetime of rotating those cars through. What do you do with all the excess cars etc.. I don’t think they thought that model too completely and besides Uber and Lyft don’t work in very low density areas and never will, nor will any kind of ride sharing. And yes people say weapons are moving back to the cities. Number one. What do you mean by city. People are not moving back to the urban core. They’re moving to metropolitan areas primarily in the suburbs. Rural and couriers are still moving into the suburbs and the suburbs aren’t what they used to be. They’re not this little teeny town on the outskirts. They’re just low density areas. That’s where people prefer to live. Do we let them live there? Well you better have a very good argument for not letting them live there. And by the way, housing is part of this picture and it has been ignored in transportation all along. By housing I mean the broader issues of land use, but the bottom line is housing is the major investment made by any family in this country right now of their lifetime. Investment that didn’t, years ago, be such an investment. As a place you lived in, it was paid off, you pass it on to your kids and they could sell it. It has now become something you get, you can gain profit on over the long run. Anything, any action that’s taken that challenges that investment would have huge negative ramifications. So if you start building toxic waste dumps next to single family homes, those single family homes total lose their value. Now no one is suggesting that but how about high rise apartment stacked at those same locations. Same thing. This is not a NIMBY thing that’s bad. This NIMBY is human behavior. NIMBY is humans acting like humans. All right. So don’t make it look like some people are just selfish because they’ve taken the time to put money into living into a single family home to get the lifestyle they want and now someone next door wants to put in a toxic waste dump. Now use that as an extreme obviously. Maybe they want to put in a four story apartment building. Either way it changes the entire picture. The stability that people are seeking is exactly what they’re seeking. Stable school, stable quality of life and that’s what they want, that’s what they’ve paid for and that’s what we should allow them to keep. That’s why I don’t like this idea of changing land use as putting restrictions. Say for example, the state level decides to build high density housing and force areas to do that. Let the locals decide what they want to do and if it’s not compatible with your plans, fine, create your own city and build it the way you want.

Anthony: Hmm, that makes sense. In terms of human behavior, is it ever malleable in any respect.

McNally: 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: I guess as we’re coming to the end, I was just wondering if maybe you could offer any solutions that maybe we haven’t talked about in terms of sustainability. If you could propose a solution and have it be put into action in Southern California or really anywhere in transportation sustainability, what would be the dream solution for you.

McNally: The job growth. That simple. I mean growth in the broadest sense.

Anthony: Do you mean population growth or economic growth or just all.

McNally: 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.

All right. Control growth. That’s the only way you can have anything sustainable, period. There simply isn’t another way to do it. You control growth, growth in everything.

Anthony: So I guess, is there anything else that you want to add about anything that we’ve talked about or Riverside or Long Beach or anything else.

McNally: Yeah. I don’t know what your angle was between Riverside and Long Beach. I certainly wouldn’t have picked those two cities to compare, but there’s lots of other comparisons you can make that are kind of interesting. I would guess that the population and employment base out in Riverside might not be that different, say than Irvine, but Irvine, developing as a master plan community, something that I kind of snickered out when I got here, but basically it’s worked. Irvine has worked By the way, there’s bike lanes in every street and there’s also bikeways off street as well. The only reason that Irvine has had a sudden increase in congestion and the alike is because we have council members who have changed the masterplan and allowed more of growth. That’s what created the problem. Irvine was working just fine. Do a lot of people want to live in Irvine? Yes. Is it ever going to be like New York City? Well if it is, you’ve killed what they moved to Irvine for. Likewise, they don’t want to kill New York City. New York City’s great and by the way, one more thing I didn’t mention too is sprawl.

Anthony: Yea, we talked a lot about sprawl.

McNally: 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: On that perspective of sprawl, can it also be defined as like a product of human preference for low density areas or is it purely a result of growth.

McNally: Southern California’s sprawl is because of public transit systems. All right. Have you heard that whole history? It is absolutely documented. The people that owned the areas built rail lines to those areas to encourage that development. It was totally profit driven. Cheapest land, great connections by rail, build the housing, leave. So from that perspective you have the private sector moving in. It’s uncontrolled growth. Some of the proposals in Southern California to build cities out in the Inland Empire, a new growth out there, plus there is Tejon Ranch, etc.. are classic cases of bad planning designs because you know those cities are gonna be commuting into the core that’s already there. But are there laws to prevent us from doing that? Not as long as people are paying off people left and right. The political system fosters supporting those that have the money to get what they want through donations and the like. So as long as that system exist and that’s also locked into habit and sustainability issues and I’m not going to address that necessarily, you’re going to have that problem. It’s just a matter of fighting it. There’s one good way that cities can control that. If someone chooses to live, let’s say out of Riverside, 30 years ago, don’t go building freeways out to Riverside and rail lines. Don’t let them come into the jobs here then maybe they won’t move there but as soon as you build a road, like the 91 freeway, more people develop there and the more they move out there the more congested the road gets. Then they start saying, you’ve got to do something about that road. When you make a choice to have more land for a cheaper cost per acre, per square foot, whatever, you’re going to basically counter that decision with more expensive transportation. That’s exactly what they got. I, instead, chose to have land that was never gonna make me any money whatsoever, but what I got out of that was real cheap transportation as well.

Anthony: So, I guess, that’s the more sustaining way of approaching it.

McNally: Yeah. Don’t give them what they want if you don’t think that’s sustainable. Don’t encourage that growth. Tell people that, you know, like Las Vegas, there’s not enough water to support the growth of Las Vegas. Tell them that, “Hey you can build but there will be no municipal water coming to your house and no sewers leaving it. Do what you want”, because there’s only so much you can sustain in certain areas. Any ecosystem can only sustain so much. You break it, you bought it basically. All right.

Anthony: Well I think that’s pretty much everything on my part. Anything else we want to say?

McNally: No, I’d like to find out what happens to all of this at the end.

Anthony: Yeah, I definitely appreciate being able to talk to you and I will definitely keep you updated.

Feature Image Credit: Professor Michael McNally