Susan Shaheen

Spectrum

Susan Shaheen is co-Director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center and Lecturer at UC Berkeley. She discusses the revolution underway in transportation choices which she believes will be driven by smart phones.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Spectrum's next [inaudible]. [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.

Speaker 2: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our guest today is Susan Shaheen, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley. Susan also lectures [00:01:00] at UC Berkeley. Susan's Shaheen received her master's degree from the University of Rochester and her phd in ecology from UC Davis. She joins us to talk about the work she's been doing at the center as well as the centers. Broader scope. Susan Shaheen. Thanks for coming on spectrum. My pleasure. I wanted to get your perspective, a historic perspective on transportation and when you look back, what do you see as the profound changes that [00:01:30] have happened over a period of time that you're comfortable with reflecting on

Speaker 3: [inaudible]? So I think transportation and the environment were significant, particularly in the state of California in the mid 1950s where relationships between exhaust emissions and smog and other types of air pollutants came together. And we started to garner a lot more understanding about that. And so in terms of [00:02:00] my personal interests, that was a really significant moment in time for the nation, but in particular for California, which, which led the way and that garnered a lot of interest and vehicle technologies and strategies for addressing transportation emissions.

Speaker 2: And is that really what started the sustainability movement within transportation

Speaker 3: in terms of transportation? Sustainability in those terms I think are more modern day than the mid [00:02:30] 1950s when we started to become really cognizant of smog and emissions, particularly in the La Basin area. There was a, the Brundtland Commission came about and in 1987 they produced a document called our common future and that really focused on sustainability. And that's when we started to hear more about the three pillars of sustainability. So economics, equity and the environment. And around that late 1980s early 1990s period, I believe that's really [00:03:00] when a lot of the discussion about transportation sustainability came about, but we had already been looking at vehicle technologies, fuels strategies for demand management, like carpooling long before then. But I think in terms of there being more of a movement or a focus on sustainability and transportation, that probably came about more in the late 1980s and early 1990s before I came on the scene.

Speaker 3: How did the Transportation Sustainability Research Center get started? [00:03:30] So the uh, Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California Berkeley as part of the Institute of Transportation Studies. It came about five years ago. It was founded as the brainchild of Professor Norgaard and Professor Sam or Matt Nat. And they thought it was really important time for us to put together a center that focused on vehicles, fuels as well as demand management strategies that could [00:04:00] employ electronic and wireless communication systems. So that's how we got our start in the center. How do you choose your projects? Well, we always choose our projects based on someone's interest within a center. So some, some great form of passion associated with it. And we find that sometimes the scale of the project needs to be very, very large. So if there's an opportunity for a large grant and it fits [00:04:30] with our mission and mandate for instance, goods movement, we have a project that's by point $5 million to implement a smart parking, uh, management system for long haul truckers on the I five.

Speaker 3: And that requires a lot of money and a lot of technology and a lot of getting out there and getting your hands dirty and implementing things. And it takes scale and money and time to build something like that. And so that's our largest project overall and it really warrants that kind [00:05:00] of financial base, but we can also do things for 50 to $75,000 that are highly impactful. We've received awards for research on car sharing, things that I think may have cost $55,000 in terms of grant monies to produce. But the work itself was impactful enough that it made a difference and was really powerful to people in the field and to decision makers and gave them the data that they needed. So a lot of it just has to do with our passion and [00:05:30] if there's a grant opportunity that fits really well with our interests, we go for it and we don't necessarily say, okay, a small grant isn't going to do what we needed to do because we know about it than that, we know that sometimes you need small grants to do really impactful things and sometimes you need massive grants to do really impactful things.

Speaker 3: It just depends on what we're trying to do. But in my research I've found over time that I don't need is larger grant anymore to do as [00:06:00] impactful and innovative research as I used to have to. And that's because there's so many innovative entrepreneurial companies out there doing this that I don't have to go and build the thing anymore and create the service and imagine the service because there's entrepreneurs everyday contacting us saying, would you partner with us and help us to study and understand what we've built? And we're delighted because that means we can do so much more research when we don't actually [00:06:30] have to go out and build it. But if we need to go out and build it, we will do that.

Speaker 2: It does the center deal at all with larger forms of transportation trucks. You mentioned trucks that you were involved with that do you get into shipping overseas, shipping trains, things like that because California has such a, a destination for so much material from Asia products?

Speaker 3: That's a great question. We have a great deal of interest in all forms of goods movement at present. Our focus is primarily [00:07:00] trying to get our hands around and our understanding of origin and destination patterns and the long distance trucking industry. And I believe that you know, more and more will venture into freight to rail and also deal more with the ports. But it's a different area of research. It's not as well understood. It's an unregulated industry in many ways. And so getting data is a major issue and really understanding that data and working [00:07:30] with it is I think a notable contribution that we're trying to make with respect to just even understanding what's going on on the [inaudible]. So I think it's going to be a big area and continuing area of research at TSTC. I think there's so many opportunities for us to make freight and goods movement more sustainable, but it's not the easiest area to study or to get into and we're really trying to build up this understanding and then go from there.

Speaker 1: [00:08:00] This is spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. We're talking with Susan Shaheen about transportation, sustainability.

Speaker 2: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the free market and government approaches to having an impact on transportation? [inaudible]

Speaker 3: [00:08:30] no, I think government can play a tremendous role in making sure that we continue to have public transportation and we continue to have safe roads and bridges and that's a really significant role and they can also play a notable role in terms of public policy with respect to incentivizing different types of behavior if it's through road pricing strategies, so to s mode shift, get people think about taking a different mode at a different time, incentivizing people to [00:09:00] buy alternative fuel vehicles, giving them access to the Hov lanes or the high occupancy vehicle lanes. I also feel that the government can play a tremendous role in terms of providing third parties with access to data about transit services. And what we've started to see is a lot of new companies and new opportunities providing people with access to information that really wasn't there before. So I think the government can play a role in really [00:09:30] encouraging and facilitating openness and sharing and a really different way of experiencing transportation than we ever have before.

Speaker 3: And I think industry has a tremendous role to play as well. Why not allow them to be as innovative as possible and create new opportunities and new modes if some of the things I study include car sharing, which is short term access to vehicles, and we've started to see lots of investment and interest in the idea of peer-to-peer car sharing or personal [00:10:00] vehicle sharing services where people could actually put their own vehicle into a shared use setting and we could see car sharing go outside of dense urban areas where traditionally lives into suburban areas and there's ideas for scooter sharing services. Public bike sharing is just growing and leaps and bounds around the world. It's about to double in size in terms of the number of programs just in the year 2012 in the United States. So [00:10:30] there's so many opportunities for creating new industries and new jobs and new transportation choices.

Speaker 3: And I think the government has a tremendous role in that and creating and encouraging and inspiring these partnerships with individuals who have innovative ideas. I think we're really entering into a new era of mobility, which is very exciting. And then you have to tread the line between interfering with the market, choosing winners and losers gets run out [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:11:00] and not over-regulated. So there's a balance there. Right. And I think that's where research is really critical is to understand, you know, when you incentivize, what is the impact of that incentivization, you know, is it working, is it not working? Do you need to do more, do you need to do less? And that's where I think a lot of our work can come in to help provide policymakers and decision makers with more informed understanding about what, what is actually happening in the system. And we're really [00:11:30] moving into an era of massive databases and opportunities to look at real time data and in a way that we never could before because of the availability of electronic and wireless communication systems, the ubiquity of cell phones and smart phone technology and sensor technologies and the cost of these things are dropping.

Speaker 3: So again, I believe we're really entering into a new era and mobility and transportation and it's just gonna require sort of a new way of thinking about openness and sharing. And there are [00:12:00] going to be some, some struggles in this, but I think there's more opportunities than there are barriers. And is the center very focused on having an impact in policy? We're very focused on that. So we truly want to make a difference and we want to do real world research and get out and be involved in demonstration projects and pilot projects and any type of endeavor. You know, we just received a grant from the University of California Transportation Center here at Berkeley [00:12:30] to look at personal vehicle sharing services. So we're not actually going out and implementing it or designing it or doing any of that, which we often do, but we're actually just working with companies throughout North America to see what they're doing and to help them actually understand through our data collection processes and analyses, what is this doing and what kind of impact is it having and what role might policy makers play to encourage more of this and what would work best overall [00:13:00] in terms of growing this opportunity?

Speaker 3: If people really like it, I'm a big fan of diversity and choice and all of my research. If it deals with fuels or if it deals with giving people an opportunity to see, you know, when is the next bus coming or on a mobile app in a, where can I find the bike sharing vehicle? I am really, really a big fan of giving people choices and information because I think that's critical to giving people an [00:13:30] opportunity to, to experience transportation in a new way. But I think for a long time people haven't felt that there's a lot of choices and once they invest in a private vehicle, they viewed that a lot of those, you know, transportation costs are sunk and so there's really minor expenses associated with that, but that's actually really not the truth. But you know that fixed cost really does change people's relationship with other transportation modes. [00:14:00] The more we can give people choices and have him think about transportation costs is variable. We can see a really different attitude towards taking different modes at different points in time, including getting lots of physical exercise.

Speaker 1: And this is the public affairs show spectrum on KALX Berkeley. We're talking with Susan Shaheen about transportation sustainability. [00:14:30] Next we talk about bike sharing and car sharing, the bike sharing during

Speaker 3: project. Can you talk a little bit about that? You were mentioning that it's going to double. Yeah, so public bike sharing as a form of public transportation, it's gone through actually several evolutions. The first generation of it started in 19 five and Amsterdam and it was a system called provosts or white bikes, which you might've heard of. They deployed, 50 of them, put them around the community and [00:15:00] they promptly disappeared. And so then we've seen different evolutions of the bike sharing concept into the 1980s where we moved into a more technology based approach where you had a coined deposit system so you couldn't just take it for free. Shortly after that we saw movement into what we call the third generation, which is more IT-based, which requires sort of the identity of somebody to be linked to that bike. And what we found is that the more advanced technology use, the more reliable [00:15:30] these systems become and the more they can be integrated into people's Daily community, which is pretty significant.

Speaker 3: Now, bikes are being used not just for recreational purposes, but to complete a first mile or last mile or a many mile trip that is actually part of a person's daily life. And these concepts have just taken hold. And I started to monitor this about seven or eight years ago and cataloged more and more of these bike sharing systems. They leave [00:16:00] has over 20,000 bikes in Paris. Honjo, which we've studied is in China. 60,000 bikes will, Han has over 70,000 bikes and it's public bike sharing system. New York City is sent to launch sometime late this summer or fall with 7,000 bikes leading up to 10,000 bikes. They're not taking a cent of public money to deploy the system. They have a title sponsorship with City Group, so [00:16:30] things are really changing in terms of transportation and mobility. How do they deal with the safety side of it all? All these people jumping on bikes without helmets probably.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. On the safety side, it's actually quite interesting is the majority of programs do not require people to wear helmets, so the majority of people actually don't wear helmets and using these systems and I think liability issues associated with public bike sharing are going [00:17:00] to be become more prominent and more important, particularly as they scale in size and they become larger. We do think or hypothesize that as these systems proliferate and people become more aware of them, there will be safety benefits as well because drivers will be more aware that, okay, those are capital bikeshare bikes riding down the street. I need to be conscious and aware of them because there's a lot more bikers on on the road, but the issue of density and more and more of these bicycles hitting [00:17:30] the road is an issue and I think a lot of municipalities are working more and more to build supportive infrastructure.

Speaker 3: New York City's an example of that. So these programs often go hand in hand with cycling infrastructure. But you do raise a good question associated with the helmets and there are some happening. San Vol is a company in British Columbia that's developed a dispensing system that actually cleans the helmet. So that could be a creative strategy. [00:18:00] A lot of the bike sharing programs actually offer helmets or give them out with a membership, but we think that a lot of times what happens is somebody who doesn't necessarily plan to take that bike and then realizes, wow, I want to take that bike. They're conveniently located like street furniture throughout the city. I'm just going to jump on it and go from point to point. And so the helmet is a difficult thing to plan for if that's how you use it. Carpools, car sharing. Can you talk about that a bit?

Speaker 3: [00:18:30] Yeah, so I've been studying shared use vehicle systems since the mid 1990s I did my doctorate on car sharing. That again is the idea of short term vehicle access where you don't actually need to own a vehicle but you have access to a whole fleet of vehicles and you use them by the hour and we've seen over time tremendous growth in the number of operators throughout North America. We've seen a membership continually grow as we've been tracking it. We also see [00:19:00] some very interesting behavioral effects in response to what we call traditional or neighborhood car sharing where many times people who join these systems actually end up either foregoing or selling a vehicle after they start using the system because they realize they don't need a car and they can trade off this fixed vehicle asset for variable costs and take public transportation, more ride share, Carpool more bike more a, we're also seeing [00:19:30] a really neat concept which is called one way car sharing traditional car sharing works and that you go into an out of the same location similar to a rental car system and many of us in the shared use space of thought, if we were able to provide a one way service similar to public bike sharing where you start off one place and you leave the bike in another place or a vehicle in another place, this might attract a whole different usage pattern and what would this do?

Speaker 3: [00:20:00] So several companies are getting started in this Daimler's cargo system, which uses a little smart vehicle launched in Austin. They're now in Washington, D c they're in Portland, they're in San Diego and this system is doing quite well. It requires a lot of public infrastructure because the vehicles have to be parked throughout the business areas or a neighborhood areas, but people actually instead of accessing the vehicle [00:20:30] by the hour, they're now actually accessing it by the minute and taking it one from one location to the next. BMW launched its program called drive. Now in the bay area, the first in the United States, it had only been operating in Germany prior to that. So lots of change and evolution in this shared you space coupled with public bike sharing, lots of innovation and ride sharing movements towards Uber taxi services and dynamic ride [00:21:00] sharing services have vago launched this spring and is providing dynamic ride sharing services.

Speaker 3: So I think what we're going to start to see is the bundling of these concepts and technologies and hopefully linkages to smart card technology like your clipper card and it would give you access to any one of the car sharing programs or the public bike sharing program is planned for San Francisco. I think, you know, with time we're gonna see a lot more smart apps that tell us [00:21:30] what our choices are. If it'd be a taxi or a car sharing vehicle or a carpooling vehicle. And I think it's all going to be integrated. And I think the big mobility device is going to become our phone through these smart apps. So a lot is happening and there's a lot to be watching. We're actually keeping pretty busy these days. In terms of our projects in the shared use space, we, we just uh, got great news, uh, the end of last week that we were funded to actually evaluate cargos, pure electric [00:22:00] vehicle based one way, car sharing service in San Diego.

Speaker 3: And we have another grant to look at the integration of electric vehicle bikes and to see car shares fleet in San Francisco. So it's going to be a service of both car sharing and Evy bike sharing, all combined into one service. So there's going to be a lot going on and a lot to watch in this space. And I, I do think the bay area is a critical location to see what's happening. What do you think is the best way [00:22:30] for individuals to find out about all of these options that are starting to happen? Is there someone who's consolidating these kinds of things on a website that they could go to or how do you search? I think you know for the bay area in particular, I think MTC, the metropolitan transportation commission has a really good five one one.org site that can provide you with a lot of information on your choices. Also, as of MTA has apps that you can download like the SF park site, so I think just go into your public transportation [00:23:00] operators websites like Bart, but also again, the regional transportation agencies are doing a really good job of getting information out there. Susan, Shane, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. You're welcome. It was great to meet you.

Speaker 1: [inaudible] [00:23:30] regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me with the calendar this month.

Speaker 4: Leonardo art science evening rendezvous or laser is on Wednesday, October 10th at Stanford Universities. [00:24:00] Jordan Hall Building Four 20 Room 41 talk. Start at seven with Andrew Todd Hunter discussing bridging the fuzzy techie divide, the senior reflection capstone in biology. Terry barely years subsequent. Talk on where at the beginning meets the end. It's about making technologies vulnerabilities visible and illustrating how easily modern inventions can become footnotes to a bygone era. [00:24:30] Mark Jacobson then discusses a plan to power the world with a wind, water, and sun. He focuses on three of the most significant problems facing the world today. Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity. Tonight ends with composer Sheryl Leonard's music from high latitudes, making music out of sounds, objects and experiences from the polar regions. To Register, visit www.leonardo.info the [00:25:00] northern California Science Writers Association and Swissnex our host, Tina taught by why are dotcoms Kevin Polson on cybercrime an inside view.

Speaker 4: He will talk about Max Butler, one of the highest value cybercriminals ever brought down by the FBI and Secret Service Butler, a hacker establish a worldwide operation from his safe house in a high rise apartment building in San Francisco's tenderloin. Butler eventually dominated a global black market in stolen credit card numbers, [00:25:30] supplying a far flung counterfeiting operation. Polson first described this in a wired article and then in his book published last year, kingpin, how one hacker took over the billion dollar cyber crime underground. The talk is on Thursday, October 11th doors at six 30 talk at seven reception with appetizers from seven 45 until nine 30 it's at Swissnex seven three zero Montgomery Street in San Francisco. Visit Swissnex, San Francisco. Dot. O R, g, [00:26:00] the San Francisco Opera, and the California Academy of Science Present Moby Dick, a whale of a tale in celebration of the musical conversion of Herman Melville's. Classic novel scientists will discuss Melville's famous dedication to the 19th century scientific accuracy in his writings.

Speaker 4: There'll also be biologists who will present on modern day whale science and conservation practices. The event is at the California Academy of Sciences. 55 music concourse drive in San Francisco's [00:26:30] Golden Gate Park on Tuesday, October sixteenth@sevenpmitistendollarsforyourmembersandtwelvedollarsforthegeneralpublicvisitwww.cal academy.org now, here's Rick Karnofsky with two news stories to stellar mass. Black holes have been discovered in globular cluster m 22 located at 10,000 light years away by a team of international researchers who published their findings in nature on October 4th using the Carl g [00:27:00] jetski very large array in New Mexico. They found two black holes and argue that there may be as many as five to a hundred in the classroom. This runs contrary to earlier theories that suggested only a single black hole of that size could survive in a popular cluster. They are the first stellar mass black holes found in a globular cluster in the Milky Way and the first observed via radio waves that of course, I mean Arthur j straighter of Michigan State University and the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was quoted [00:27:30] by scientific American saying that because they were seen by radio, they have to not just be in binary's, but they have to be in binaries that are close enough that mass transfer is actually taking place.

Speaker 4: In an article published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September, Yale researchers showed that academic research faculty have a gender bias in favor of male students. The team performed a randomized double blind study in which university scientists were given applications purportedly from [00:28:00] students applying for a lab manager position. The content of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached and sometimes a female name was attached. Female applicants were rated lower than men on the measured scales of competence, higher ability mentoring and we're giving lower salary offers. The mean salary offered by male scientist for male students was $30,520 for the female students. It was $27,111 female scientists recommended lower salaries for both [00:28:30] genders, but had an even greater bias against female students who received an average offer of 25,000 compared to the average offer of $29,333 per milestone.

Speaker 2: [inaudible]. The music heard during the show is from an album by Lascano David entitled Folk Acoustic made available by a creative Commons [00:29:00] license 3.0 [inaudible]

Speaker 1: [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us. Email address is spectrum [inaudible] at yahoo.com [inaudible].

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