 Welcome to the Tuio Revolution on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, I'm Peter Rossin. We're here to talk about an ongoing revolution in transportation, sometimes called micro mobility, which includes a variety of small, generally low speed vehicles, human powered or electric, privately owned or part of shared fleets. And for me, personal mobility also includes walking and powered wheelchairs. So joining me today to talk about this is our guest, Shivani Rommel, she's a journalist with Hawaii Business Magazine. She just published an article in the August edition called You Don't Need Four Wheels to Go Electric. And in full disclosure, I want to tell you that Shivani was a student of mine in a journalism class I taught at the University of Hawaii a few years ago. I tried to scare her away from journalism, but I didn't succeed and I'm glad about that. Before joining Hawaii Business, Shivani was a digital content producer at KITV4 and an intern at Hawaii News Now. Thank you, Shivani, and welcome. Thanks for joining us. Hi Peter, thanks for having me. Okay. So tell us a little bit about your job at Hawaii Business, first of all, do you cover anything in particular? Do you have what you used to call a beat or how does that work? I cover a wide variety of things, but my main interest is in transportation. So I do a lot of transportation-related stories like this one. Okay, and how did you come to write this particular article? Was this your idea or would the editor say go figure this out or how did that happen? It was my idea. I've noticed a lot of kids riding e-bikes around my neighborhood and when I go to our office in downtown Honolulu, I've seen those e-scooter or bike rentals lying around. So I thought, are people actually riding these things? So I just thought it was interesting because we've seen more and more people just starting to use them. So, and I did a little bit of research and I found out there was a state report that said in August, 2021, there was about like 16,000 electric vehicle sales, which was about an increase from like, about 30.6% from the same month a year before. So I was like, oh, electric vehicles, like electric car sales are up, but I've noticed a lot of e-bike sales are also up too and a lot of people are riding it. So I was thinking, this is interesting because from my perspective too, I don't have a driver's license yet. I only have my permit, so I can't buy an electric car. So that's why I wanted to dig more deeper into these alternative modes of transportation. So you're not a rider of the alternative modes of transportation yet, I see. No, my main form of transportation is the bus actually. Very reliable, that's good. I'm a bus rider myself. So, and it's interesting you're talking about the numbers of electric vehicles, but of course we really don't know how many of these electric bikes or scooters or whatever are out there because are they required to register or is there any way to figure out how many there are? There is, I think it's state law that you have to register your e-bike. So like, there's numbers out there. I just don't have them at the top of my head right now. I have a feeling maybe the law, you have to register your e-bike, but I have a feeling there are a lot of them out there are not registered. So we see the growth clearly, but we don't really know yet. We have no way of knowing at this stage how many there really are. And I guess we could go around to all the stores and ask how many are they selling, but you can buy them online too. So that's hard. So just in general, as you started looking into this, what did you learn? What did you discover about these alternative modes of transportation? You know, I didn't realize these alternative modes of transportation were so popular. Like one of my sources that I interviewed said that a national report ranked Hawaii as having the greatest potential for micro-mobility to succeed. So I was thinking, oh, I didn't realize this was a thing because on the mainland, I thought it made more sense because there are more roads and then we're just an island, but I learned that more people are using these personal electric vehicles for short distance trips versus having to use a car. So I thought just like, that was interesting because you can essentially, you can drive, park your car somewhere and then you can just hop on your e-bike and go on that last mile, ride to your, whether it's your workplace or just doing just errands in general. So I thought that was important too because not only are, if people are using more of these electric vehicles, it helps, it's contributes to the state school of going carbon neutral by 2045. And I guess the other thing I think that's, if you're not a rider of these vehicles, it's reducing congestion somewhat, and especially with parking so tough in downtown or Waikiki or even in Takako, if you can park a little bit away and then get yourself on a scooter or an e-bike and get to where you're going, that makes, you don't have to think about parking in Waikiki, which is, as you know, tough, tough going. So I guess the assumption is that most people who ride these things are young people. Is that a, well, what do you think? Is that true? No, that's not true at all. That's what, that's another thing I learned when I interviewed the marketing manager at E-Bikes Hawaii. She said that before e-bikes were, like she said that e-bikes became more popular, especially during the pandemic, but before then the demographic wasn't the young people. It was actually the old people. Well, I don't want to say old, but it's just like that category. I'll let you say old, speaking as an old person, I can let you use that word for sure. What else did she say about that? She said a lot of old people were buying e-bikes just for it, because a lot of people have mobility issues. So having the e-bikes comes in handy, especially since you don't really need to rely on just pedaling as much. So that was something interesting I also learned. You know, I did, my wife and I do bicycle touring in Europe. And I remember one trip we were on, it was in Holland actually. And most of Holland is pretty flat, but we were going along the coast and we were kind of going on these dunes and we were going up and down and up and down. So we'd ride down a little hill and up a little hill. And of course, riding down a little hill was easy and riding up those little hills was not. And all of a sudden out of nowhere, these two, and I'll say the old people came whizzing by and they just left us in their wake and we couldn't imagine what had happened. And we finally caught up with them at a rest stop. They were, they'd been there a long time and I went over to look at their bikes and they were riding electric bicycles. And that's about five or six years ago. And I think every time we've gone since I've seen it more and more. I mean, obviously you have to have some ability to balance yourself and you have to be somewhat a mobile but you don't have to be an Olympic runner to ride a bike and a lot of us old people we're not quite ready for the wheelchair yet, but we are interested in that. So, okay, that's great. So we found, what else did you learn? What else did you find out about as you researched the article? I actually did my story prior to doing this one. It was on mobility hubs. So it's essentially the city is planning to make some mobility hubs at some of the rail station. So that's where you can essentially park your car and have the opportunity to hop on a bus and the rail when it eventually opens to the public. So that was the other thing too. I learned it's important to have infrastructure and resources for people to use these vehicles whether it's using the rentals around town or actually purchasing one. I think it's important because it helps solve that first mile, last mile problem. Okay. And what do you, what do we need in infrastructure? Do you, did you, people talk to you about everybody uses that word a lot infrastructure? It's an ugly word to me. But anyway, what does that mean really? Infrastructure and we were talking about these two wheeled vehicles. It's more so building more protective bike lanes around the city, you know, like sharing the road. A lot of the bike riders I talked to talked about their experiences almost getting hit and just the frustration of like this love and hate relationship they have with cars. So that's the, I looked, I looked it up and the city is planning to build more of these bike infrastructures. So it helps the bike riders feel more comfortable using those sorts of things. Yeah. Seems to me there's like a chicken and egg story here, you know, why aren't there very many bike riders or two wheeled vehicle riders? And people will say, well, I think it's dangerous. And if there were more, it would not be so dangerous. If there were more riders, so can't get more riders, but it's too dangerous. But we won't get safer really until we have so many bicyclists and so many riders at the city, which is working on it. It's a long, hard road, but they certainly have added more bike lanes in the last few years than they ever did before that. And there are a lot of them that are kind of in progress. And sometimes they're good with little, you know, with little curbs that protect the bicyclists. Sometimes it's just paint on the road, which I think they call pharaohs. And, you know, that paint won't save you from the car. That's for sure. But anyway, so it seems like there are more and more of these. And did you look into, you know, what's the cost factor, do you think, in getting into this kind of transportation? The cost of... Cost of buying one. I want to buy one. What's it gonna cost you? Ooh, that's a good question. I, for e-mike specifically, it can vary, but roughly, it can cost anywhere around 1,000 to up to 8,000. So it's sort of on the pricey side. Yeah, the big ones, they are definitely can be going right up there. Of course, you can spend a lot of money on a regular bicycle too, a high precision bicycle that's made for riding in races and stuff like that and is made of, you know, the lightest material available. But what's interesting to me right now is if you go into Costco or Wal-Mart Sam's Club, you can buy one of those littlest, little kinds of electric bikes. They're almost like tiny bikes, but they have an electric motor. And you can buy them in those stores or you can buy them online for like $400. So, you know, that's something we see a lot of kids on them, I think, now. So they're obviously the range of vehicles that you can buy if we're talking about bicycles, it's pretty wide. And what about, you know, you looked into the shared scooters a little bit too, right, the ones that we find all over nowadays are all over Coca-Cola, there are more area, they're down in Waikiki in some downtown. For people that don't know what's involved in those, what's involved in riding one of those. So it's kind of like geeky in a sense. So, right, you can go up to one of the e-scooters that you see lying around different private businesses and on the scooter, it'll have you download an app and then you can do all of those things, like set up the scooter and just pay there. So I think it's like a dollar to ride for half an hour. So you can just take it and then go do your business and then park it on the app, it'll have a map of where the nearest station is. So it's kind of like geeky. Now, and I've seen two or three different kinds in Waikiki. I know there are some other companies that wanna get here, but I guess the law is still a little confusing about what's okay and what isn't okay. So that's kind of gotta be worked out. So, Hawaii Business is a business magazine. Why would you think people, your kind of readers would be interested in these subjects specifically? This is sort of an interesting question because I wanna backtrack a little bit because when I first heard about Hawaii Business, I thought the same thing too. It's just a magazine about business and that's true to some extent, but at Hawaii Business, we cover more than that actually. We cover a lot of big issues that impact our island home, its people, companies and nonprofits, climate change, the cost of living, entrepreneurship, innovation, a lot of those big issues. So what I think my article is interesting to our readers because majority of our readers are people in businesses, whether it's like the top CEO's or just anyone in startups, entrepreneurs and with their offices being mainly in downtown and more people coming back now that everything's open up, parking can be difficult and expensive. Like you said earlier, it's difficult to find just an affordable parking space and just having to combat that traffic. So when I talked to my sources for the story, all of them said that they try not to drive when they can and opt to use their e-bikes, their one-wheels, scooter skateboards when they can because of this. And the city has done and is still doing a lot to make areas more micromobility friendly, whether it's more bike lanes plus lanes or just more of these rideshare and rentals. So people care about these things, especially the different modes of transportation because it helps contribute to the cleaner environment. I guess if you're in a business, the only way you're gonna get customers is if they have a way to get to where you are, if you're still doing the brick and mortar kind of thing. So I think that's why so many businesses have been open to Bikki. They like to see the Bikki stops near their business, 7-Eleven has been a big supporter of Bikki, for example, because I think they believe people will use Bikki and then stop off at 7-Eleven or other stores nearby to take advantage of that. You mentioned the one-wheel and I bet very few people who are watching know what a one-wheel is. Can you explain that? It's essentially a self-balancing skateboard, but the name itself, it basically has a one-wheel in the middle. So it's like a balancing board. You just put your feet on and it goes, there's no remote or anything, you just need to charge it. Okay, wow. And in the article I was interested, you say there's a bunch of people that ride these every week and get together and do that. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah, I talked to this group called Hawaii Float Sessions, which is basically a group of people that ride around the island on one wheels and other personal electric vehicles. It's just like a big group of people that love to do what they do. It's essentially like how there's, I know there's a lot of people that have motorcycle groups and they just do like ride around towns. It's essentially like that, but on one wheels. And how, when you say a big group, how many are we talking about, would you guess, on a typical? No, I can't, yeah, I don't want to speak for them, but they have a Facebook group page and that group page has roughly, I would say over 800 members. Wow, so a lot of people. If a quarter of them showed up on any given day, that's a lot. And where do they ride? They start over by the bike factories, all right? Yeah, they start around the bike factory at Kakaoka Waterfront Park and then they just make their way down towards Waikiki. I've never seen that. I'd like, I gotta go check it out. When, what days are they out there? Usually Wednesdays and Fridays. And I know that bike factory also does monthly rideouts too. I just don't know why, but I know they do. Interesting. So you've got the one wheels and on the one kind of one end, you've got the electric bike, which is new, but still kind of understandable. What other kinds of alternate transportations have you seen or do you think people will see around town? I've seen some of the electric skateboards around town and also the electric unicycles, which I haven't really seen much of, but I know people ride them. So it's like, I thought of unicycle at first, I really thought of just like the standard circus one, but it's more high tech than that. I'm sure again, people don't know what that is. Can you tell us a little more about what an electric unicycle is like? It's kind of like the one wheel, but it's more so it's like this circular device and then there's two platforms where you can put your feet on. Oh, right. That's how you go. That scares me just looking at them more. Everybody, they're standing very still and very stiff kind of and I'm not sure I'm ready for that. I used to have a segue here in Hawaii and I used to ride it to work and that's a self-balancing thing. It's only two wheels, but it's made to be very easy to ride. But the unicycles, those are the ones that were really, really scary, I think. Anyway, which one, if I gave you the money right now and said, go out and get yourself one, what would you get? Ooh, that's a hard part. I've been actually researching and debating which one I want and I'm in between an e-bike and an electric skateboard because I can take both of those on the bus. I'm leaning more towards the skateboard because it's a little bit more compact and I know that the bus has the bike rack in the front, but sometimes you can only put two bikes on there, so if there's two bikes there already, you have to wait for the next one versus if I just have a skateboard, I could just take it on with me. There you go. Have you skateboarded old-fashioned kind already? Oh, yeah. I have one. I use it just recreationally, like around my block. Did you ever take it up on campus and use it up with UH? I know, you know what? I should have done that, but I was too afraid of hitting someone while I rode because like UH can get crowded sometimes, especially during like the peak hours where people are rushing to class. I bet, I'm sure. I've been up there and I've seen that, but I'll tell you, I was just in a meeting and we were talking about all this and somebody said that the director of commuter services at UH, and I'm afraid I don't know her name, but they're really doing a lot and they're really promoting a lot of different things to get people out of cars, to get people to be able to move around on campus. So I'm gonna give you a free tip here before I get her on the show, you can go and you might consider doing an article about the commuter services at UH Minoa because apparently, and I just know this from somebody who was talking about it at the meeting, but apparently they really are doing a very good job there and have a lot of interesting ideas. And I know that Vicky recently just expanded up to UH and what happens in Minoa affects all of us because the traffic and the stuff that we're all kind of caught up in that in whatever is happening at UH. If UH is in session, we know it just because we're sitting in traffic and at certain times a day. So you might wanna look into that, but I'm gonna talk to this person too and see what they're doing up there because that's a little city in many ways I think and it could be a very interesting model for what's going on. So you already know how to ride a skateboard so you can probably jump on a one wheel and not even think about it twice, you think? You know what, I was interested, but at the same time I think I'll try it, but at a park versus, like I don't trust myself going on the road with that. Well, we want you to try it in a park too or in a parking lot or something. We don't want the first ride you take to be down in its highway. You know what I mean? I think obviously you gotta learn to ride it and get comfortable with it and stuff, but as you say, you can carry it on the bus. You can take it up to your office. You don't have to, if you leave an $8,000 electric bike parking on the street, you may run into a problem there. So we only have about five minutes left. So let me ask you, what do you think is the future here? Are we gonna, is this kind of a fad that's gonna go away or you think it's gonna continue to expand or tell me what? I think we're going to see more of these vehicles popping up on the streets. It's definitely more affordable than buying a car for a lot of people, especially with boys high cost of living and the state is going to have to do a lot more things to make transportation alternatives or just provide different modes. This year, for example, was a good way that the state did just like a good example because the legislature actually passed the e-bike rebate program, which is where the fund pays $500 or 20% off the cost of an e-bike. So that just encourages more people to say, hey, you can buy this, it's the state's making it more affordable. So I definitely think it's not a fad that's gonna go away. I think more people are going to turn to these electric vehicles just to get around town as much as possible versus having just to hop in our cars. Well, obviously I agree with you. I wouldn't be doing this program every two weeks, but people always say, oh, Hawaii is such a paradise for bicycling. And it's good in many ways, but if you're a working person and you're downtown as you are and you wanna go to a meeting, you don't wanna get to that meeting all sweaty and wind blown and I don't have a lot of hair to get blown around. But so the electric bike kind of creates new opportunities in that area. So I'm excited about this and I hope you'll continue to watch this trend and I'm certainly gonna see what's happening. And I really appreciate the time you've spent here today and I will tell you, I'm very proud of you for having stepped to journalism and having gotten a job and doing actual writing, not just television and not just, which is great, but being out there on the front lines with the writing there aren't too many of you left. So congratulations. And I will say it's time to thank you very much. It's time to say hello to the people who have tuned in. In two weeks, we hope to talk to the new executive director of the Hawaii Bicycling League. His name is Travis Consul and he was here earlier, but now he's back as executive director of the Bicycling League and we'll see what he has to say in a couple of weeks. This, you've been watching the Two Little Revolution on Think Tech Hawaii. We've been talking to Shilani Ramos of the Hawaii Business Magazine and we really are grateful to her for being here. We wanna thank all of our viewers, both of you, all of you, however many of you are out there today or in the future. If you wanna get email advisories with a complete listing of all shows on special events, you can sign up at thinktechhawaii.com and you will be able to get a huge variety, 30 or so different hosts talking about every subject you can imagine. And so we'll be back. Please tune in. Please tell your friends to tune in. I'm Peter Rossig. This has been the Two Little Revolution and thank you for joining us. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.