 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here, 12 o'clock on a given Friday, you know, I am not Stan Osserman, I'm Jay Fidel, I'm standing in for him, I'm standing in for him. Nicely done. Thank you. And that's John Nauchi, he's the Deputy Director of the Department of Transportation Services here in the City and County of Honolulu and we're together on Stan's show, the Hydrogen Man, I'm not the Hydrogen Man, but we can talk about that kind of thing. So Stan, welcome to the show, thanks for being, I'm sorry, John, welcome to the show, thanks for being here. Glad to be here. Yeah, yeah. So tell us, you know, I mean, for those who would like your job, tell us how you got your job, what did you study, what was the long pathway that took you there? Without being too wordy, my long pathway probably started with where I grew up in Kahalu'u. Okay. So I was reading Kahalu'u, the bus came by, made a left turn in front of my house, every day, every hour, for as long as I could remember growing up. And you know, once in a while, my mom or my dad or my popo or goong-goong would shuttle me onto this bus and I think that's where I learned about reliable transit. So fast forward through my high school and I'll shout out to Yolani because they're my favorite and that's where I went. I did go to college in Los Angeles at University of Southern California, USC, and I studied urban planning and I had a chance to experience LA immediately post Rodney King at a time when, you know, a lot of their infrastructure was just devastated. I mean, I arrived on the USC campus and things in the neighborhood were still literally smoking around the neighborhood, but the campus was relatively pristine. So I got to experience LA with bad transit and bad mobility and car-based mobility. And I developed, further developed my, I call it my transit geekiness for studying transit systems and how they work. It's actually a thing by kind of experiencing LA. And when I came home, I wanted to apply the knowledge I learned in urban planning. I studied urban planning with an emphasis in transportation. I wanted to kind of bring that home and figure out a better way, a better path to mobility for Honolulu's residents. So upon returning home, I took up work at Oahu Transit Services, OTS. They're the contracted management and operations for the city's, the bus system. Worked for them for 16 years, left there as a director of planning and service development. Moved over to heart for a little bit, did deputy director of planning, environment and culture, and was appointed last, well, in 2016 by Maricaldbo to be in his cabinet as deputy director of DTS. So I'm, I like to actually kind of proudly say, if I'm going to took my own horn a little bit, I may be the only person on this island who's worked in bus and rail and paratransit, which is our handy van, to, you know, be able to kind of be in the really uniquely situated position to kind of bring it all together now. Yeah. I agree with that. You're perfect. I used to say sometimes like I got to quarterback the thing, throw it down the field and then do the Marcus Mariota and then catch it again. So no, it's, it's, I'm not that, I'm not that good. So deputy in DTS, what does he do? The deputy in DTS oversees a number of divisions, which include our traffic signals and technology, our traffic engineering, transportation planning, and our public transit division. Within those falls the responsibility of what's called complete streets and the city adopted an ordinance to implement complete streets, which equalizes no preference over mode or balances out preference for bikes, peds, transportation, cars and buses. Complete streets is yours. Complete streets. Oh, that's really interesting. I hope we have time to talk about that a little bit. But let's talk about the news first, always the news first, top down, yeah? So the news is the electric bus. Yes. This is really interesting. Somebody told me they saw one. They really looked beautiful and it was, you know, it harkens a new time. Can you talk about it? Yeah. That's actually been one of my passion projects under Mayor Caldwell's leadership. And councilmember Joey Monahan has been, they've been very front facing in terms of pushing us to get electrification of transportation and have that incorporated more into our DTS's immediate and future goals. So the city basically began what we had hoped to be a year long demonstration program in which we opened our doors to bus manufacturers who have electric vehicles to come and demonstrate their buses in Honolulu's transit environment. And when I say that, it is really an environment. It's different than other environments, yeah? Yeah. Everybody likes to think they're different. But I would point out that in Honolulu we have the fifth highest per capita transit ridership. And that says a lot because in that top five, top six, top seven, we're the only ones without an active rail component. So just with our bus system, we have maybe one of the most heavily utilized bus systems in the nation. And that's something that most people don't realize. I think if you think Honolulu, you think I have to have a car. But it's changing. It's changing. And I would actually put it out there that everybody is talking now about TOD, TOD, transit oriented development. And I like that it's in everybody's mindset and everybody's considering it as, oh, this is something we're going to do now. And I'll nod and I'll agree. But I'll contend that we've always had TOD here. The Honolulu that we know, the old urban city, is based on the streetcar system that was developed. The 12 miles of streetcar that we used to have is basically TOD, run up and down King and Barrett Tanya streets in downtown. Tell the people what it is and how it works and how it benefits us. It's this idea that the city should have a more compact footprint. You should be able to get around. You should be able to do everything you need to do without requiring a car. Now I'm not going to malign anyone who, like my former predecessor planners, who thought that we should sprawl to the suburbs. We should have neighborhoods with nice looping streets and cul-de-sacs, because that's what the rest of the nation was doing. And we went along with that as almost an American ideal. Was that the yard, the American family? A cul-de-sac in everybody's pot. A cul-de-sac in everyone's neighborhood, yeah. But when you look at it, we had TOD in the 1900s. And those neighborhoods that were established by that are still thriving and are still vibrant. And if you look at even YLI and Kaimuki, Kaimuki was the answer to probably Honolulu's first affordable housing crisis. So we had a sustainable transit system that was electric powered. And like the rest of America, a lot of us gave it over to diesel. And so that was a big evolution, probably in the 40s and 50s. And we're seeing that evolution where I don't want to sound too hipster about it, because I'm probably officially a generation X or Y-er. But we're coming back to this ideal of putting electrification of transportation back in. And I find that we're on the cusp of it, and I'm kind of happy that we get to see this ushered back in. I'm not going to go back and start using manual typewriter. I like to see the quiet vehicles coming back in. So TOD means you develop at various intervals. And those intervals are mercantile. They're shopping. They're commercial. And so you can always get somebody to fix your shoes, to sell you some groceries, whatnot, within a fairly short distance. And you don't have to have a car to do that. Sure. It's this idea that you can live, work, and play. I mean, I think that's the simplest way to put it. Live, work, and play in a very compact area. That's not to say that everyone should be based out of their own small little village. We want to give people mobility within the region also, because we still cannot turn our back on the sprawl, the fact that affordable housing exists farther away from the city center. But we want to make sure that people have more of an opportunity to enjoy their own neighborhoods. And neighborhood is community. Neighborhood, it all begins in the neighborhood. That's right. And I think, I agree with you, we kind of lost touch with the notion of neighborhood where you say hello to people on the street. You walk your dog, you say hi, all that. And the problem I see, just to compress this part of our discussion, is that we spent a lot of time sprawling. That was the big plan, second city, all that. Sprawl, sprawl, sprawl, sprawl, for how many 50 years anyway. And now the better judgment is not to sprawl. And here we are trying to reverse an initiative that we spent 50 years building. This is hard. And it's hard to get people to change, turn around too. It's hard to get them on board for this sort of thing. It really is. And we're coming into an era where we want to transition people away from fossil fuels. And I think the mindset is in place. Now, how do we translate that mindset into actual forward action is the rub here. And I'll share something that Mayor Caldwell always tells me personally. And I think he means it maybe as a little joke, as a little knock to me as someone who hasn't ever been planning background. But he'll always say, you planners, you always plan. You guys have a hard time implementing. You guys can plan, but to implement is divine. Is that true? Well, planners like to think about things. Is it true that planners have trouble implementing? You don't strike me, actually, John, as someone who has trouble implementing. Well, I will say a planner's job is to plan. And then we hand off to engineers and other more able-bodied members to implement. So our role is to plan. But sure, I mean, planners can sit around and spend hours and hours and hours planning. And maybe nothing will get put in the ground because of that. But we have to make sure that we can articulate our ideas that make sense and hand them off to a more technical set to actually put them in. It's the same time, though. If you go to the trouble, go to school, study, learn, commit your life, your thought process to planning. And you believe that your plans are going to go on a dusty shelf somewhere. To me, that's unacceptable. So they're all self-defeating. You've got to, if you want to realize your plan, your destiny, your work, have it come alive, have it flower, you have got to follow up and say, wait a minute. We've got to implement this. And I'll go to great lengths. I'll even push people in order to implement it. So I'm not just handing it off. I'm saying, here, now, let's do it. And I'll help you do it. And that's what I usually tell people who are contemplating a career in planning or contemplating going into the field, even for education. I said, you have to be OK that for every 100 ideas you have, maybe five of them will get done. And if you're not OK with that, don't enter this field. And I was liken it to the real erase. We package the idea. And we have the baton. We hand it off. But at the same time, I can't just hand it off, let the person take it and stop running. You've kind of got to run with them for a little bit. Just to make sure that what you had articulated, the vision you had, makes it all the way to the finish line. Yeah, you should have some authority actually to do that. Maybe it's just cheering for them as they finish the work that you started. Well, as DTS deputy, you do have some authority, don't you, to cheer them on, to ask them to be accountable, not to let it die. After all, we went to the trouble of planning it. Then it should happen. My feeling is there's too much planning that never goes anywhere. So if you're going to go to the trouble, you might as well force the issue. Anyway, but going on to the news, what is the electric bus like? Is it the same inside, outside? How does it work? So this is interesting. So let me back up a little bit. Mayor and council member Manahan told me that they wanted to do an electric bus demonstration. And I said, OK, that's a great idea. And I got the speech about implement. So we set up a program for the demonstrations to start. Same discussion every time, every time. And I say jokingly, but there's an answer to every true statement. But so we had some people answer to our call for demonstrations. The first happened to be a company called Protera. Now what's interesting about Protera is they're a technology company that is building a bus. Everyone else, I believe, is a vehicle manufacturer who is applying high technology to an existing platform. So it begs the question for us, as someone that operates transit, is it easier to teach somebody how to build a bus, or is it easier to teach somebody how to add technology to an existing platform? So with Protera, it's the only electric vehicle that's designed from the ground up to be an electric bus. And I found that very interesting. They're based out of San Francisco. And what is another interesting feature that they have is it doesn't have a stainless steel frame like most buses do. It's made out of composites. So it's manufactured in very much of the same materials that a boat would be manufactured. Lighter, more efficient. Lighter and more efficient. And the battery storage actually happens under the floor. So in every other electric bus, they stack the batteries on the roof because that's where space is available. And they don't have to re-engineer that platform. More stable under the floor, no? Having driven it before, and having heard comments from our bus operators who do drive it, they say it turns and it is nailed to the ground. Yeah. This makes for a better ride. It sure does. It really does. And I think one of the moments of realization I had that this was completely different, I was standing on the intersection of Baratanya and Punchbowl, which is right next to one of our most busiest stops in our system. You have all the lanes of traffic coming up in Punchbowl and Baratanya. And all you could hear was the noise from the cars passing by. You couldn't hear anything from the bus. The bus passed by, you know, it was just like, well, this bus is here, you know? That's like Stan's hydrogen bus. I was telling you, it doesn't make any sound at all. And we had a lot of discussion about whether we need to add a friendly little noise that the driver can actuate. So don't need to tap the horn to make people aware that I call it the silent green ghost is behind them. But, you know, when you look at that, that was a moment of realization I had was that this bus was not polluting the noise environment any more than, you know, all the other cars were already doing it. And when we had the press conference, we had a press conference to introduce it on Tuesday. It's the first time, and I noted this, the first time we've done many of these bus presentations and bus demonstrations before with diesel buses. First time we've ever actually had the press conference with the bus fully on and the AC running and everything like that, because we could. Good sound. Yeah, I mean, it didn't make any sound. So we could respond to it. We could put it right here in the studio, eh? Yeah, you know. You'd hear a little whooshing because of the AC and all that kind of stuff, but it's not significantly a noise polluter, no environmental effect in that sense. So one more question before we go to the break, John. What does it cost? I always say right now, an electric bus will cost about one and a half times our standard diesel bus. So we're talking about more than half a million? Yeah, a standard diesel bus costs a little bit north of half a million dollars. We're talking about 750 or so. Yeah, so even numbers, nice, easy math because I'm a planner, I'm not a mathematician. I always like to think of 500,000 and 750,000. So in that case, you know, you got issues about raising and you have to buy it cash, no? We can buy it federal funding. Federal funding. Ah, okay. So the feds have a lion's share of our vehicle purchases and we provide a local match to start it and the feds buy the rest of it. Okay, when we come back from this break, we're going to find out how many of these buses John wants to put down in the streets of Honolulu and over what period of time? That's John Nauchi, he's the deputy at DTS, the Department of Transportation Services in the city and county of Honolulu. We'll be right back. Good afternoon, my name is Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, a program on Think Tech Hawaii. We show at three o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists, both from here and the mainland on energy efficiency, which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea, Aloha. I'm Jay Fidel, not Stan Osserman. I like him very much though. And this is Stan the Energy Man on a given Friday at noon. And we have John Noucci. He is the deputy of the Department of Transportation Services here in the city and county of Honolulu. We're talking about the new electric bus, among other things. So before we left it, there was a cliffhanger there. How many are you gonna get? Over what period of time are you gonna take to deploy them? So I am working under the mayor's guidance that in December, all four county mayors gathered on board the Hokulea or Empokai Bay or the YNI coast. And that was more than symbolic. The Hokulea had just done the Malama Honua voyage and learned how climate change is really affecting the rest of the world. And upon the deck of the Hokulea, all the mayors committed to powering their public and private vehicle fleets in each of their counties with renewable energy by 2045. And Mayor Caldwell gave city and county of Honolulu an advanced finish line 2035 for our public vehicles. So it sounds like a lot of time, but really we have 15 years to execute. It's not that much when you start looking carefully. It's not a lot. And I think what we need to do is take stock of the resources that we have. And it's more than just us appropriating money to buy these vehicles. We have to look at the infrastructure and electric infrastructure and see what's available to us right now and how we might grow that and introduce more of the renewables into that electric infrastructure. So we're not just burning fossil fuels to power electric vehicles. And I think I like to use that adage. It is good times in the kingdom right now. We have been collaborating very, very, very well and with Hawaiian Electric. They have put a pretty serious commitment to electrify transportation. It's called EOT. And hopefully as we go on EOT, I won't have to say it means electrification or transportation. People will know what EOT means. They don't know it yet, John. They don't know it yet, so we'll start here. And part of that issue is integrating our charging needs with what the grid can hold and what the grid can provide. And the city recently applied for what's called a LONO grant. That means low or no emission vehicles. And we're poised to bring in our first purchased electric bus, hopefully by the beginning of next year. And there is a certain story that goes along with that bus that I find very exciting. We've partnered with our long-term bus manufacturer Gillig Corporation out of Northern California. They're an all-American bus maker. They've been in business probably since the early 1900s. Are they healthy? They're healthy, very healthy. They've survived the San Francisco fire in the early 1900s. And they've recently just moved. They moved to Hayward after that. And then they're now in Livermore, California. But we've had their buses since 1983. So we've been a long-time partner with them. They've partnered with the Cummins Corporation. Now Cummins is one of those products. Diesel, diesel. Yeah, when you think diesel, you think Cummins. Most people have an experience with Cummins and maybe don't even know it. They're that ubiquitous. They're a $17.2 billion a year Fortune 500 company that they're bread and butter in almost 100 years has been diesel engines. Now they've chosen to turn the corner and- Go electric. Go electric. And their first electric- He works for them. Yeah, and so their mindset is there that go along or be left behind. So I'm glad that Gillig and Cummins, our long-time partners, have chosen to be leaders and that we're moving forward with them to bring a bus to market as part of that federal grant. Okay, so federal grant, 750 apiece, at least for now. Deadline 2035, a city deadline to change out, among other things. I mean, I'm sure there are other changes too, but on this one item, change out all the diesel buses in the city for electric buses, presumably the Gillig- Gillig? Just for this purchase. Oh, just okay, but whatever manufacturer it is. Between now, 2018, you said the first one comes a year from now? Yeah, we'd like to have the first one in probably at the start of 2019. On the road, operating within the schedule, within the fleet, so to speak. Yeah, normalization, just a regular bus, just one of the fleet. Okay, and then gradually introducing more of these, maybe the same brand, maybe different, who knows, over time to achieve 100% by 2035, which is 17 years, 16 years from next year. So question, how fast can you go on this? Because ultimately, it's a matter of the federal funding and the money and taxes and politics and changes of mayor and administration and city council. I mean, there's a minefield out there, really, to get where you have to go. How fast can you go? I mean, so one in the beginning of 2019, how fast do you see it? Because ultimately, you have a fleet of how many? 500? Over 500, about 540 right now. Yeah. And so what we have to do is it's so much of us just pivoting. You can't turn a ship real hard into this direction. And the mix of renewables that we've committed to use before 2035, that could be anything. And I don't wanna, I think now that the city has a chief resilience officer appointed, Josh Stanbrough, we've had a lot of discussions about what is a resilient source of energy. So for me, I think about it, I don't necessarily want 100% electric fleet because if something happens that impacts our electric production, we have a transit system that can't run and we have no mobility. So diversity is always good. You're gonna get hydrogen? We would all consider hydrogen. Hydrogen, I think, is still in the test phases in terms of transit. And electric vehicles were probably there 20 years ago. But now electric vehicles are a reality. They're in place, they're operating. Better and better all the time. Better and better all the time. And the price in terms of battery capacity, storage and range will go up as prices come down. So electric is one prong. We'll be looking at other alternatives, including hydrogen. And there's a significant, one of the unique things about our bus system is we do some really long routes. I mean, our route 55 goes from Alamoana over the Pully into Kaneohe, runs along the whole windward coast crest to the top of Kohoku, ends in Halibu. So long way for a battery. It's tortuous grades going up the Pully. Perhaps those get swapped out last with diesel electric hybrids. The diesel can be sourced from biofuels. And I think our biofuel production is ramping up. And while earlier on we, the engines were not made to tolerate a little bit of how the mix of biofuel existed. Nowadays, the engines are more manufactured to accept biofuels. Okay, so we have electric, pure electric. Just like cars, we have hybrid electric with using a certain amount of diesel, less, but still diesel. And then we have, that I mentioned, hydrogen. And then biofuel. That's another one you've introduced. Any other possibilities for the fleet as it will exist in 2035? Well, we're open to looking at anything. We really wanna look at how we can accept and implement. We don't want something where the initial cost of entry is infrastructure wise. I don't wanna spend 10 buses worth on just a fueling station. There's those kinds of balancing of budget that we need to do. But isn't it, don't you get a better economies of scale if you say, I want all one kind because I only wanna have one kind of fueling station and I don't wanna have different, I don't wanna have five different fueling stations for five different types of buses. Exactly. And I think our maintenance guys would definitely hop on board. They're probably, if I were to say, we're gonna do one kind of everything and we're gonna have one method, I'm sure they would cheer that on. But resilience again, if that one source happens to get quashed, we don't have an alternative. So we do have different bus divisions or maintenance homes for the different vehicles. So we could diversify our fueling based on where the bus is housed out of. In terms of green, what do you agree with me that pure electric, which is fueled by electric generated from pure green sources, purely renewables, is the most pure in terms of climate change carbon emissions into the air. So that it all depends, and I'm glad you mentioned, what did you call it with the utility? They had an acronym that you were rolling out. EOT, electrification of transportation. Yeah, EOT, remember that, EOT. So you need to have EOT coming from the utility. Because if the utility is using diesel, they're not really getting it benefits. Quiet, I give you that, but you're not, you're still using diesel fossil fuel to run the buses. So you have got to be working in parallel with them the whole way through this period. Yeah, and it's not just about government shifting their role. All the partners that come along have to shift their role. And I like to say that this was the first time we recently went to a transportation convention, a huge convention in Atlanta, Georgia. And we partnered, we went along with the different county providers, we went along with some of the private transportation providers, Juan Electric was there. It's the first time we all kind of linked arms and we showed up in a big mob to every single bus manufacturer. And the bus manufacturers were kind of floored, they're like, how did you get all these people in the same room to talk about this? I think individually in other municipalities, the government can't do it alone. They've other places where they tried to deploy a good amount of, or even one electric vehicle, they've run into problems with the utility, municipalities and even other departments. So our talks with Juan Electric have been productive to the point where we realized if we were to charge an electric bus during the peak demand time, it does not pencil out to be cheaper than diesel. So we have been working with HECO to devise a charging strategy where they have something called the duck curve where when the sun's productivity is high in the sky and all that solar energy is being fed into the grid from photovoltaic systems, say between just 9 a.m. or 3 p.m., let's say, all that energy is getting fed into the grid, nobody's home spending down that energy. So we'd like to actually charge our buses and we hope to get a very good tariff to help spend down that excess energy and thereby allowing HECO at some point to maybe allow more solar on the grid. So it's a real partnership there, but you can imagine all that coordination that has to go on with that and even for us, we have to upend for the longest time, probably for 100 years in transit, we fill a bus up with diesel, it goes out on the road all night, comes back at the end of night and that's what it does. Fill it up again the next day, yeah. Yeah, but now we have to bring the bus back, charge it because that's when it's cheap and then we see the huge savings in energy costs. Yeah, and we don't have time for that conversation now, but similar issues exist with rail. Yeah. Do you ever see a time when we'll be putting panels on the top of the bus to sort of trickle charge it as it depletes? The amount of power that actually is required by that, probably you wouldn't be able to see the ratio of energy production that you need. But we have looked at putting charging solar on top of the stations to just power lighting and on those bases. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, finally our last discussion, so to speak, John, is how do you get this done, given all the changes in a free society? You know, with all the tumult of government and all that and the change administrations, how do you get that done? I know you had one thing I think is clear, you've got to have people trained in planning. Correct. Like you. You're a breath of fresh air to have you there. You're not political, you're a professional and you're trained in something the community needs. But you also have to get the community up on this. And I suspect that was so when you went to that conference was in Atlanta, when you went to that conference to see all these people from all over the country. Things are changing. People are coming together on municipal transportation and you're part of a movement. But how do we ensure that these plans will be realized? How do we ensure the city government remains responsible and responsive, responsive to the public need, the public wish for complete streets, the public wish for clean transport, what do we do? And if you wish, you can tell them on camera one, you can turn your chair, you can look right there and tell them what they want to be doing and thinking in the years going forward. I don't know that I want to actually address the public right on as a hypnotic thing, but I will address you. While I think you've upsold my role in this, I do think the strength and how we do this, it has to, exactly as you said, it has to be people-based. And in Hawaii we have a strong base of continuous labor. I might go out with the mayoral administration, but I have to impart upon the people that I work with that these relationships, you build them. So no matter who's in charge, the mindset carries through. And I think that's the seeds of what is being built right now. And with strong partners in the community and the environment, I think there's enough upswell that we can carry these motions forward. And we can just have a better livable community, at least in terms of transportation. Yeah. Thank you, John. John Nauchi. Thank you. Deputy Director of DTS Department of Transportation Services here in Honolulu. We wish you a long life and long participation in all of these issues. Thank you. Aloha.