 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. OK, we're live. And it's Hawaii at the State of Clean Energy. I'm Jay Fidel. We have a special show. This is a special show with one of our special guests who came down to participate in the Clean Energy Day conference took place earlier this week. So this show is Hawaii State of Clean Energy. And our title is, What Can We Learn from the University of Wisconsin on Smart Transportation? And logically, we're going to talk to somebody from the University of Wisconsin. And he's the director of the State Smart Transportation Initiative at the University of Wisconsin. And he is Eric Sunquist. Welcome to the show, Eric. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So what an excitement. You came down here with Craig Dirksen of Portland. You guys were both material contributions to our effort on Monday. Thank you. And we heard a lot from you. We talked with you. You answered our questions. You were engaged in a really good conversation that lifted the value of the program, the importance of the program. Well, I wanted to review that with you or relive it, if you will. And I wanted to get your thoughts now, just the two of us, just along here, about how it went for you. What did you think of the proceedings? What did you think of the collective lesson of the day? So first, let's talk about what it is at the State Smart Transportation Initiative in the University of Wisconsin. Yeah, so we've been around since 2010. We grew out of a research center at the UW. We're now co-housed with Smart Growth America in DC, so we're jointly operated. But we work with state DOTs around the country, including Hawaii DOT, mainly. But we work with some other large entities and some smaller ones, too, but mainly state DOTs. We work on sustainability issues. We work on modernizing practice and policy, and those two are different things. Often we have great policy goals. We're going to reduce VMT, or I should explain what that is. I guess we can in a bit. Emissions, we're going to get people to work better and so forth, but the practice, it's hard to change the practice, the decisions that are actually made. So we work a lot on practice. Well, let's talk about the payload on this. So you're in the University of Wisconsin. Where is that in Madison? It is. And then you're actually speaking to the whole country. You're consulting with them, offering them advice, writing papers, consulting in one way or another. And it's not limited to Madison or the university or to the state of Wisconsin. No, and most of our work is outside of Wisconsin. We have not gotten much traction with the Wisconsin DOT. But you want to be, and you are, a national consulting organization. You're doing university, what do you call it, from academia to industry, from academia to government all over the country. Yeah, so UW has this thing called the Wisconsin idea that dates back to the Robert LaFollette era, where the idea was, the idea, I know pun intended, was that the ivory tower shouldn't be apart from the world. That people who learn about whether it's engineering or policy or anything should actually be engaged with people who are making decisions in the real world. So we come out of that and we do convenings. So we bring state DOTs together for meetings. We do technical assistance. So we were here for some other meetings around that in addition to Clean Energy Day. And then we publish and do conferences and stuff, regular academic stuff. So the payload, the takeaway then, the product of your efforts, it's in events where you speak and participate in panels, I suppose. It's where you publish and what else? Well, most of it is in technical assistance or what you were calling consulting. We call it technical assistance that we're not a for-profit consultant, but it's kind of the same thing. Yeah, okay. Well, it's pretty valuable because then you're doing outreach, you're helping people all over and you're helping us by coming down here. So you came down, you spoke, you were your keynote on Monday. Can you summarize your remarks? What were you presenting to the crowd at Hawaii Energy Clean Energy Day? Yeah, sure. So Clean Energy Day's focus was on transportation, which is why I was asked to speak. And typically when energy people come into transportation, there's a little bit of a, I wouldn't say a mismatch, but a lot of people in the energy world come from the utility side. That's what they've been working on, policy around coal plants, policy around utilities. And the transportation policy world is a lot different. When I get out of this though, I'd be interested in your thoughts about it from where you stand. Is that the whole movement started out on the energy side. Everybody's interested in better generation of renewables, moving into the new technologies and all that. And then just like Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, somebody said, wait a minute, we got to look at transportation because there's so much energy. This is the biggest generator of greenhouse gas now. Yeah, right. I mean, the grid is getting cleaner and transportation is lagging. So you got to look at that. So and it's very sophisticated to deal with energy in transportation. So you look the other side of the fence, you look for somebody you can sort of meet in the middle, somebody on the transportation policy side, and you find out those guys are not thinking about energy. Am I right? So half right, they are thinking about it. And again, I think a lot of DOTs and states have good policy goals around transportation that we're gonna reduce greenhouse gas by X percent by X year, but it doesn't translate into actions and decisions often in practice. So if you go to the average planner engineer and say, we need you to reduce greenhouse gas, they got nothing. There is not. They got stats. That's not what they're working on. They're working on should we widen this road because it's congested or should we put in another traffic light because there's a danger there? That's what they're trained to do and that's what all the books in civil engineering around transportation are about. So there's a disconnect between these policy goals and the practice and that's what we're trying to, that's what I was trying to talk about. We're working on here with some stakeholders around Hawaii. Yeah. So this whole thing about bringing it together, bringing energy and transportation planning together, relatively new, isn't it? Your state smart transportation initiative does include reference to energy because energy is part of all of that. Energy and environmental outcomes in general. Anybody else at your level with doing an initiative like this in other colleges? Oh yeah. So there's a lot of papers written about this. There's a lot of discussion and there are some actions. I don't want to say that it's just, this is, I thought of this. That's not the case at all. In fact, back 10 years ago or 12 years ago, a lot of us in the Midwest worked on a Midwest Governors Association package of greenhouse gas reduction efforts and there was a huge emphasis on transportation. So, but it's a more diffuse policy target and a practice target than the more centralized utility world. So we've been thinking about that as such, focused on that for a long time, but this we haven't really integrated it with all the technology and all the energy aspects of it. And I was very impressed, for example, in your use of technology determine what was it? Access, accessibility. So you take a given neighborhood, given community and you look at each destination as against every other destination and you determine accessibility through transportation. And it's actually a very complex matrix. It's almost infinite to have all these places connected with all these other places and do accessibility for all of the connections. It's complex, but you know what? We got computers, they can do that. It's not that complex. It would have been, this has been written in papers for two generations now. This is not a new concept, but the computing power and the big data that we have now and make it practice ready. So I mean, what the point of that was when you look at transportation, we basically have three legs of the stool when we're talking about greenhouse gas. We have what are the vehicles? How efficient are they basically? What are the fuels? So even if the car is efficient, there are different carbon intensities in gasoline, say. Have to analyze each different mode. Yeah, so while walking is a zero GHG mode, is that one easy? Yeah, transit has some, but by and large we're talking about automobiles and you can improve the auto carbon footprint by having more than one person in the car at a time. But anyway, we're looking at vehicles and fuels, and then the third leg of the stool, which is where infrastructure and planning and all the stuff we work on come in the most is vehicle miles traveled or VMT that I referred to. So normally what we do is we look at congestion and delay and those sorts of things and those tell us what to go and put money into or to improve or to expand. But if you look at accessibility, what it does a number of things. One, it describes what people really care about most getting out of transportation. It's not that important how fast I go if I can get where I'm going quickly. So if my destinations are close together, then maybe I can slower vehicle speed or I can even get out and walk or something and be there. And I can make a plan. I can plan to go this way and not that way. I can make a plan to use this mode and not that mode and get there faster. Right, so you can look at the different modes in one paradigm, which is different than the traditional how fast we go in mode because it's different standards for walking and different standards for, I mean, there's really not a how fast can I walk mode standard at all. But for cars and transit. Well, if your traffic is completely congested right in the next block and people are spending 20 minutes moving five inches. Yeah. Walking is faster. It can be. So the point of, if we look at different modal accessibilities, which you described well, it's just like how easily can I get from where I am to the potential opportunities that I might want to go visit, where that could be a job, it could be a school, it could be a grocery store, it could be another house, it could be whatever. If I look at that across all four modes, bike, ped, transit and car, I can get a really good idea how much people are gonna drive because all you can do is drive. If everything is inaccessible except by car, then people are just gonna drive. And then when I know that, my planners and engineers have some traction they can say, let's raise up the accessibility on the other modes. We can make some land use decisions, we can make some transportation decisions. And we can see empirically that where accessibility is higher by walking, say, BMT, vehicle miles travel go down and emissions go down. So all of a sudden we have something that practitioners can use as the point. Let's talk about technology or at least improvements. You know, take a system as exists, you want to improve accessibility, reduce vehicle miles traveled. So you may have to make changes. I mean, for example, and I'm only speaking of Honolulu now, I stop at the traffic light and I wait for three minutes or four and I notice that nobody is crossing vertically to me, nobody, there is no other traffic there. And I say, gee, couldn't they do better? Couldn't they have sensors that determine there's no other traffic coming and free me up to cross the intersection earlier than three minutes. I'm killing time, I'm killing money, I'm killing everything by just sitting there for a while. So arguably, if you put in some sensors and put in some technology, I'm improving my accessibility in that mode on that street, going to that destination. So that's gotta be part of the planning, doesn't it? Also, let me throw one more thing in, if you find that the street is not adequate to get there, that you need another street, an alternative street, this happens much, a lot of time in Hawaii with the valleys and the cuts through the mountains and so forth, where you have one road only. If something happens on that road, everybody gets tied up, happens all the time. So you say to yourself, well, let's use some condemnation here, let's make a second road, let's have some relief from the total dependency on one road and that's gotta be better. So I'm just throwing that in as a possible alternative improvement that you would make in order to make life better. Sure, so yeah, so we're talking about auto wheel access now, accessibility. And your first point is absolutely dead on. Often when we think about problems with accessibility, by any mode, we think about we gotta build stuff. But operating the system that already exists, the foot within the same footprint can be very efficient and so whether it's signalization improvements or transit route improvements, signalization improvements for pedestrians. I mean, I've stayed here near the beach and spent a lot of time waiting for lights to change walking around in the past three or four days. So we have a very high rate of pedestrian fatality, by the way, which could be resolved with improved signals. More signals sometimes, and there's variety of different kinds. So there's a lot of, sometimes when you have long blocks, it's really impractical for the pedestrian to walk all the way down, cross and walk all the way back and they call it jaywalking, but it's really kind of unfair because it's just the pedestrian doing what is efficient. I do it all the time, you know. And in fact, I would have the adventure to say that every time I walk, you could arguably say it's jaywalking. Yeah, so let's just talk to each other. All right, okay, all right. Took me a minute. That's Eric Sunquist. He's the director of the State Smart Transportation Initiative at the University of Wisconsin, serving the whole country and will be right back after this short break to further discuss what can be done in Hawaii will be right back. I look familiar. He calls himself the ultra fan, but that doesn't explain all this. What? He planned his party, planned the snacks, he even planned to coordinate colored shirts, but he didn't plan to have a good time. Now you wouldn't do this in your own house, so don't do it in your team's house. Know your limits and plan ahead so that everyone can have a good time. Okay, we're back alive. We're here with Eric Sunquist. He's the director of the State Smart Transportation Initiative at the University of Wisconsin. We're delighted to have him here and where our title of the show is let's see, what can we learn? What can we learn from the University of Wisconsin and smart transportation? And guess what? Sharon Moriwaki is here. She's the co-chair of the Y Energy Policy Forum. She put that program on on Monday. She's gonna tell you a little about it and Eric's role in the larger picture of that program. Well, you know, we've been grappling with transportation, clean transportation, energy and transportation for so long. And so clean energy pathways to clean transportation was the theme for Monday's Clean Energy Day. And we wanted to do something different. We wanted to not only bring experts like Eric in, but also have them listen and listen to people who are doing things in the state and putting that all together and actually themselves coming to consensus on what kinds of goals do we wanna take forward? And so we really appreciate Eric's role on measuring success and clean transportation. As part of the problem sometimes is that you have goals and you don't have measures. And so they stay on the books and stay on the shelf. That's called pie in the sky. Whatever you wanna call it, it doesn't get done. I guess they say you only do what you measure. And so we really appreciated Eric's coming over not only to speak to us, but to work with the people who really do need to make things happen and can make things happen are the transportation folks. So he was with transportation planners and with people that we don't usually see on the energy side of the house. So he's making that connection for us because he has a background in energy but also working with transportation. It's the integration of energy and transportation. That's what we're looking at, it's integration, collaboration. And as the mayor said the other day, you not only think to the choir, you expand the choir. And how can we bring people to work shoulder to shoulder which is what we did on Monday to come up with goals and actions. So we're trying to get a report out and we've been working hard on that. So you not only spoke in the keynote about what you were doing in the University of Wisconsin and all the analysis you were making, the computer models you were making, but you also actually consulted with some people while you were here. Can you talk about that? Yeah, sure. So we are working with HDOT over the next several months on this or maybe up to a year. That's the Hawaii Department of Transportation, the State Department. And the counties. And the counties too. Right, so we're working with HDOT though, specifically on some follow up to a previous workshop that looked at scoping transportation projects and some better practices for them. And it's sort of now attached that effort to what we talked about on Monday at Clean Energy Day. So we had counties in Ampo, the MPO for Oahu and HDOT in a workshop for two days talking about, again, performance measures. How do we measure decisions or apply measures to decisions that we're making so that we point in the right direction and not the wrong one. And bring energy and other considerations into these decisions that haven't been there before. So how did you feel about it? I mean, but were the agencies you're talking with, were they coming to action points here? Give us an honest appraisal. Yeah, so they, the counties are in different places in some, which you would expect. I mean, Oahu and Kauai are vastly different in scale. Yet the energy was universally really good across all of the islands and with the state. And the MPO, they requested. So this is something we, yeah. So this is something that we were coming and trying to sell. This was a request. And they've all been working on performance measures and putting them into practice for probably a varying time depending on the island. Some are a little further along than the others. So how well do you think Oahu is doing? From what you've seen. That's an open-ended question. Yeah. And it's really hard to answer because there's so many different aspects of transportation. So clearly you have this massive rail project that is really important and should, you know, will expect that it succeeds. That could be a real game changer here in Oahu. I mean, that can be a real VMT. Either way, if it succeeds or it doesn't succeed. Well, true. Yeah, but doesn't then, that'll be tough too. But generally the projections on ridership on almost every transit project in the country in the modern era, you know, dating back maybe to the 70s. They always underestimate ridership because of the models. So unless something is really different about this and I'm not really in the weeds on the projections and the modeling, it should perform really well. And that provides a big opportunity, we were talking about accessibility to have transportation-oriented development, which the city is big into. Sometimes intentional, like we're gonna, we have some state-owned land or the city's gonna bring some land together here so we can sort of be developers. Or organically, if you have this transit system that is providing new accessibility as a spine and you can provide walking access to it at many different points, the land uses can just respond sort of organically and densify in places where you'd like. So what do you favor, plan TOD or organic development? I mean, I don't think you have to choose. I think if you have an opportunity to do some, if you have state-owned land, which there is a lot in Hawaii, I understand, then why not like plan that? On the other hand, you're not gonna be able to do that at every stop or every station area. So where you're not doing intentional TOD, let's make the organic stuff really work. Let's make the zoning compatible. Let's make sure the walking and the routes in and out very easy. This isn't any news to anybody in the city of Honolulu. I think they're thinking about that. No, but there's so many components to play together. And I see your initiative as a place where you evaluate the components and you make them work together. And you have to give appropriate emphasis and stress on some over others. And that depends on the community involved and what people want and what is available. And for example, bikes. Bikes that don't do well up steep hills. But bikes do well on the roads, the main roads around Oahu that are sea level. So clearly, I've just asked a question. What is the future of bikes here? Do you think bikes are promising? Do you think bikes are a larger element, a larger element in the development of clean transportation here than they would be in some other place? I saw a bunch of people out on them last night, particularly the bike share with the flashing lights. I understand those are ahead of projection in terms of ridership. I think that there's a long way to go in terms of retrofitting the road so that people feel safe to do it. It costs money. It costs money? No, it doesn't always cost that much money. What it costs is a trade off. Like, am I willing to give up some parking spaces so that the bikes can go through here? Or a lane of traffic or something like that. So those sorts of hard choices are more of a barrier than the money usually. The money for a bike lane isn't usually very much. How do you make these choices in the perfect world? In a world where you have seen it would be most efficient, how do you make those choices politically? Community-wise, how do you make those choices? Yeah, it really depends. It's a messy process when it gets to community. People have their own set of beliefs and their own interests. Some people's interests make track right against having a bike lane because they have a store on the street and they are certain that if people can't park there, they will not come to the store anymore. Now, that may not be true. So the one linking thing is that you can, and we work in academia and consulting, is to bring as much information to the table as possible. So at least if there's gonna be this political, messy discussion that, you know, honestly doesn't always turn out for the best. But you wanna make sure they understand the implications and effects of making it this way or that way. You can at least tamp down some clearly irrational or unfounded claims. Others are just policy decisions. Experiences like in Hawaii where people love their automobiles and how do you transfer from that love of automobiles to helping to, everybody share the road to get to where we wanna go faster or better, has any other jurisdiction gone from that point to sharing the road? Yeah, they have. There's some famous cases in Washington DC and New York. When I lived in the DC area in the 80s, you could drive anywhere, park anywhere. There were no bikes. The transit system was not used a lot. And now the modal share of people traveling in Washington is mostly not by car. And there's not really that much congestion in the district per se. Now, when you get to the suburbs, it's epic congestion because that's still very car-oriented. So, and some of that was land uses being built close together so people could walk and that you didn't have to drive. Some of it was infrastructure. So they have counterflow bike lanes. They have added to the capacity of transit and so forth. So it's both sides of the coin, the land use and the transportation. And we don't, you know, we try not to like chastise people for driving. And that doesn't help anything, right? Because some people have a really good reason to have to drive. They just, you know. And a number of reasons. Yeah, and I drive some. I mean, I'm not like anti-car. I, you know, try to balance it out. But if we give people the opportunity to drive less, driving is a cost. If we give people the opportunity to drive less, a lot of people will do that. And that's really the goal. So, and then they get off the road, you have to create that infrastructure so you have that option that's convenient and that, you know, gets you where you wanna go without a pause. And you or, you know, I may still drive, but there's a continuum of people. And some people will stop driving readily and some will do it with a little more incentive and so forth. Talk about infrastructure. We're remaking this, your initiative and like initiatives. And maybe what happens here in Hawaii, remaking the society, the country. Because somebody said on Monday that 50% of the land area in a given city is dedicated to transportation, 50%. Including parking. Parking is the big one. 50%. And, you know, when you think about it, the economy of the country is largely in the cities. The population is largely in the cities and how the cities work is sort of a metric on how the country works. And so we've gotta use those public spaces and I say public spaces advisably. You know, your apartment in your condo or my house, it's not a public space. But everything else is a public space. The city flows through these public spaces and I don't think we've paid enough attention in the past few years. While the community gets more active, has more to do, we all have more to do. More places to go, we're used to that. Like the old days with the car. It was a car only, you mentioned a little while ago. You know, it was not happening as fast. People were not doing as much. Now they're doing more, they gotta get around. And that's good. Economy, you know, quality of life, you gotta get around. And so we have gotta catch up with that in my view, I'm interested in your view. And we gotta make, you know, public spaces that work better. And these are, transportation is all about public spaces and that means we're remaking our structure, our infrastructure in the community and indeed we're remaking our cities and indeed we're remaking our lives. A whole thing is in transformation. And when you add to that, at the same time in parallel we're remaking our energy generation systems, you know, could this be a better time to be alive or could it be a worse time to be alive? I'm not sure. We'll see. What's your comment? Well, you're right. I mean, it is, the transportation infrastructure is vast and not appreciated because so much of it is parking. And it falls in different silos. So the Department of Transportation doesn't own the parking. They don't really think that much about it. The people who own parking don't really own the roads and then there's local roads and there's state roads and so there's a bunch of silos and it's hard to bring it all together. But there are great signs of that happening. So, you know, it used to be in the U.S. the walking environment was just a social safety net. It was there if somebody absolutely had to but the assumption was everybody else probably would drive except in a few densities where there was still transit. And now we know that we can make those areas livable. Those are places, not just conduits. Those are places in that people linger there or if they shop there or that's part of their living space because it's a place where they can meet their neighbors because it's a nice environment instead of just a conduit again. You know, at one point our house was full of all hallways and shrunken little disconnected rooms so we got to make the rooms, these places that were hallways into kind of rooms again. And there's always going to be some fast moving, you know, regional facility that isn't going to be that much fun to like hang out on the side of the road and be on, right? But we can make all the rest of the stuff much better. Better quality of life, better quality of city, better economy, the whole thing is better. I mean, do you like your work? Yeah, very much. It's pretty interesting. I guarantee one thing, it's going to get more interesting as more people realize these processes. And you know what's going to make it really interesting in about four or five years or even sooner is autonomous vehicles. Further complication. That changes a lot, that's another disruptor. So that, nobody knows quite how that's going to go. Is it going to be, are people going to like buy them and own them privately and then decide, I can live way out in the country because land is cheap and it's pretty and I'm going to spend all day driving back and forth and then we just have. We use more energy. More emissions go through the roof and we have rivers of metal that make everything unlivable along the conduits or is it more of a shared mobility transit model where you have electric vehicles and lower emissions, more mobility, including for people who don't have mobility now because of income or disability or what have you or the age. So it'll probably be some mix, but policy and practice are going to play right into that. Hard problems. Some kind of regulation. Yeah, regulation, government action, it's really a million things all feeding in and it's critical, it's critical to our lives and our future by community and by nation, but we're almost out of time. So I want to ask you one last area and that is what's your future with Hawaii, May? Do you have some lingering contact here? Will you have some lingering, do you want to have lingering contact here? How can we find you? Are you coming back? Will you come back to our table? Sharon wants to know. So the answer is yes. We have this work that is funded to work through Hawaii DOT, but also with the counties and with the MPO. So I think we're already trying to put some on the books for January. Please come back. Yes, we will. Great, because we need you. Coming back to Hawaii in January from Wisconsin makes a lot more sense than coming here in August. There are many benefits. Yeah. And you have to tell us where you are, so you can give us some feedback in January. Probably no. Oh, we'll be, we're gonna have some check in with our stakeholders and hopefully have a lot to show by then and a lot to do. Well, thanks on a number of levels for coming down here, for talking with us, for participating in the program, and for coming back. Thank you. I'm really glad to be here. Eric Sunquist. Now, Sharon, you have to close. Oh, okay. Well, we're really pleased to have Eric and people like Eric really caring about Hawaii, because I think we sometimes have consultants come in, they don't know about Hawaii, but they come in and they tell us how to do things. And I think you're very respectful of what we have and considered an expert to bring to us what we can glean and really use to our benefit. So we want you to come back. We want to hear from you and we want to make that connection continue. Great, thank you. Thank you, Eric. Thanks for coming down. Aloha. Aloha. Thank you, Sharon. Aloha. Thank you.