 Welcome to the two-wheel revolution on thinktecawaii.com. This is a streaming interview show where we talk about bicycles and electric bicycles and electric scooters and electric skateboards and the oldest form of personal mobility walking. Anyway, we can get around our urban environment without a car and I hope you will stick around for the whole 30-minute show mainly because I think it's going to be very interesting but also because at the end we're going to continue our little bicycle bits or micromobility moment. I haven't figured out what to call this thing yet. At any rate, our guests today we're very fortunate to have Julia Thane of the Rocky Mountain Institute where she is the principal for urban transformation before joining the Rocky Mountain Institute which is a global climate action non-profit that's very well known and esteemed. She was executive officer for economic development for the mayor of the city of Los Angeles overseeing $150 million of financial assistance to businesses during the COVID pandemic, driving sustainability policy at the port of Los Angeles which for those of us here in Hawaii is a very important place since so much of our goods and materials come through there and leading mobility innovation programs across LA's transportation departments which again must have been a challenge because in the city of the car but I saw Julia in action when she emceed the recent Micromobility America conference near San Francisco and she introduced virtually every speaker and interviewed some of them and she moderated panels and she gave to me one of the most important and impactful talks there so I'm really very very happy to have her here Julia welcome and thanks for being being with us thank you so much thank you for having me and I only wish it was in person rather than virtual well anytime you're ready you know we do have one or two accommodations for tourists here and you would be you we'd welcome you and we would we probably never see the beach because we'd want you to be talking to the bicycling league and the beaky folks out there which is our bike share program and a lot of other people in Micromobility so we would you know you could write the trip off anyway I'd be more than happy to do that all right we'll work on that but start out by telling us you know urban transformation principle for Rocky Mountain Institute what does that what does that mean and what does that mean in everyday talk yeah absolutely uh so again very much uh appreciate you having me and it's wonderful to be able to talk about Micromobility across the US and across all kinds of different contexts uh when I say urban transformation and talk about the work that we're doing at RMI as you mentioned the global climate action nonprofit uh what we really mean is that we're working with cities on accelerating what we call equitable climate action uh and then in my space through climate aligned urbanism we think that land use housing and transportation are very much underfunded under resource and under appreciated ways of contributing to equitable climate action and so we want to be able to pass policies scale up technologies think through different findings and mechanisms and honestly work with community-based organizations on uh being able to uh take action whether it comes to changing zoning so we can have more compact development building housing because we need it and finally making sure that we connect the housing that we have to transportation options so that we can move away from the car monoculture that we really have in the US and in most states and in most places in the US um so much of my work is about doing some research trying to push through uh new and innovative ideas but in a way that's co-creative with communities. Well I uh redouble my invitation we've got a lot of work here for you uh if you if you can get you to show up um but uh I went to this Micromobility conference in Richmond actually across the bay from San Francisco it was my first one and uh I was very impressed I I'm sure it wasn't your first one and I'm sure you probably in the month or so since then you've been to three or four others but I'd love to know what your kind of takeaways or impressions you actually had to listen to pretty much everything that was said there what are your impressions or takeaways from that conference or from other things that you are in touch with in your work? Yeah it's a great question and for those of you who are watching this but haven't been to the Micromobility conference um just to kind of set the scene for you it's one of those conferences that's half talking and half vehicle demonstrations and being able to ride the vehicles so what I find really fun about it is it's this small set of people around 1500 people um who all really love care about the vehicles themselves plus have a deeper appreciation for what it's doing for climate for what it's doing for affordability for what it's doing for access and for that matter for what it's doing for changing the form factor of electric vehicles to be much more inclusive in my mind um for the different types of users that there could be so in terms of key takeaways from the event I mean uh it's funny I get teased a lot because I um as Oliver Bruce who's one of the co-founders of Micromobility industries the company that puts on this conference says I fell from urbanism back into micromobility and most people fall from micromobility back into urbanism uh but that that key takeaway for me is that micromobility is the love child of urbanism and electric vehicles so it's putting together this compact development this idea of street safety street liveliness of having housing and services and retail all be close together with this new mode of transportation that really gets you around faster more efficiently um in a way that you can carry not just yourself but other people and also goods um uh that's really important so that's takeaway number one I would say two more takeaways um uh what impresses me about um that conference is just the number of vehicles the types of vehicles you have I went into three-wheelers I went into two-wheelers I went into things that looked like mini cars I went into things that looked like uh mopeds um and I think that micromobility has done a really good job of leaning into user-centric design rather than I mean I'm biased but I look at cars and they kind of all look the same to me like I know there's little differences between them but but not maybe major differences uh so that user-centered design feels really personal and then finally I'll just say Peter to wrap it up I want to interrupt you for one second you didn't ride the electric inline skates I'm guessing because you didn't that that was a shock to me to see some to see uh people tooling around inline electric skates let's let's yeah no I thought that was funny too and you could tell everybody was like a little bit wobbly they were trying to figure out what do I do here they had in order to I'm wobbly enough on my my scooter and so I'm not going there but anyway I'm sorry but third takeaway third takeaway yeah no no third takeaway um is that you know kind of like what's next with micromobility it's it's a tech space so you always have to be looking at like what's the next set of investments or tech that you're gonna see and I think it's two things one is security being able to protect against theft or for that matter being able to find your a micromobility device if it is stolen and second is accessories you know you've got to have a micromobility device that's kitted out not just you know like I talked about user-centered design but part of that is being able to have the light that works the you know cart on the back of your bike that gets your groceries a horn that actually sounds like a car horn so that people take you seriously on the road and so security and accessories I think have to be next in terms of the investments that tech companies make that's interesting I would you know mostly when you talk to people and what I heard quite a bit of of course was safety in addition you know security is kind of is maybe a subset of safety but the the big issue for most people when you even talk about a bicycle or an e-bike is is the safety factor and so first of all let me say I had some takeaways and I put them in a blog that's on the the twowellrevolution.com which any of my two listeners here can can look up but so one of the things that seems to me is that there's not just potential but there's actual conflict increasingly in this area and most of these will have to be resolved at the municipal level of course we've always had conflict between pedestrians and vehicles and unfortunately the pedestrians usually eludes those confrontations but now with a variety of different speeds capable of you know electric skateboards there was one there a the claim to go 60 miles per hour which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up so there's there's different speeds of vehicles in the space and even you know within the biking community I think a lot of the traditional cyclists the purists what I call the the spandex and clip shoe crowd uh they look down on electric vehicles and don't let us don't don't come into my bike lanes and so forth so do you you see that as conflict and and what do we do about it yeah yeah this is where we're starting to fight against ourselves right you know that's where we start to divide the bike enthusiasts from the pedestrian enthusiasts from the advocates from the micro mobility folks and I think it's probably unhelpful so let's talk about this in a couple different ways first is to go back to your point about safety I mean when I think about safety in a micro mobility device of course there's the feeling of safety the perception of safety as you're actually on the device and is this going to be able to keep me upright and am I going to tip over am I going to hit something but then there's also the safety around you the things you can't control the fact that you are on a street there's not usually a bike lane and you're in mixed traffic with again in the us increasingly large and heavy vehicles including electric vehicles and so I think my first takeaway is that when we're talking about safety those folks that I just mentioned who should be part of the same collusion but sometimes tend to fight with each other if we're talking about e-bikes or if we're talking about e-trikes should really band together on a few things one is that just street design I mean we don't have bike lanes we don't have enough bike lanes in the US and I think actually what could be really cool is for the industry to come up with some new street design guidelines I mean we don't have to have just the regular car lanes and the bike lanes and the parking that we've had for so long because we're going to have mobility devices that are moving at different speeds maybe we should rethink how we redo how we do street design in a way that provides for you know either different lanes or no lanes for that matter just so people have some clear clarity around where they can travel and also who is in the hierarchy there needs to need to be prioritized from a safety perspective the second thing that I think you know the cities are in charge of street design and safety but the second thing that I think some cities are starting to think about is speed limits and speed guards so there's a number of cities across the US and even more so in Europe and other places who are dropping down the speed limit of their streets normally from you know like 35 miles per hour or higher to 25 miles per hour and even doing that actually starts to resolve some of the difference and and issues you might have with street design itself and then speed guards are just like new technologies that allow for vehicles well they're not even that new of a technology but allow for vehicles speed to be arrested at a certain level so you know you can't actually go above 35 miles or 25 miles in a certain zone and then finally I think about you know things like automated ticketing you know again municipalities a lot of the ways that our departments of transportation get money is because they ticket they ticket for you parking for too long they ticket for you going too fast or whatever else and even though there are definitely some issues around equity and inequity of ticketing there are also some opportunities for automated ticketing to be used as a way to remove human bias from how we do ticketing and also to remove like cargo vans from being in the bike lanes which then makes it unsafe to bike so lots of opportunities and I think to the extent to which the coalition of folks who believe in pedestrianism cycling e-bikes etc can get behind these three things that could be really really meaningful to improving the safety and experience of being on micro mobility in cities it is kind of interesting that there are speed controls on on scooters very often and you know I even said as I said I was worried about a scooter to go 60 miles per hour whereas the automobile you know thousands and thousands of pounds of steel moving down the street there are virtually except for what the driver is willing to to impose there are no automatic or or electronic controls over the speed of of these very large very dangerous devices so it's part of you know the the kind of inequity the disconnect between the two kinds of mobility I think so one other question there was a lot there is starting to be discussion at micro mobility and I want to dive into the equity issue much more but I want one more question and that is you know there's already some talk about mini mobility which is more like enclosed vehicles small two three wheels four wheels and you know most people in America today don't know what micro mobility is much less mini mobility and so I wonder if you think are we getting ahead of ourselves here or you know should should we not get all together and get some advances in the micro mobility or personal mobility space rather than you know having this incredible variety of vehicles and different factors yeah yeah this would be a fun one to have a debate on maybe it's the next panel yeah for one of the micro mobility conferences I'll be there might yeah maybe you'll be part of it um my perspective on this is we should continue with this Cambrian explosion of vehicles we're going to have some consolidation in the industry I think we're a couple years out from the consolidation of the industry both in terms of form factor and and number of companies but for right now what you're seeing and I think what tech is capitalizing on what people are responding to with purchases is the fact that they've been um they haven't had choice you know it's just basically been like car or nothing in terms of public private ownership rather no of course we have public transit and everything else so there are other options but in terms of private ownership it's really just been like car or bust so I think we need micro mobility I think we need mini mobility and I think we need the policies and the support for them to be safe and permissible on streets but I you know also think as part of this too micro mobility and mini mobility you know again need to join hands with each other in terms of working as a coalition in terms of how they present to the consumer too so the consumer doesn't get confused by all of these options right and for that matter start to think a little bit more about how do you plug into the fact that we have quite a powerful auto industry in the U.S. and also that sort of advantage of the auto industry in terms of having a bunch of the infrastructure in terms of having most of the vehicles on the road and in terms of capturing people's imagination too in terms of what mobility and transportation could and should be in the U.S. Okay as I said one of the to me one of the most important talks there was your not very long talk on I guess on the second day talking about equity and inclusion in micro mobility so could we go a little further into that and you know I'm not going to ask you to re redo the presentation but which is unfortunate because I think many people would have would profit from that but can you kind of summarize the challenges you see on this front and what you know what are the solutions to the inequality in transportation that you you think are are going to help yeah and the question is almost where to begin I mean it was a 10-minute conversation that Peter hopefully I can send you the link to and you can put up on the website or show okay I'd be glad to do that yeah yeah to for folks to listen if they care or if they'd like to but you know in terms of micro mobility and equity you have to start at price point so micro mobility devices are much much cheaper than a car you know the electric vehicle goes for about forty thousand dollars a micro mobility device anywhere from fifteen hundred to thirty five hundred dollars and then it just depends on what you're purchasing but my sort of challenge to the industry was if you want to have a product that's going to be broadly available you know don't necessarily like go out in the market thinking you're going to lose money from the beginning but try to work with city governments the state governments and federal governments with philanthropies even with financiers to bring down that price point so it can be accessible to more people I think what we miss a lot in the conversation in the US is that the folks who are biking and walking around and taking transit are people who are on the lower income side of the spectrum and so when we are thinking about micro mobility it shouldn't be considered necessarily only as a luxury good or only as something cool that you have that you bring out every once in a while but something that people fundamentally rely on for their livelihoods and to be able to get around and to have that personal mobility personal freedom that they otherwise wouldn't because they couldn't access you know a car and that's the second component which is right now you know who has access and where there is access and micro mobility really varies and it also varies a bit by the business model so whether it's privately owned or publicly owned but in order to really drive more equity in the micro mobility space we need to have a couple of things I mean just many more micro mobility sharing programs that again are price point accessible to people and also are balanced geographically in places yeah where people who really meet them can access them so I think access is a huge huge piece of equity or for that matter inequity and then the final two things are around the design of the vehicle itself so making sure that as like mini mobility micro mobility form factors are being developed they're being developed with many different users in mind whether it's the mom who supports her kids but also her mother and then also you know has to go to night school and go to her job during the day versus you know somebody who's young in their career and just commuting and that's what they're using for using it for I think that the space can be much more inclusive in that in that way and then finally and I realized this is quite a long answer so I'm maybe just recapping that's what I want to talk about so it's on me go ahead yeah I mean the final point is oh my goodness the car the internal combustion car engine car has been really traumatic for parts of American cities in the way that you know highways have cut through neighborhoods in the way that it's taken up so much space that could otherwise be used for other things and my end also just in like things like particulate matter and emissions that have been derived from internal combustion engine vehicles so the clearest area where micro mobility can really start to contribute to equity is in terms of being able to repurpose and minimize some of the car based infrastructure and second draw down on that environmental impact which we all know is disproportionately borne by disadvantaged communities so that's the that was the crux actually of the talk was really about the climate impacts and the equitable climate action impacts but all of those other pieces are part and parcel of this conversation around how can micro mobility drive equitable and environmental benefits thank you you know we have a new ebike rebate program that's going into effect here it's in the process of being stood up and one of the you know there's some restrictions on who can who can qualify for it one of them is if you're a student you can qualify and the other is if you're on any kind of of of income assistance program that allows you to qualify for this $750 rebate which is something but not you know it's not a fortune in this even in the relatively less expensive environment but let me play the devil's advocate here for a moment i can go into Costco right now or go online and buy a small ebike for under $400 you know less than the cost of a phone less than what 80 visits to Starbucks or however we quantify these important things and so you know don't bother me about equity i mean if anybody wants to buy it wants to have an ebike and they're you know a little more expensive but still very little inexpensive Chinese models so doesn't that amount to equity anybody anywhere can pretty much you know scrape together the 400 bucks yeah uh well you also have to think about what the bike costs over its full life cycle i mean we didn't even talk about insurance we didn't talk about the operational costs of cycling you know fortunately with something like an ebike you could just plug it into an outlet so from an energy perspective it actually doesn't cost that much but there are other costs that aren't in that you know major sticker price of what the ebike is and then i think you know kind of above this question of just cost $400 it's like you know what's the trade-off and where can you purchase these things because some of them are available online a lot of people are purchasing either second hand bikes or getting bikes from friends or they're getting bikes from local bike shops and so in order i think to have that $400 really makes sense for a person you also have to be able to access the ebike itself and to get it so you know $400 i think it still sounds like a lot depending on who you are right and very frankly what you get for $400 is uh you know most of us would not be get on one of those things for lover money so uh yeah it's a it's it's an interesting challenge to really see how the equity works in that case yeah and peter that's a that's a great point which is if you pay $400 now in a year from now it breaks you can't use it then you're paying another $400 you know what what does that really mean i also think equity can't be viewed as just like you're able to own something crappy it has to be you know you're able to own something of value that's what equity is versus equal um and so i think that's the point we should really be making which is like let's not give you know the crappy products to people who can only purchase crappy products let's really think about up leveling all the products um so that people can it again access them at different prices i take a lot of stuff to goodwill and sometimes i look at this stuff and i say you know no poor person should be asked to use this again after after you know i've finished with it there's a level of dignity and respect that has to be included in in you know and not just dollar signs when you when we're talking about equity we have to and you know treat people as human beings uh that's great so let me ask you one final question and this is uh i steal this from iris leite on science friday at mpr um it's the blank check question he asked scientists uh researchers if you could have a blank check to do something really important in your field what would it be and i guess it's a little bit weird to ask a person who administered 150 million dollars worth of of money what would you do with a blank check but on behalf of cities everywhere you know if if money were no object what what do we need to do um do i have to choose this one thing no no you know okay the check is blank you know that's the beauty of it you can choose three things i'll make three checks you know art you're actually getting the money i'm not worried so uh tell me the three things what are they yeah oh great okay uh so for starters i'd subsidize micromobility devices for everybody i actually did this calculation right before coming on this this virtual interview to figure out how much this would cost but if you gave people a 3500 dollar instant rebate for a micromobility device and you considered that about 80 percent of the 330 million people who live in the u.s live in cities which is a high number and then thought about maybe a three quarters of them would actually want to be able to use a micromobility device uh that blank check or now this written check would be around 700 billion dollars which is roughly it's actually less than what we spend on the infrastructure investment and jobs act that floored me i thought it was going to be a much larger number i thought it was going to be you know in the trillions i thought uh this will not be you know something that i should say in public but actually it's 700 billion dollars it's something that we should consider and i don't mean that you know after we've had this conversation about equity in a 400 dollar bike to be totally tongue-in-cheek but i think in terms of you know quantifying all the benefits to people's mobility and and health and just general well-being emotional and otherwise we might be able to justify spending that amount of money but you know other blank checks would have to go towards uh street redesign and bike lane infrastructure uh and then third and this is not something we talked about but we got to start subsidizing some of these micromobility companies um and when we talk about equity too the entrepreneurs the financial institutions the tech folks the maintenance folks who are in micromobility should be as beautifully diverse as our country is and so i think for that to happen too we need to start getting serious about providing some subsidies for micromobility companies to to locate to grow local bike shops to locate to grow in the u.s. That's a great answer and and when you even begin to think about the subsidies for the automobile industry over the course of 150 years it you know whatever we would spend on micromobility would pay all by example so i thank you very much you've been terrific i wish we could go longer i wish we could know i hope we can do this again in the future with that julia i thank you so much and i really appreciate your time i'm going to get your i feel send me the link i'll get that up on my website and a little more about you since i could only touch on your many accomplishments but thank you again and i hope i'll see you at the next conference in amsterdam see you there all right all right all the best 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 linked in and donate to us at think tech hawaii dot com mahalo