 This is Stink Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. Okay, we're back. We're live on a Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. and you know what that means. It means Hawaii, the state of clean energy right here, right now. Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, which we care deeply about. Right, Maria Tomei? Oh, yes, definitely. And the topic is transportation. Of course. Yup. That's your topic. Hey, yes. Transportation, yeah. So the Energy Policy Forum has a transportation group and we try to keep up with what's going on and look ahead at what might be necessary for us to have the transportation future we want here in Hawaii, especially from the energy perspective. So we're very happy to have with us today Lauren Reichelt, Transportation Lead with the Sustainable Transportation Coalition of Hawaii. So Lauren, welcome to the show. Nice to have you here. Nice to meet you guys. Yeah, this is good. So, okay, so that said, there's a few basic fundamental things. For example, the acronym is STICH. Correct. STCH. STICH. It's Sustainable Transportation Coalition of Hawaii. Yes. So, thus is LUS. All right. So the Sustainable Transportation Coalition of Hawaii is a U.S. Department of Energy Clean Cities program. So there are around 90 coalitions country-wide and this is one of the coalitions. So it's a local coalition of stakeholders committed to reducing the petroleum that's used in the transportation sector through various means. Why here? Why Hawaii? You said 90. There's more, you know, than 90 places. This could have been, but it's right here in Hawaii. So will we select it or why? It's been around for a while. So we used to be Honolulu Clean Cities and we recently rebranded to the Sustainable Transportation Coalition of Hawaii, but yeah, it was a grant program and we had it applied years ago and so it's been around for a while and Blue Planet Foundation administers that program. So I'm ... So you lived within the Blue Planet umbrella there? Right. So I'm a Blue Planet Foundation employee and I just am also the coordinator for the coalition. That's great. Yeah. Here. Here. Here. Here. Doing this. Doing this. I've been with the Blue Planet Foundation a little over two years. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, because of that, you can still talk to us, right? You can talk to Maria and me and the Energy Policy Forum and Think Tank. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk. Okay. So what does Stitch do? Do you mind if I call it Stitch? Yeah. No. So what does Stitch do? Give us a ... So it's mission as it exists here in Hawaii and the kinds of things you do and you cause to be done here as part of the coalition. Sure. So reducing petroleum in the transportation sector is our general mission. That's the U.S. Department of Energy's Clean Cities Program mission. And we do that through a number of means. We try to educate our policy makers and stakeholders and also advocate for certain policies as they come up and also educate. So for example, one program that we're looking to launch soon is the ... is an EB Expert Certification Program for car dealerships. So it'll be a ... So dealership gets certified. We're educated. Individual sales associates will get certified. So we're looking to certify one or two sales associates per dealership so that they are highly versed on the incentives that exist for electric vehicle ownership, the technology, how to sell an EB. It's a different way of talking to a consumer and it's a different consumer in general. So being sure that there is a cohort of sales associates that are very knowledgeable about EVs and we don't come across any issues there. That's a great idea. So that's something that we're working on as well and that'll be launched. We're going to be pushing that soon. Are you going to do the teaching? No. I don't think so. I think we'll find an industry expert. What about Maria here? Yeah, you want to do it? No. It's okay. I'm good. I'm kind of busy. All sorts of other stuff. Sharon Moriwaki. What? Sharon. Oh, yes. I'm sure they're going to have folks who are... She has an EV after all. Yes. I think you have to have an EV to be an expert in selling EVs. It definitely helps. Certain sales associates I've talked to who own EVs tend to either a little more evangelical about it. They want everyone to be into EVs also but they also understand the lifestyle shift that accompanies EV ownership and that helps when you're selling a car and explaining to people how they can fit into their life and that they're not going to be stuck somewhere charging for an hour. The flip side of that, the back side of that is that the dealer now has an expert. The dealer has a consciousness about EVs maybe that he didn't have before and that means dealerships are going to change. They have to change anyway to deal with EVs, don't they? Different repair and a whole different protocol on how to handle EVs. I mean, they can turn their backs and say, well, sorry, we don't do that. But that's not smart. So my guess is that dealerships will change. If they have to get other equipment, if they have to get training, not only in selling but in maintaining and repairing and what that, they'll do that. The market's going to be too big. Yeah. A lot of OEMs have made sweeping commitments to electric vehicles. Over the last year they just kept coming for a while there and dealerships are going to have to evolve in order to keep up with that shift in product. They're going to have to find a way, this is off the point, but they're going to have to find a way to deal with, this is not the right word, to address the notion that there'll be a lot of sales of electric vehicles on the web, not through a sales board. You go on the web like buying a pair of socks. You know the model you want, check it out like you're buying a computer. You can just do it on the web, push a button and it'll be at your front door. So the dealers have to find a way to get involved in that transaction, either by modifying their arrangements for sale or by getting in on the other guy's arrangements for delivery. So they can be part of the process. Anyway, going through the discussion, because we like news, what positions did you take, what happened? Yeah, so there are a couple of transportation-related bills that we're following in the session. Unfortunately, none of them actually went through. We didn't see a lot of progress on the transportation front. When you say follow, you mean you were promoting them? We were, we were supporting them and providing input along the way. So one was a bill to electrify Hawaii's rental fleet. So that addresses a couple of things. It reduces the emissions associated with passenger vehicles. So the rental fleet is the largest passenger vehicle fleet in the state. And then, so it also increases the secondary market of electric vehicles, which makes electric vehicles cheaper for the consumer, which is great because they haven't reached cost parity yet, so they're still a bit more expensive than ICEs. So increasing that secondary market with the turnover of rental fleets and then also branding us as a clean tourist destination, which we talk about sometimes, but it's not always the case. So those don't sound like hard bills. They don't sound controversial. Well, it requires the rental fleets to incorporate ADs into their fleet. Were they agreeable? I think that they probably know what's coming, but they don't want to be told when those... The question of when. Yeah. So yeah, unfortunately that bill didn't go through. But we are looking into next session and figuring out how to figure out how to get that through. And then another one was an EV charging infrastructure bill. So it was a bill that was looking to actually cut incentives on EVs. Right now, there's free EV parking at the airport. And the bill was looking to make that reduced to only 24-hour segments. So the planet foundation came in and said basically, you know, EVs don't even make up 1% of our entire vehicle stock right now in the state. And it's too early to be cutting incentives. So if we're going to be cutting that particular incentive, we need to put something into the bill to benefit EV uptake. So we added a piece in there that says that all new multi-unit dwellings or workplaces or large lots need to have 25% of the stalls be EV charger ready. They don't actually have to have an EV charger in them yet, but they need to be wired and electrically ready for an EV charger to be installed in that space. That's just like the California statute I told you about, that every new house has to have solar on the roof. Every new condo has to have EV, at least be EV ready. So Vancouver recently passed a bill that says that 100% of the stalls that the new builds have to be EV ready, EV charger ready. So that's much more aggressive than what we're looking to pass, but it's a lot more expensive to go back and do construction on these spaces after the fact to make them ready. And you were only talking about perspective, right? I wasn't talking about refitting. So it wouldn't cost anybody for a refit just perspective. Now, if it passes later, then you have to go back. Well, you can't go back. It's just too expensive to go back. So the beauty of it is, look, it's forward thinking in that it's going to keep costs down in the long run. Although it's an initial cost, it'll save money. I think it's around three times more expensive to do it later. So what was the resistance on? I'm not sure on that one exactly, but it didn't go through this session. But it's something that, again, we'll be looking into next year and keeping an eye on, especially if they try to start scaling back on incentives this early. Yeah, need incentives. And what about did you, did anybody get involved in the EV tax credit, which went away just like that? We don't have it anymore. We need it. We need it to incentivize the sales of EVs. Yeah, we didn't get too involved in that. It is, I mean, it is a great incentive and it's been shown to improve EV uptake in other areas. Well, you could, if you look at a chart of EV sales in the state of Hawaii, it was going pretty good until the incentive expired. And it's not going as well now. I don't think you know more. Oh, don't know more. I could look it up. Anything else in this session? Those are the two that we're mainly focused on. Yeah. There was another bill that we initially submitted or were working on that was in EVSC ratio. So the infrastructure right now, there's a bill that says that one stall, one stall, if a parking lot has at least 100, one stall has to have an EV Charter. So if it has a thousand, it's only has to have one stall. That's not likely. So we had created a bill that had ratios tied into it and would increase that. But it kind of morphed along the process and it just changed. It just kept getting altered and it's not really the same bill anymore. So that didn't pass either. And I'm here really looking at that. Next year. We'll see. Yeah. But yeah, so we're looking forward now. Now that sessions over being able to focus on transportation programs, education programs and, and working with, you know, candidates and then doing, potentially doing a legislative briefing before next session. Just, it seems like these EV bills end up in front of legislators and there may not even be a general knowledge around EVs where it's hard to understand what's good policy and what isn't around electric vehicles. If someone isn't very comfortable with electric vehicles in the first place. And the same thing goes for other methods of clean transportation. So we're looking at doing a clean transportation briefing. Prior to the next legislative session. And I come down to that. Absolutely. Is it going to be a ride and drive? We can. Yeah. We can combine it and make it a ride and drive event. We have a ride and drive coming up too, actually. There's an electric vehicle ride and drive event coming up on May 19th and Saturday and we'll have. What is that? Yeah. So our ride and drive events, we invite a number of dealerships to bring various electric vehicle models and plug in hybrid models. And then it's open to the public and you can, you can take parts out for free test drives. Just it's, it's nice because you don't have to go to every single dealership to try all the different models, bring them all to one place and you can just get in one after the other and really compare them in a direct way. And we're partnering up with Revolution on that. Are they getting involved in such things? Yeah. Well, so the best way to charge your electric vehicles through your house, rooftop solar. Sure. Sure. Sure. So yeah, we're working with them. It's going to be at Salt at Arkacaco on May 19th from 11 to 2. Okay. At Salt. Okay. Are there chargers down there? Yeah. There's one. I think there's one, maybe two in their parking structure. Yeah. Well, okay. I'm really impressed. I mean, so the education, before we go to our break, just one thing about you. You mentioned earlier you want to educate somebody in every dealership, but what other education? I mean, and you're going to educate the legislators. And educating the consumer through our rideshow events. So working on multiple levels. Trying to encourage them, incentivize them somehow to buy an electric vehicle. Yeah, encourage them. But we also think that there's a, encourage, but also just expose. So until someone gets an electric vehicle. Right. Exactly. It's really daunting initially. And until someone gets an electric vehicle and feels how smooth it is. And how easy it is to operate. And that there is no range anxiety problem. I mean, not anymore. Yeah. There are a couple of models that are breaching that here on the islands. That shouldn't be that much of an issue. So we can take a break now. Okay. And Maria, when we come back, you know, what do you think we get into this whole thing about what is, what is multimodal? And how is it going to unfold? And how are all these, you can address this. Yeah. How are these little pieces going to work together? All right. In Kakaako and elsewhere. Okay. Right back after this break. This is going to be really interesting. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Hi, I'm Dave Stevens. I'm the host of Cyber Underground every Friday here at 1pm on ThinkTechHawaii.com. And then every episode is uploaded to the Cyber Underground. That library of shows that you can see of mine on YouTube.com. And I hope you'll join us here every Friday. We have some topical discussions about why security matters and what could scare the absolute bejesus out of you. If you just try to watch my show all the way through. Hope to see you next time on Cyber Underground. Stay safe. Here we go. I told you we come back. We came back. This is Lauren Raichel, Maria Tommi. We're going to talk about multimodal. What is, versus loss, multimodal. What have we got on the table? How many multis are in multimodal? Multimodal is inclusive of a lot of things. Do you want to talk about it? Yeah, you've got your pedestrians, your bicycles, your buses, your rail. If you've got your, of course, your single passenger vehicle. If you've got other types of vehicles, you know, like your tour buses and whatnot, that would also need to fit in there. Does a car share? Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, if you're talking about integrating with your airports and your harbors, that's a whole other angle. But I think we're mostly talking about ground transportation as a focus for Stitch. Yeah. And do you call it Stitch? Yeah. Okay, okay. Yeah. Just checking. So how do you, this is really a hard, it's a planning question. How do you take a city like us where we're so focused on cars and exclusion of so many other good modes and you make it multimodal? I was in Vancouver. Been there lately last summer and I was just astounded by, you know, the multimodes and the beautiful places where you could walk or ride a bike or what have you and get a boat if you wanted. But how do you change the city so to encourage people? So Vancouver did something amazing. They set these mode shift goals. So they said by this year we want to have this percentage of all of our trips done by walking and biking, this percentage done by cars, et cetera, et cetera. And then they actually reached those goals, I think two years earlier than they had planned, which is really impressive. And so I think that's a testament to setting long-term goals and then with that vision, sort of using that to guide everyone's actions. And yeah, Vancouver's awesome. Here, yeah, we are a very drive-heavy city and I think we're making strides in the development of new bike lanes. Right now they're working to get a budget item restored for a Pensacola bike lane. And like complete streets in Chinatown is great. The launch of Bike Share has totally changed the game, I think, as far as mode shift. Sort of that's successful. They've met their goal to actually change the way people operate. Yeah, I think it's been greatly successful there. Every month their numbers had, I mean I haven't looked in a couple of months, but for months their numbers just kept increasing every month. The usage was primarily residents, not tourists like a lot of people expected. And I know a lot of people, as someone who works downtown, a lot of people take these bikes to their meetings, to their lunches. They're really accessible and yeah, I think the more people ride bikes, the more comfortable they'll be on them. And it also is sort of a chicken and an egg situation with you need more bikes to get more bike lanes, but you also need more bike lanes to make people safe on bikes. So by launching this program, it's really showing the city and other players that, okay, there are a lot of bikes on the street now. And it's a responsibility to make sure that they're gonna be safe and we need to have bike lanes and pathways. What about pedestrians? I mean, you know, there were all this aspirational talk from way back when about a walkway along, you know, from Alamona Park all the way, from Waikiki all the way to downtown where you could walk and have a nice experience. That really hasn't happened. If it did happen, I think it would change where people thought about the city. We're talking about life in the city here. All these things feed into a quality of communal life. How do you do that? Kala, kala. Yeah, well, that's a conversation for a lot of players because it's the landowners, it's the property owners, it's the city and county, it's developers. And so it's hard because each segment of whatever that path would be has so many different players involved and getting them all to sit down at the table together and figure out all the moving pieces. That's where the chaos comes in. How do you attack it? What do you do? Well, so right now we are working with a group of individuals that advocate for various things. Some of them are bike advocates, some of them are environmental advocates, but they're looking to implement a self-tra-bike path. From where to where? It extends, I believe, all the way from the west side, all the way down past Waikiki. And so they've developed these plans and done a few studies on that. They're trying to attack it in chunks. It's the only way you can do it. You can't do it all at once. What's the first chunk? I don't think there's a first chunk. There's a few ideas. The first chore is to find the first chunk. Right, exactly. So they're chunking it out to find who we need to talk to to start having those conversations. It's challenging. It's a lot of resistance by property owners. It's very challenging, but it's also an amenity. And if those property owners realize that they're offering something to all of those new dwellers and those kind of minions that are being put up, it should be valued as an amenity. It's an investment. One thing that happened in Vancouver, which is instructive in this, and we would have to sort of reorient our way of reaching consensus. I like consensus sometimes, but not always. They had all these property owners along the water there in that beautiful area, and now beautiful area with the grass and the bike lanes and the walkways, so beautiful. And these guys said, we want to build condos right above that on our property, which was then industrial. And the city said, that's fine, but you have to give us and allow us to use the property Makai of your condos for these multimodal uses. And if you don't do that, it's fine. We're never going to approve your building. Have a choice. And of course, they all caved in. The permits for the buildings were approved, and so was the multimodal area. So if you do that, you can achieve it. It's not that hard, actually. You've got to have a little political chutzpah. Just a little. Just a little. Let's talk about rather car share. And let's talk about automated cars. Because they're coming. Even if they have an accident once in a while and they're testing, they're still coming. So where does that fit? Should I wait on my electric vehicle until I can do a share on an electric vehicle? I won't tell you what to do with your electric vehicle all the choices. But yeah. So automation is coming. And along with it comes a lot of changes to the transportation system and that's another challenge that the dealerships are going to have to face as well. They would be smart to get into that and become part of it instead of the other side of the street on it. They absolutely would. And what we need to do, though, is figure out how to implement them in those cars. If these automated vehicles are dropping folks off and then driving away empty, that's really it's going to increase the vehicle miles traveled and it's really unsustainable. So finding ways to be sure that these cars are used like there's actually people in these cars every time that they're driving. And I think one of the best uses for that is or best ways to implement those would be sort of the first mile, last mile situation with integrating it with public transit stations or bus stops or to areas where they can then walk or bike not using them for like full rides the way that you would, you know, that people now grab an Uber and drive across. When you have all these different modes and you have all these different stakeholders and players and all technologies all competing for a space to be the center of attraction or at least to be on the table you will have conflicts where people can't agree in fact where finding the right policy is hard to find because you have to make priorities that seem to shift all the time. And I wonder how you do that. Is there a computer program you could use? There are modeling software that is coming out to look at some of those things but yeah, I think that the businesses that are, that really get it are looking at themselves as a piece of a larger multimodal system and once they do that I think they'll be successful and so, you know, here locally we'll soon be having the holo holo card that's coming out to integrate bus rail and then it will be bike share as well all on one card and so doing things like that allows people to utilize all the different pieces when they're convenient for them. And to think multimodally? Yeah, it allows people to think at a wider scale and at a system level. That's really important conceptually. It's not a matter of convenience it's a matter of, you know, looking at your world as all these options always available. This is very important. And something like that would be really useful moving forward also when there is, when there is automated vehicles or maybe some day it'll integrate things like car share, lift and uber or whatever iteration of those exist in the future and yeah so having some sort of centralized way of looking at the whole system and what's available to you, I think that is going to be and will be really important. And one of the risks here is we over plan and when I say over plan, I mean we plan but there's so much planning going on we don't do anything you know, this happens, it happens and certainly there's a risk when you're talking with multimodal concept but I want to tell you about a trip I took and see what you think this is not an easy situation. And so you go to Melbourne. If you've been to Melbourne you know that it's fabulous on transportation because they have these trams and in the CBD of Melbourne which is 8x8 8 big blocks by 8 big blocks they have completely revitalized or totally vitalized that area by what by free trams free trams. It's all the trams and they make them go this way and that way and this way and that way and around and so if you want to get from point A to point Z in this CBD you just get on the tram it's all you got to do get on the tram, don't push a second and the value of that of course it's not so much that you save $5 it's that free makes you want to do it free is an incentive thing the notion of free is I'm saving money even if it's only pennies so what's really interesting about that is it revitalized it and what the second interesting point is that they didn't necessarily focus on electric some of those trams are running on old-fashioned fossil fuel and so you have an interesting choice here I mean we could take for example the CBD here in Honolulu we could plan this thing and plan it and plan it and by 2045 it'll really be something aspirationally and it'll be all electric just as beautiful as any planner could ever imagine or we could take existing buses make them free, put them in the CBD and revitalize everything in the CBD this is not necessarily consistent with green energy but it works we know it works so how do you reconcile those competing factors in the planning process I don't think you have to I think that what you're talking about is great to have a thriving central business district but it's not sustainable and there's a way to do both so there's a way to revitalize your central business district while not sacrificing clean energy and that's the space that we're working in is trying to work with businesses to figure out what's financially viable and also you can use this clean energy as an incentive for people to come visit it it's exciting and it's new and it should draw people to whatever that is whether it's a transportation mode or a building or a company so people are making choices based on their values and I think that in the end we don't have to sacrifice business for clean energy it must be great changing the world that's what you're doing Laura okay Maria you want to summarize or make a comment or put this all together for us sustainable transportation is more than just one particular vehicle technology it's actually encompassing the variety of modes and also thinking ahead and being creative and incorporating the cooperation of the county folks and the state folks and the private sector and the non-governmental organizations there's a lot of outreach to the folks who are making the decisions or making the sales or understand even just understanding what there is where to be selected from whether it's the vehicles or the way of getting around and so sustainable transportation coalition seems to be doing good things and thank you so much for reaching out to the public and thanks Jay for offering us this opportunity yeah it was a really interesting conversation I have a feeling we could go on much longer if we had more time there's a lot of moving pieces that means you have to come back Lauren we can do that thank you Lauren thank you Maria