>> ok. so, well, good evening. it's a real pleasure to introduce dan sperlingas our keynote speaker for this evening as we continue our discussionabout energy in the near and the long term and how to decarbonize it. and in particular, we're going to beturning our focus a little more to advances in transportation that can help usachieve a cleaner energy future. dan is the founding director of the institutefor transportation studies at uc davis and the institute is celebrating 25years of research on travel behavior, transportation systems modeling, electricvehicles, climate change and air quality.
dan has held the automotive engineering seat onthe california air resources board since 2008 and in that role, designs and oversees thestate's climate change, alternative fuels, land use, zero emission vehicleprogram and other programs. and he's also been the co-director ofthe california low carbon fuel standard and i was fortunate enough to work withhim on the national low carbon fuel study that was funded by the-- whatwas it, the energy foundation. that's right. and in june 2013, dan was therecipient of the blue planet prize from the asahi glass foundation,which is a prize described
as a nobel prize for the environmental sciences. in 2010, he received the heinz award for hisresearch on alternative transportation fuels and for his role in inducing adoption of cleaner transportation policiesin california and across the us. dan is recognized as a leading internationalexpert on transportation technology assessment, energy and environmental aspects oftransportation and transportation policy. he has testified many, many times tothe us congress, state legislators and has authored numerous, numerous publicationsand more than, you know, several books. his phd was in transportation engineeringfrom uc berkeley and, you know,
he is widely cited in leading newspapers. he's been interviewed manytimes, been on the television and just given many, many talk shows and so on. so we're really honored to have himhere this evening, and please join me in welcoming dr. dan sperling as our speaker. [ applause ] >> so, many of you would probablythink i'm a fallen academic because no real academic doesall those kinds of things. well, on my way here, i thoughti was really well prepared.
i knew what i was going to talk about, who iwas talking to, and then i realized, you know, i've never been to illinois except for chicago. and, you know, that low carbon fuel standardran into some problems with the corn farmers. they weren't real happy with some of thethings that we were saying and doing. and i-- then i started getting a little moreapprehensive, and then i was coming here with-- in an uber car and talking to thedriver and she had never heard of tesla. and i thought, maybe i havemisjudged my audience here. so let me get started. ok. how many people have heard of tesla?
all right, i'm reassured, ok. [ inaudible remark ] yeah. ok. are there any uber drivers here? there's -- i have a couple of graduate studentsof mine that drive for uber and lyft part-time. how many have an electric or plug-inhybrid car, a volt or leaf or tesla? quite a few. ok. how many hybrid cars? oh my gosh, wow, this is really--i guess i'm in a university, right? ok. all right, so i am going to talkabout the passenger transportation system.
so, we've got quite of the-- i'll try to leavea fair-- quite a bit of time in q&a but i-- and so idea with most aspects of transportation,so we're going to be talking about freight or biofuels, a favorite topic in this campus. be happy to talk about all of that. but let me get started just giving a few littlesimple observations just to set the stage here. one is transportation just gained thehonor, if you want to call it that, of being the largest sources of--source of greenhouse gases in the us, the largest sector going pastthe electricity this year. another observation is that californiajust a few days ago adopted a new law
that requires a 40% reduction ingreenhouse gases in the state by 2030, which is you know quite extraordinary. but it-- and a way of thinking about that isit probably requires about a 40% reduction in electricity and abouta 40% in transportation. so, very aggressive. and then i would add the additional observationthough that the transportation system, that's where i've done mostof my research over the years. i've always focused on transportation asit related to energy or the environment. i'll make the observation thatthere's been almost no innovation
in the transportation sectorin many, many decades. and when i say no innovation, yes, cars havebecome safer and more comfortable as artifacts, but functionally, they're virtually unchanged,four wheels, same carrying capacity, same speed. and transit you could say the samething about roads, the same thing. but what's amazing, and what i'm going totalk about today, is that change is starting to happen in the transportation sector. it's kind of like what we heard at lunchtime that the information technology revolutionis making a lot of new things possible. well, it made a lot of thingspossible in a lot of sectors
but not transportation until very recently. and so now, we see that transportationreally is on the cusp of massive changes. and most of them are going to be positivebut there's some that might not be. and so, that's part of whati'm going to talk about here. so, transportation, part of tounderstand the transportation sector, you have to understand its roots are incivil engineering, and building bridges, pavements and the most recent major innovation of civil engineers is theinterstate highway system, limited access network across the country.
one outcome of this focus of civil engineeringand transportation on building roads and bridges to accommodate cars is, guesswhat, we've got a lot of cars. and in fact, cars have essentially vanquishedeverything else, and for passenger travel. so now, i come from california butoriginally from upstate new york, but i've been in california manyyears, but in northern california. and i make that distinction becauseit was really southern california that was the birthplace ofcar-centric transportation, where they built the city around the car. and now of course there's a lot of, you know, inhouston, phoenix, a lot of the sun belt cities
and most of the suburban areas through theentire country are now very much car dependent. so anyway, we've ended upwith a transportation system, very car dependent and infact has become more so. so here you see data from 1980through 2012 and you see that of the-- all of the passenger travel,almost all of it is driving alone. and in fact, the amount of carpoolingactually shrunk over that time. the amount of public transportation shrunkover that time even though this was a period in which a lot of money was being put intobuilding carpool lanes in a lot of cities, putting a lot of money in thetransit, and yet here we are now
with mass transit providing only 3%of total passenger travel in the us. we talk about pass-- how transitis being a major modal option. but in fact if you look at it overall,it's only 3%, and most of that is in center cities, chicago, manhattan. and it's not just the united statesthat has become so car dependent. the rest of the world is following behind. the graph there, that's from a book i dida few years ago called "two billion cars". and what it shows there is thatthe number of vehicles increasing. and what's important about that is not somuch the numbers but the slope of that curve.
and the point of that is if we thinkwe've got problems dealing with petroleum, greenhouse gases, pollution, it's only goingto get a lot worse if we stay on this path. here is just some images up here for you to kindof-- so you can picture what i'm talking about. so that photo there of the freeways,that's a real intersection in los angeles. and the reason why it looks so outrageousis because a number of years ago, they decided they were going to build carpoollanes, hov, high occupancy vehicle lanes. and so that's on the, you know,the left side of the lanes and you can't have all those people crossingover back and forth, so they have these flyover. so you have the carpool lanes flying over.
so you can see flyovers allover the place there. billion-- just for that intersection,billions of dollars. and it's not just los angeles,not just california. down that other photo yousee there, that's brasilia, built in the 1950s, built around the car. so, just to really get that image in your head,this is how far we've gone in car dependency. now, if that person would have-- would get outof that car, they'd save money, they'd save-- use less oil, less carbon,and they'd be healthier. but just so you don't think thatthis is just an american problem.
[ laughter ] actually, an mit colleague gave that to me. yeah. all right. so, we've created a transportationsystem and i'll call it a monoculture because if transit is 3% and taxisand everything else is less than 1%, that's pretty close to what i call monoculture. just like all that corn we werehearing about this morning. and it's really-- it's an extraordinarilyexpensive and carbon intensive and resource intensive wayof providing mobility.
and if you look at it just in terms of theroad cost, in this country we're spending over $100 billion every yearon road infrastructure. we're spending, each of us-- the average costof owning and operating a car is $9000 per year. each of us is paying about $9000 ayear for each car we have when you take into account depreciation andinsurance and fuel and so on. and that adds up to over atrillion dollars per year. oil we're spending-- even with low oilprices, we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year on fuel for our vehicles. and climate change, about a third of all thegreenhouse gases come from transportation.
and the air pollution, about half of theurban air pollution is from vehicles. actually, that's not exactly right anymore. it used to be over a half and it'sbeen slowly diminishing because one of the really impressive engineeringaccomplishments of this last 50 years is that cars and trucks are almost zeroemissions now in terms of air pollutants. and so that's a tremendous successstory, environmental success story. now, to emphasize that point aboutgoing forward, southern california. so, southern california has kind of seen-- seen the sins of the past andunderstand that they have gone too far
and they have started spendinga lot of money on transit. in fact, over half of all of the transportationmoney in the los angeles area is for transit. now, the fact that only about5% of the passenger movement is by transit kind of give one pause. but they are-- they've gotten desperatein terms of what to do about it. so, looking forward, just like los angeles islooking forward, california, the united states. you know, we've heard about the paris protocols. we're all looking forward to how do wecreate a more sustainable energy system and a sustainable transportation system.
and i'm here to say that the modelers don'treally know, the policy people don't know, the scientists don't know,it's pretty wide open. and this is just some energy systems models thatwere brought together from around the country to look at different scenarios goingforward, and you can see business as usual, and then a set of others,dramatically different numbers in terms of energy use and greenhouse gases. so, my point is that we needto really do a lot of thinking. we need more understanding, moreresearch to figure out how to go forward. so, i'm going to talk about going forward here.
a good way of thinking about transportationis we can think of it as a three-legged stool. think about it in terms of the vehicle use,the mobility, the fuels and the vehicles. and we-- and, you know, just for the engineersand analysts in the audience, you know, those are the metrics you would use. and you just multiply thosetogether to get the total amount of carbon emissions or greenhouse gas emissions. and so i'm going to just quicklygo through these and then i'm going to focus on a few issues in particular. so, one of it is vehicle use.
a couple years ago, many of us weregetting quite excited because it looked like we really had turned the cornerthat vehicle use was really going down. in fact, it was going down very sharply, the-- now the main curve thereis total vmt for the us. so you can see that it peaked around2006 or so, and then it went down, and then it start-- has juststarted to go up again. and there's a lot of new storiesabout it, you know, that you know, all of that good news now is, youknow, just headed back to the old days. but in fact it's a-- that is misleadingbecause if you look at the other curve,
the vehicle miles traveled, vmts, vehicle milestraveled per capita were still way below what we were 10 years ago. so yeah, it started to go up alittle bit but it's still much lower. but this is a key issue, is vehicle use. another key issue is where the fuels come from. and that was getting a little problematic,disconcerting until recently also because it looked like we werenot decarbonizing our fuels but we were recarbonizing or carbonizing them. we were moving to higher carbon fuels,the fuel, the oil sands from canada,
the arctic oil which requires tremendousamount of energy to get it out. well, oil sands is probably pretty flat. the arctic oil, it looks like it's being pushedoff into the future maybe for a very long time. and it turns out the shale oiland shale gases really know-- is about the same as conventional oil anyway. so that part of it is not quite as bad, butwe would like to go to lower carbon fuels. the third part, the third leg of this stool, the vehicles themselves areactually a great success story. not only are they emitting less local pollution,but they're becoming much more efficient.
so the speaker this morning fromgeneral motors, even though i disagreed with his final conclusion, his observationand his story about all that gm is doing to make vehicles more efficientis exactly right. every single car company is doing that. cars, they're introducing lightweight materials,better transmission, better combustion. and in fact, every new car and light truckthat's produced not only in united states but in europe, in china, in japan, korea, in allof these countries, all of the major markets, they're becoming much more efficient,every new model that's brought out. so on average in the us, every new-- every year,
the vehicles are about 4% moreefficient than the previous year. and we have laws and regulations in placeall the way through 2025 and i'd say that it's very likely that thattrajectory will continue after that. so this is a huge success story. the challenge will be thatmaintain that but it's-- we're on the right path therewhich is the only part of that-- this that's really on the right path, interms of vehicle use we're kind of flat and fuels were not doing a veryjob moving to low carbon fuels. so how do we create transportation systemsthat are cheaper, better, more sustainable?
we want to make them lessexpensive, less resource intensive, less carbon intensive and more accessible. and that's an important point not just-- well,for the us but everywhere around the world because as we go to more cardependency, car centric cities in living, that starts to marginalize a lotof people in a lot of places. so what i'm going to talk about hereare the three transportation revolutions that are getting underway. so, here are some of the revolutionsof the past in transportation, street cars back in the late 1800, youknow, electric street cars, cars, you know,
the model t roughly around 1910, 1908. airplanes around 1930, the limitedaccess highways i told you about. and that's the last one, that'swhat it's telling you about. it's been 60 years since there's been any realmajor systems innovation in the transportation, in the passenger transportation sector. and that's pretty shocking, really. so-- and to think i spent my-- almost myentire professional career working in an area with so little innovation,but times are changing. so, we have three revolutions now on theirway, one is, the vehicle electrification.
the other is shared mobility systems,real-time uber-type systems and, i mean, much more than uber and i'll talk about that ina moment, but uber and lyft were the first step. they got their foot in the door moving as towards a more real-time sharedmobility system, and then automation. so the first revolution electrification,we see-- every car companies coming out withnew vehicles every year that are-- either pure electric, pure batteryelectric or plug-in hybrid electric. meaning like the volt that we heard about wherethey have an electric motor and a big battery as well as a combustion enginethat runs in gasoline.
so these are some of the cars that havethis are more prominent ones including that little fuel cell car. and just to show that they're real, this is thefuel station near me, five hydrogen cars lined up to be fueled minus one of them. california is taking the lead in that but the hydrogen fuel cell carswill be spreading pretty quickly. there's a lot-- germany and california and japan are the three leadingplaces for hydrogen fuel cell cars. toyota, hyundai, mercedes, daimler and hondaare probably the leading companies developing it
and starting to market it. so just to let you know i'mwalking the talk here. so there you see me with myhydrogen car in the left. there's my wife with her tesla, a company car. how is that for a good deal, right? talk to your employers. did i point out she's the owner of the company? it was an easy, you know, sell them. and there is my bicycle,all zero emission vehicles.
so i just submitted-- i've insertedthis graph just a couple hours ago after i heard the speaker from general motorssaying that battery cost were not improving and he was just playing wrong on that. it's really-- it's been really exceptionalhow fast the battery costs have come down in the last 10 years. so this is the study-- a study that was done, it's probably the most respectedstudy on to overall battery cost. and what you can see there is they've decreased from $1300 per kilowatt hour10 years ago to $400 last year.
and some of the new-- some companies are nowsupplying batteries that just about $200. so-- i mean, that's a pretty sharpdrop in batteries that we're seeing and the expectation is they'll keep coming down. obviously nowhere near zero but it's expectedthey'll get down to about 150 or so, you know, in five, six, seven, eight years. so that's promising and real. and so if you put it alltogether, this is kind of the-- a simple characterization of what'shappening with our light duty vehicles, our cars, suvs, pickup trucks, vans.
icb's internal combustion enginevehicles just-- are gasoline cars. they've been improving-- theyare improving about 4% per year. they-- the requirements, the nationalrequirements and california requirements are for them to keep on that trajectory until 2025. i am glossing over a lot of littlenuances here, and so if you want to test me out on them, i'll be up for it. but basically, it's about 4% per year. and then the expectation is-- so this isexpected that through 2025 the engineers and the car companies are doingsuch a great job far better
than anyone expected includingthemselves in terms of making those vehicles more energyefficient that they barely see any need to shift towards electricvehicle or fuel cell vehicles. so most of the compliance withthat regulatory requirement through 2025 will be mostly gasoline cars and now because of vw it won't given bediesel it'll really will be gasoline cars. but at some point there's goingto be a transition to electric and plug-in hybrid and fuel cell cars. and it's very likely that this isgoing to be a fairly smooth transition.
so you see car companies bringingout all of these electric vehicles. they're not really pushing them reallyaggressively, you know, they're-- i wouldn't call them experiments butthey're not exactly full blown commitments to them because they still do cost more. those battery cost still are high. they are coming done and they knowthey're going to be less in the future. so we see this future where it's very plausible that we'll see this 4% per yearimprovement up till 2050 or more. in california-- so california, atleast in the us is leading the way.
it has a requirement that about 15% ofthe vehicle sold by 2025 have to be these, what we call zero mission vehicles actuallyplug-in hybrids, battery base and fuel cells. and its not just california and even-- north-- the us even in fact china now is the largestproducer of electric vehicles and actually so that's the green color thereand they've come on very strong-- that was last year in their forecastto double their sales this year. and most of the largest manufacturers ofelectric vehicles in the world now are in china. so we used to hear that, you know, whateverwe do we can't do energy efficiency, we can't do alternative fuels, we can't dogreenhouse gas requirements because it's going
to disadvantage us relative to the chinese. well, i think we're starting to see adifferent story that the chinese are starting to make these investment more than us. and just kind of the electric vehiclestory is still an uncertain one, how fast it's going to unfold and how. but one of the interesting thingsis tesla announced this model-- its model three a few months ago and theysaid you can put a thousand dollars down and to make a deposit forthis car and it's, you know, and then you can get it in two or three years.
and amazingly 375,000 people sent athousand dollars deposit for this car. i mean, that's 375 million dollarsthey gave to elon musk interest free. that's where-- how my wife puts it. she's says, i get it. elon needs the money. i know it's an interest free loanbut he needs it, so i'm over it. i don't. and-- but it does suggest that, youknow, there is seems to be a lot of interest. and general motors is coming out withits car that's equivalent this december. so that'll be a good questionto see how well it sells.
revolution number two, shared mobility. this to me is really exciting because thisis bringing the information technologies to transportation finally. and uber and lyft, uber and lyft they'reonly four years old or at least in terms of providing consumer regular consumermobility services, only four years. and uber by the way is now valuedat $60 billion, more than almost all of the car company, the regular car companies. and what they do is-- so how manyhave people have used uber of lyft? all right, so you know what it is.
ok. so, you know, by the way i usedit, you know, i had trouble getting into the university here fromcalifornia the connections weren't good. a flew in the indianapolis, took uber here,it was $110, you know from indianapolis and, you know, for a two hour ride ididn't have drive i got chef ford. so that's the good and the bad actually. the good is they're really introducinglow cost, easy transportation mobility. the bad news is those driversare not making very much money and that's kind of a bigger issue here. you know, i can get into itin the q&a if you want to.
but it is this bigger about what's happeningwith our country as, you know, we have the have and have not's and the equity issues about our society is evolvingin terms of income and so on. but in any case, so uberis part of that narrative but meanwhile it is revolutionizein transportation. uber, i call uber a glorified taxi. so it's not really revolutionary in thatsense because it is just a match better taxi. but what it does is now it's gettingpeople accustomed to the idea of using it and now they are moving towards what they calluberpool, lyft calls it lyf line and this is
where you have multiple riders in the vehicle. and why i'm so excited about that is becausethis is a case where the public interest seems to be aligning with the business model. the uber and lyft are looking at it, thatthey think people are so price elastic in their demand, that ifthey can just bring the price down a little bit they'llgenerate a lot more ridership and therefore a lot morerevenue and a lot more profit. so they're desperate to getthat price point down. so if they can get multiple riders inthe same car, they can reduce the price.
so if you do uberpool that $115 ride might havebeen half of that if it was a uberpool ride. and so now we're opening up a future wherewe really have something that is a compliment or even a replacement for conventional transit. conventional transit really only works wellin certain circumstances where you have a lot of population density and you havea dense corridor or too dense nodes, it doesn't work very well anywhere else. it's really expensive to providetransit and other kinds of setting. so here's a case where we can fill in the gaps, we can compliment it, connectup first last mile.
it's a lot of opportunities,there's a lot of companies coming into existence called sometimesmicrotransit companies that have vans, a little bigger than uber car. so there's a whole world opening up here. and-- so it's actually i put in somefreight examples too, because it's happening on the freight side as wellbut especially in the car side. so we have a situation where removing from acar dependent, car centric transportation system to one where there's a lot more choice. so you have car sharing where you can get acar just for certain trips or certain purposes,
you have that uber and lyft type services. as they expand you can have the microtransit. actually i did this slidefor my book many years ago. so this slide is 10 years old now. and so what i had call smart para-transitwe would now call microtransit. and we're creating choice. what's more american than choice, right? and it's great for the travelers because nowyou can not be dependent on that one car, you can have multiple-- you can have accessto multiple vehicles, through car sharing,
it's much more comfortable and easierto use these services many times. my wife and i sometimes if we're going out todinner, we're going to have a bottle of wine and celebrate then let's just takeuber and not worry about, you know, driving, you know, drinking and driving. and so we use it just forthat purpose for instance. so kind of my rough assessment, i don't-- haven't done a model to beable to quantify this yet. but i'm thinking probably halfof our travel could be replaced by these new mobility services.
because there's all kindsof reasons people use it. the example i just gave actually the peakridership on uber and lyft is on friday and saturday nights when peopleare going out partying and a lot of young people going out clubbing and so on. and that's where they actuallyhave the most ridership. and for the economist in the crowd you deal-- you should love them because they'veintroduced marginal cost pricing. they now charge like friday and saturdaynights they bump their prices up 50 or 100% or 200% to try to balancethe supply and the demand,
just what we've all beenpreaching for all these years. all right, third revolution is the automation. and this is going to become moreand more controversial i think. there's a lot of people invested in it. there's a lot of potential goodbut there's ways it could play out that are not in the public interest. so here's an analysis thatwas done and it show-- it breaks it down in terms of differentvariables and components of the use of the vehicles in different activity.
and what you see is on the left side that'sreducing greenhouse gases and energy use. but on the right side is increasing it. so think about it, if there's a car availablethat drives itself, you know, that 60 or 80 or 100 mile commute doesn'tsound so bad anymore doesn't? you just sit there, you do your work,you can text legally and safely, you can sleep, read an ebook, watch a movie. so it starts becoming very attractive. you know, you can even picture it. it can be a hotel room for you.
it can be an office. all of a sudden it becomes much easierand much more comfortable and desirable to be in your car even more than now. so it's pretty easy to imagine a scenariowhere there's actually a lot more vehicle use. well, there's a lot of questionhow this is going to play out. you know, don't believe the media. the media is gets all excited about automationit's something new and every new and now. and, you know, a lot of theindustry people feed into it and say, we're going to have an automatedcar in two years.
tesla says i have it already. mercedes says i've got it already. well, those are not fully automated carsbecause i've driven in those automated cars and yes it works most of the time of thefreeways but it doesn't observe traffic signals, doesn't detect traffic signalsor traffic signs and it-- so it works great, our pedestriansfor that matter. it works great on freeways-- well it workspretty on freeways but it does not work on local streets and they've got a long, long ways to go where theyare going to really be safe.
and that's even before you get intodealing with regulators, safety regulators, insurance companies and localgovernments and so on. so there is-- i predict it's going tobe awhile before you can actually go out and buy a fully driverless car, meaning one thatyou don't have to have a driver's license for or don't have to sit in the driver seat. i think it's going to be awhile. but there are going-- thereare almost every car is going to be partially automated in going forward. so the question is, are these threerevolutions in the public interest?
and i think as i told you the vehicleelectrification unequivocally yes, almost any case and any situation, even chinawhere they have mostly coal for electricity. there's-- for mobility sharingi'd say mostly yes as long as they move beyond the glorified taxi mode. and the automation, it could be. the ideal will be if we can merge them alltogether, so that we have an automated car that actually will transport multiple people orpick people up and take them where they're going and drop them off and it's electrified. now we're talking about asustainable transportation system.
so, one of the big, big questionsgoing forward though is as consumers. because at the end of the day someoneis going to buy these vehicles, someone is going to make these choicesabout bicycling or using shared mobility. and the reality is we don't putnearly-- i mean in university, right? we don't put nearly enough research intounderstanding behavior because at the end of the day it's going to playa huge role and we don't-- i mean the forecast if you go into any of these big models these energy systemsmodels they have almost no behavior built into them and very little on innovation.
and so that's why you get graphsthat go often to the future and all kinds of different directions. so this is some of the older folks in thecrowd will appreciate this little graphic here, that's pogo from the 1970s said, "wehave meet the enemy and he is us." and that's kind of pejorativebut that makes the point. and the last big point i want to do isleadership because we need leadership to make sure that this revolutions thatthese investments, that innovation processes, that behavior moves in a directionthat's in public interest. so the vehicle revolution--so i become a policy wonk,
so i said i'm a fallen academic iguess that's another definition of it. and i've gotten very much involvedand i look at these things and policy and all these things we're talkingabout makes a huge, huge difference and we really need to get policy right. and we need to bring science to the policyprocess and we're doing a very poor job of that. in washington, in springfield, in sacramentoand we need to do a much better job. so we got the vehicle revolutionthe new mobility issues, automation. and part of this is kind of a plea of sortsespecially in this university audience. those of us in academia, some of us needto put more effort into crossing that chasm
between the research world, theuniversity world, and the government world, and the policy world, because i've been workingnow part time on a government side in sacramento and i'm just stunned at howlittle of the research that we do in universities actually makes its way intopolicy and decision making in government. and that's irresponsible. it's, you know, it's a response for allof us and the blame goes to everyone. it's on the government sideand the university side, different cultures, different reward systems. but this is just a plea that, you know,those of us especially that we, you know,
you get into your 40s and 50s and you be abrilliant researcher, publish lots of stuff. got your tenure, maybe now it's time to startthinking about how to use that expertise, you know, in bringing it to the policy world. not everyone but more of us. thank you very much and i'll leave you withthat little thought from albert einstein. >> so do we have time for questions? >> thank you for that presentation. can you give us a little bit of your perceptionof the ride sharing, car sharing enterprise like zipcar and car2go and where are they going?
are they doing better orare they sort of flat lined. >> the car sharing, zipcar isthe-- probably the largest. car2go is from mercedes and that's actually-- and it's a good innovationit's a one way car sharing. so if you do it from zipcar at leastuntil now you get the car you have to-- you go somewhere you have to bring it back. now there's new services whereyou can-- it's a one way service. you take it somewhere you drop it off andyou can leave it there and you picked it up or it go somewhere else in some other way.
it's-- they're in continuing to expand. i think the problem we have is that the car-- the car is so good in terms of freedomflexibility convenience that it gives us that no one alternative can compete against it. transit can't compete except insome very special circumstances. car sharing can't compete-- andthen if you already have a car or multiple cars why would you do it? so it only makes sense if you get ridof a car or get rid of all your cars and start thinking about that set of choices.
ok, remember i told you abouthow important choice is. so if you have car sharing and you have uber andlyft and other kinds of microtransit services and the conventional transit so-- aswell as maybe one car that you keep. now you've got a whole set of optionsthat are actually a better option. you can-- if i was king and i could say, ok i'mgoing to control the set of options available. i bet for almost everyone, i couldprovide transportation that's as good as what you have now if not better at lesscost by providing this set of mobility services because right now you'repaying that $9000 a year. you give me $9000, if all of you gave me$9000, i could create a transportation system
that would be great for you,you know, better in most ways. so that's kind of the challenge we havehere, is that we're kind of waiting for all of these multiple services to evolve. and that's why uber and lyft and thesemicrotransit i think are really the key to it, because they have to become as-- moreavailable so that you do feel and reliable. you know, when-- i actually i flew inindianapolis and i was nervous, you know, what if there's, you know, what if uber decidesnot operate there are no cars are available or they have some of that marginalcost pricing and they're going, you know, charge me double or triple.
so i have to feel comfortablethat these services are available. and then, then i'll be willingto give up a car or two. >> so it's a great talk andthank you very much for that. so it's interesting thingabout this three revolutions. on the vehicle electrification i justwonder if you have any comments on research by aaron mancer and others who have lookedthat the pollution reduction benefits of an electric car versus ice in differentparts of the country and they basically argue that except in california, maybe innew england you have lower pollution and lower greenhouse gas emissions withinternal combustion engines given the state
of electricity today, clearly that can change. that's one question. and then on the shared mobility-- >> wouldn't i just answer that andthen i'll let you do the next one. you know, a good researcheris one that works with data. so, an economist in particular they loveto get some data set they can crunch. so they're going to go and look at theelectric vehicles that are on the road now. and they're going to look at thegrid system on there that exist now. and yes, you're going to come upwith lots of stories and situations
where electric vehicles are notso compelling or attractive. you can go to china and it'll be even more. the whole-- everything we're doinghere is going towards the future. so the new electric cars are farmore efficient than the old ones. the-- you know, like when they those analysis,they have climate control systems in those cars that are really inefficient the newones are getting much more efficient. the grid is getting decarbonized. and so-- so yes it's goodanalysis but it's not-- >> i know the grid has changed much, becausewe already have the national gas revolution
but i take your point that lookingforward we should seek changes. >> ok. ok, number two. >> on the shared mobility, if it simplyleads we can have fewer cars on the road but if it simply leads to more vehicle milestraveled overall, is that a plus or a minus? it's a plus certainly for consumers but environmental i justwould love a comment on that. and then where do walkable communities come intoplay in terms of thinking about transportation in urban design and building centers, cities and towns where peoplecould walk, do shops and things.
is that going to be an important phenomenon? >> yeah. ok, so the lastone, so walkable communities. we've turn the corner with our cities in thiscountry, you know, for a long and well for well into the '60s, the cities were decliningand there was problems with crime and the urban renewal projectswere as often misguided. but in the last 20, 30 years,most of the cities are-- have been on an upward swing in terms of becoming more livable placesand people are moving back. and it creates an opportunity, so yes.
so a walkable-- and so i moved justactually a few years ago actually to davis, i used to commute for many, many years. and i was kind of skeptical myself. yeah, and all my colleagues talkingabout it was walkable community stuff and it's just livable community,yeah, yeah, yeah. but there really is something to itbecause it is that idea of community. you're part of the community, you walk,you buy and you feel more engaged. i think human being like that. so, there is something beyondjust things that we can quantify.
and then of course, if we are walkingand biking, we are reducing the vmt and we're reducing the carbon footprintand it's probably good for elderly people because they have more access in a lotof cases, so i think it's mostly good. your second-- what was your second question? yeah. in the abstract, morevmt is good because it show-- it means people are gettingmore access and so on. but, as i was trying to illustrate with that suv with walking a dog, i thinkwe've gone away too far. and if we truly price transportation, we wouldsee a lot more travel if we priced it correctly.
we're probably not going to do that sowe do it through other second best means. and, you know, just-- it's kindof the american thing, you know, cars are right and driving isn't right. but i think people have lost track of what'sreally important to them, some people. i don't want to be like hillary clintonmake these generalizations that [laughs]. >> i had a technical questionon your hydrogen car, what's the pressure in the tank on that vehicle? >> so, the-- it's twice what the cngthanks are, so it's 7000 or 10,000 psi. so, it's high pressure.
>> what's the refill time? >> and then refill time is aboutfive-- four to five minutes, so it's. you know, we used to talk about safetyconcerns and these high pressure thanks. but, no one seems worried anymore. you know, i've been around long enough thati remember, you know, all those concerns, but toyota does not sell a car ifthey have worries about liability. and this fuel stations are all self-serve,they don't impose any restrictions. i thought they would impose a restrictionthat you park it and they would tell you not to park it in a well-insulatedplace because then the hydrogen--
if there's hydrogen leakage it couldbelly built up, but they don't seem to think there could be anyhydrogen leakage, so it seems good. yeah? >> ok. very nice talk dan, thanks. i appreciated your slide aboutunderstanding consumer choice, because obviously that's a research areaof my own when related to transportation. you mentioned in this slide down below, you mentioned james salliswork on rational and attention. you mentioned loss aversion by davidgreene, both behavioral biases.
what's your thinking based on what'sout there now about how consumer choice, behavioral biases and whatthat means for policy? >> what it means for policyis that we need intervention. i mean, it sounds like, i mean itsounds really paternalistic, right. but if you look at vehicle standards, so we usewhat the gentlemen from general motors said, we do know that in observing behavior thatit is true that people want to return in two or three years for any extra cost they bearin turn-- for improving the efficiency. in other words, if you're going to-- likehe said, if you spend a thousand dollars to make the vehicle more efficient, you wantto make that money back in two to three years
through refuel savings, gasoline savings. and that seems, you know,that has been the case. from a societal perspective,it makes no sense at all even from that person's perspective,it probably doesn't make it. you know, they can irrationalize at that. well, maybe i'm going to sell thecar in two years and i want to-- i worry about the resellvalue and things like that. but over all, it's reallynot in the public interest. and in fact, the vehicle standards have beenadopted the so-called 54 miles per gallon
in 2025. the estimates are that it's--it'll cost about $1100 to make that vehicle more energy efficientto meet that 54 mpg standard. but they're going to save many,many thousands of dollars in fuel. and so, they come-- society comes out way ahead,but the individual consumers come out way ahead. so, what do we do about that? and so, it does suggest that settingproof-- ok, i'm a policy wonk these days. when i look at policy, the best policy ofall things equal is a market-based policy that changes market signals so thatpeople understand the full cost
of what they're buying and using. we often, for many, many reasons, that's notpossible politically or even technically. so then, we go next best, ourperformance-based standards. and that's what these cafã© standards in real gasstandards are their performance-based standards. every car company has to meet a certainmiles per gallon for their vehicles. and on top of that, they're actuallyallowed to buy and sell credits. so, if they beat the standard, theycan sell credits to another company. so they actually do impart,you know, a carbon price. it's not really strong, butif fairly good carbon price.
so that's where i end up with policy is that,you know, you start with the best and then you-- in the us, at least you quickly go to thesesecond best performance based standard switch-- and then you throw in some credit trading. and you've got something that's, you know,second best but still pretty efficient from an economist perspectiveand very effective. and consumer tax payers or voters loveit because it's all hidden away from them so they think it's great, they thinkit just affects the car companies, so we can get it done. [ inaudible question ]
i would point out though by theway, we have automated cars now. that's what uber and lyft are, it justhappens to be a human robot driving. you know, for an academic,i really spread broadly. i do a lot of stuff try tosolve a lot of problems, but that one's beyond-- that'sabove my pay grade. but it is. it's-- it is this, you know, and that'swhat i was saying about what's disconcerting about this, you know, uberand lyft type services, they're part time, they're not paid very well.
on the other hand, it's partof a bigger problem. and then if you do-- and then if they don'teven have those jobs, you know, it's even worst. so, what do i know? >> you haven't really touched on how to lowerthe carbon and freight and long distance travel like aviation and for that matter, marine. how do you see doing thatbecause that's still a-- if we eliminate all the light dutycarbon, there's still a big lump left. >> i'm glad-- i'm glad you ask that becausei think that's where the biofuels go. we don't need-- and i didn'tsay this explicitly.
we don't need biofuels for lightduty vehicles for suvs, cars. we've got great solutions for it, thebattery electrics, the plug-in hybrids, a fuel cell electrics from every perspective. but we don't tell a good solution forlong haul trucking or-- nor aviation. and that's where we're going to need the bio. we need a high density liquid, ideally ahigh density liquid energy dense liquid for long haul trucks. we could, on a long haul trucks, we could usefuel cells with hydrogen either high pressure or some other improved storage, techniques.
i think it could work ok butit's not really attractive. so i think that's where weneed the biofuels to be going. >> now before the second worldwar there's a lot of work on electrification of railparticularly in europe. now we have-- since dieselization peoplereally haven't addressed electrification. do you think electrificationof rail will come back? >> i have a phd student doing hisdissertation on exactly that and it's costly. so if you have a dense corridor,rail corridor where a lot of trains, then you can amortize all the extra cost, youknow, for the cut in area and everything else.
but when you go beyond thatit get's pretty expensive. so, you know, maybe we're willing to bearit, you know, if we start pricing it right, you know, maybe we should do that. the hydrogen and the fuel cell, if you get zerocarbon hydrogen and a fuel cell is a possibility for rail also or just low carbonelectricity like you are suggesting. so it's only about i believeabout 2% of our passenger energy or our transportation energy is railroads. so it's not a big piece of it, but important. >> so dan, let me ask you-- i mean, iguess this question about, you know,
why you see biofuels is not being thesolution for light duty and electrification as being the way to go and what-- you know,despite the policies we've had the rfs which is to promote biofuels has beenuptake has been so slow. i guess with electrification wereally don't have any major policy to have greater electrificationexcept the technology push that might be taking place for other reasons. so, how do you see this moving, you know,faster in the electric vehicles based than we've done in the biofuel spaces? >> so i think that the vehicles, the cafe
and greenhouse gas standardsare going to be effective. we'll accomplish it. i think they're going to be the binding, theyare going to be binding on the car companies and i think the-- they're investing in itnow because they know they have to make that transition to electrified vehicles. in california and nine other states, we have azero emission vehicle mandate which require-- i put one slide up there that theyhave to produce a certain number of electric vehicles in the next 10 years. but the role of that is really just
to accelerate the commercializationprocess so that we don't get to 2025. and so in the words of a carcompany executive he said i get it. he said, we don't have a zero emissionvehicle mandate we're going to get to 2025 and we're going to say, "oh gosh we can-- you know we've done everything we can witha combustion engine, light weight materials, we need time now to figure outhow to use the electric vehicles." so the role of this have mandate is tosmooth that transition to force the companies to keep them from procrastinating,is a good way put it that they'll make those investmentsearlier than they would otherwise.
but those vehicles standard, ifwe keep going at 4% per year. i mean even if we don't goelectric, in theory, who cares? if they could make those gasoline cars4% better every year good enough for me. now in practice i don't believethat will be possible, but-- so i think that's the one place where weactually have durable policy framework in place. and in this case the car industryis largely bought into it. and they're making the investments. so this is a case where that pathforward looks very plausible. the policy people in the industry aremore or less aligned going forward.
unlike-- ok how you been say it, unlike onthe biofuels side, ok let me-- we have a few-- let me give one minute on biofuels since iknow so many of you are interested in it. to me the problem with biofuels isthat we've not move to advance biofuels because the investment haven'tbeen made not in the r&d, nor in the early demonstration pilot projects. you know, because there's-- every one of thosecellulose projects has run into all kinds of start up and scale up problems. and almost all of them have gone bankrupt. and the problem is that not enough resourcesare being put into it and the only industry
that has the resources and theexpertise is the oil industry. and they need to invest in biofuels ifwe're going to see advance biofuels succeed. and until that happens it'sgoing to flounder i think and the renewable fuel standardthe way it's structured, is it does not require theoil companies to do anything. all it tells them is that they have to buyit if it's available, the advance biofuels. and so they have no incentive to invest. the one difference is california with a lowcarbon fuel standard which does require them to invest, does require thema hard performance standard.
and that's why it's especially controversial. any oil company people here? >> let me ask you, do you seethe oil industry investing to meet the low carbon fuelstandard in california? >> not yet-- >> for that matter, british columbia? >> well, you know, they sued. they got-- and so they got itheld up at a very low percentage, it was flat line for a couple of years.
so now it just, it's going tostart in another year it's going to be going up in a really steep rate. and they back loaded it. they, me, i confess i was part of it. but it is hard to know. i mean some of the oil-- i think eventuallythe oil industry will embrace biofuels. it make sense, because otherwise they're goingout of business as oil consumption slowly, it's going to be very slow butcertainly declines overtime. what are they going to do?
and biofuels, hydrogen are the mostobvious fuels to be investing in. so we'll see. >> ok. let me ask you about your hydrogen. what's the source ultimately of thehydrogen that you put in your 10,000 psi tank and what's the efficiencyon creating that hydrogen? >> so in-- there's a law incalifornia that one-third of the hydrogen must be renewable hydrogen. some of it is made out of biogas whichis essentially close to zero carbon. most of the rest of it is made from natural gas.
so the carbon life cycle, it'sabout the last analysis i saw it's about half the carbon footprint ofa comparable car, you know, grams, you know, to equivalent per megajoule. but the real key to it is goingtowards renewable hydrogen. and that's going to take awhile. and a lot more research and alot more development is needed to bring down the cost of hydrogen. right now most of it is made from eithernatural gas or from the refineries where-- because refineries made huge amounts ofhydrogen they just pipe it out of there.
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