Two down, one to go

We left China yesterday, bound for Bangkok. Overall, this has been one of our most interesting and rewarding trips. This was the first time I’ve gone as a faculty member and clearly the first time I have ever brought students along. It is also the first time I’ve had two kids along (no I’m not referring to the students). It has had its share of challenges and adventures. This trip was possibly busier than any other trip to China. This time I spent more time managing and planning projects than actually collecting data (like on my dissertation research trips. We were (are) working on five projects in two countries, coordinating with three of my students, several Chinese faculty and students and several Vietnamese researchers. Here is a list of the projects that we collected data for and are currently working on.

1) E-Bike Use in China: Patterns, Dynamics, Determinants, and Environmental Impacts (Luke Jones, along with Xiong Jian (Kunming University of Science and Technology))-Partial Funder: UT

2) E-Scooters in Vietnam: Factors Influencing Market Potential and Improvements to Local Air Quality (Luke Jones, along with Nguyen Quang and Vu Tuan (Hanoi University of Transport and Communications))-Partial Funder: Swiss Vietnam Clean Air Partnership

3) Lead Acid Battery Take-Back Policy Development and the BEST Eco-Label in Vietnam (Luke Jones and Perry Gottesfeld(OK International), along with Vietnam EPA)-Partial Funder: NCIIA

4) Illegal Pedestrian Crossing Behavior and Countermeasures (Elliott Moore, along with Xiong Jian (KMUST))-Partial Funder: UT

5) Intersection Design to Reduce Conflict and Improve Capacity (Terrance Hill, along with Xiong Jian (KMUST))-Partial Funder: National Science Foundation

Luke and Elliott left early in the week to get some R&R on the beach in Thailand. Unfortunately, they left early and my other student, Terrance, didn’t overlap with them much. He seems like he will do fine on his own though. My family and I came to Thailand yesterday and this morning I met with faculty at King Mongkut University of Technology Thonburi about renewing a MoU between our Universities that has recently expired. The meeting was very promising and the all of our research interests are aligned. I think that this could be a very promising relationship. Tonight we are going to Khao Lak to take a much needed long weekend on the beach. It should be quite nice before the twenty something hour plane ride back to Knoxville. The pictures are of our beast of an SUV and the one day all of my students were in town the same day, along with Professors He Min and Xiong Jian, and students Xie Chunrong and Ren Zhong.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

I am on a whirlwind trip to Shanghai. I’ve been promising various people in the Shanghai area that I would come for a visit and I realized that I was running out of time quick. I flew into Shanghai this morning and met with the director of the Clean Air Initiative for lunch. CAI is the benefactor of some of the e-bike work that I’ve been doing lately and it seems that they would like me to do some more in Southeast Asia. This is a nice fit with the Vietnam work that we started last week. The survey in Hanoi should go on this week and Luke and I have been working real hard to get the instrument in order. I sent it off at 2:00 am and then set the alarm for 5:45, to get to my 8:00am flight to Shanghai. OK, back to Shanghai. I met with several faculty members from the Transportation Engineering College at Tongji University. I’ve worked with a faculty member in the planning department on my dissertation, but never with the Transportation Engineering department (which split from Civil Engineering in 2000). Overall, we had a good meeting and I was able to present some of my work to them. This meeting was fruitful and will hopefully lead to future collaboration. I hope this will help build UT’s existing collaboration with Tongji University. Finally, I rushed off to the Shanghai train station to catch the train to Jinhua City, the location of Luyuan Electric Vehicle Company. I will get there by midnight I hope. I am meeting with the president of this company tomorrow morning. I’ve visited several e-bike makers over the last few years and Luyuan is by far the most forward thinking that I’ve encountered. After lunch I am back on the train to (hopefully) make the connection to the airport and get back to Kunming by the weekend. We booked our tickets to Bangkok. I will meet with some faculty at the King Mongkut University of Technology Thonburi to see about renewing a linkage agreement that Arun Chatterjee established, but is unable to continue due to his retirement. After that meeting, a couple of much needed beach days to relax before we get to hectic life in the USA. As an aside, I met an interesting fellow today. He is (was) a member of the infamous religion/cult (depending on where you stand) that is prohibited in China. He was discovered by authorities and he told me about his two years spent in the “re-education unit”. It didn’t sound like much fun.

Father's Day(s) in Kunming

I returned from Hanoi friday, buy the skin of my teeth. We arrived to the airport 25 minutes before our flight departed, but made it. Good thing too. Julie's dad had a few meeting re-shuffled and was able to come down to visit us on Saturday, en route to Jakarta. We spent the day with a bunch of activities. Luckily the day before an expat friend lent us his SUV (don't judge me treehugger friends). Happily our fourth set of wheels since we've been here. We used it to go up to the Golden Temple in the morning, then some good Uygur noodles for lunch, off to the countryside for in the afternoon, and finally to the Dai restaurant for some exotic food for dinner (fried grubs and bees). The kids chowed them, even after we told them what they were eating. Julie's dad was off Sunday morning at 6am; we had a great day.


On the true father's day, Sunday, we went up to Shi Lin or the Stone Forest with Luke and Elliott. This is the much anticipated tourist attraction of most Kunming visitors and most of our friends have promised that it would be a bit of a let-down. We went and loved it. It is a geological wonder. Giant stone pinnacles jutting out of the countryside. It had it's fair share of Chinese tourist junk, but the interior of the park was very isolated from the gift shops and annoying people selling who knows what. You could certainly get lost in the park. It had it's share of steep drops for the kids so we had to watch out for them and it was slick and rainy most of the time. Really much cooler than the reputation it had from my friends and lonely planet. It was a really great father's day. Even better, the kids did really well.

Meetings and What-not

I've been quite busy here in Hanoi. Luke, Perry and I have been working hard and meeting a lot of policy makers from VEPA, in addition to other NGO's etc. It has been a lot of fun, but also very exhausting. The first day was spent participating in a workshop on eco-labeling, sponsored by OK International. It went quite well I thought. There were quite a few stakeholders in the room so it was good exposure for the battery eco-labeling project we've been working on. We had a different meeting today with some influential folks in the Vietnam EPA to determine a strategy and policy on lead battery recycling. It went better than the previous day's workshop because it was less formal and more interactive. A lot of Q&A going both directions. It is exciting and humbling working helping VEPA develop a lead battery policy. We'll see if anything comes out of it.

Hanoi is quite nice. The culture and food is great. The people (who are not selling me something) are quite friendly. I saw the Hanoi Hilton yesterday and I had a chance to talk with my Vietnamese academic partner's father who was a anti-aircraft gunner in the Vietnam war. I didn't sense any hard feelings. I asked my partner if there were any lingering negative sentiments and he said that most Vietnamese from that generation recognize that it was a war between political groups, not individuals. Definitely interesting being here.

I still feel like I'm getting ripped off around every corner and the Vietnamese are relentless when it comes to overcharging foreigners. I got my first barber style shave today (although is was a seat on the sidewalk). I forgot my razor and tried to use the cheap disposable with warm water. That was far too painful. Everyone around me getting shaves made sure they didn't show me what they paid. I'm sure I paid at least double. One really good thing here is the coffee. It is about as thick as maple syrup and, with enough cream and sugar, tastes and feels like Hershey's chocolate syrup. Excellent I might say. We went to a coffee shop last night and I was wondering why there were about 10 very attractive women hanging out there (while there were no men to speak of). We found out real quick that these women were working girls. Really quite sad. When the sun goes down the illicit behavior comes out.

Research in Vietnam

Today I arrived in Hanoi to work on two projects. The first is related to environmentally friendly lead battery manufacturing and recycling. This work is working to aid the Vietnam EPA develop a lead battery recycling policy as well as introduce a lead acid battery "eco-label". The main partner in this is OK International, who developed the BEST Certification system (www.okinternational.org). This work is funded by NCIIA and Luke is working down here with me on this project. We will have a workshop on June 10th and 11th.

The second project is related to electric scooter market potential in Vietnam. We are hoping to conduct a stated preference experiment among future motorcycle purchasers, identifying what factors are most influential in their purchase decisions. This project is building off of a budding partnership with the Hanoi University of Transport and Communications. We are hopeful that this project will go well.

My first impressions are overall very good, an overwhelming amount of motorcycles. Our taxi driver from the airport was very friendly and the Vietnamese people are very hospitable. We did end up with one problem. We went wandering and we expected that any cab driver would know exactly where our hotel was (since our first cab driver did). Well, we ended up getting lost and were hoping to hop in a cab to get back. Problem was, no cab driver seemed to know where our hotel was. We asked dozens of people and probably 10 cab drivers. We actually got into two taxis, but ended up getting out after a few kilometers of aimless driving. Finally we knew we were close and found a confident taxi (all taxis seem to try to rip you off by the way so we insist that we use the meter). As we were on our way home with the 3rd taxi, suddenly the meter jumped up so that about a 1 km ride went to 6 km instantly (and the price tripled). We bickered, and I don't know how he flipped the meter, but we were happy to be back at the hotel, about 2 hours later than expected. Lesson: always know how to say your destination in the local language or have it written down (like on a business card).

Eight Years Celebrated in AnNing

Our anniversary was June 3rd, eight years. Wow time flies. This year we had a couple of friends watch the kids for the day and Julie and I went to An Ning, a city about one hour away from Kunming by bus. We went to AnNing for its famous hot springs and the fact that it didn't make the lonely planet China tour book, so it isn't crawling with tourists. We ended up going to the "golden forest hot springs", which turned out to be a real decent place. It had a little bit of Chinese styled junk, but wasn't over the top. The grounds of the hot springs were dotted by small pools, each with its own style. There was a milk spring, a rose spring, and a candy apple spring. It was really great and relaxing. Overall, a really excellent experience. A little chronology of our anniversaries for those who care:

Married June 3, 2000 in Tucson, AZ
1st-Bisbee, AZ
2nd-Flagstaff, AZ
3rd-Payson, AZ
4th-Las Vegas, NV
5th-Chicago, IL
6th-Tucson, AZ
7th-Yosemite National Park, CA
8th-AnNing-China

Rising gas prices (or not)

So, you might complain about rising gas prices in the USA. I would probably complain too. China's gas prices are fixed by the central government, so pretty much anywhere you go, you pay the same price (so the Sinopec on one corner doesn't beat the China Petrol on the other). There are no fuel taxes, but since the government sets the price, they set the "profit" or "loss" of the oil company, which is largely owned by the government, but has been put on the market so that private investors can buy stock. This has some pros and cons. The pros are that the fuel prices do not fluctuate wildly like they can where the price is set by the "market", like in the USA. Since fuel taxes are low in the USA, we really see huge fluctuations since almost all of the price is reflected in the price of oil. European markets, where fuel taxes are much higher don't feel as much brunt (ie prices don't rise or fall by the same proportion) because their price at the pump includes some very high taxes...see http://www.cnbc.com/id/24793710 . Chinese drivers haven't seen much of the major recent increases because the Chinese government has not recently changed prices. This results in losses (rather than profits) for the Chinese oil companies (sorry dad that you just bought Sinopec). Currently, the price of a gallon is about $2.80. So what is a Chinese oil company to do? Well, rather than sell as much as they can at a loss, they are known to restrict supply by temporarily closing stations and thus jamming others. This happens periodically and happened a couple of weeks ago (along with the earthquake demanding some energy rationing). The result is rather than pay market price, drivers are forced to wait for up to 3 hours in embargo style lines. This makes it pretty inconvenient to drive a car, but also ride a bike since the lines generally spill throughout the road network, including the bike lane. Well, next time you have to pay $4 a gallon, consider paying $2.80 and having to wait several hours in your car for a fill-up or for a rationed few gallons. I would recommend driving less if you can, or getting a more fuel efficient car.