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.