Bicycles Collecting Dust and E-bikes Shining

I’ve returned to Kunming, China with my family and a handful of students to study transportation demand and transport’s effect on the environment for about two months. It is so interesting coming back every year or so, to see snapshots of the rapid rate of change. There are a number of major infrastructure initiatives in Kunming, including elevating the entire second ring road, causing tons (literally) of trucks to be diverted to the street outside our apartment, which has effectively destroyed the road (and air quality and safety)--one neighborhood fatality and counting. I am particularly interested in the growth in e-bike use in China. Kunming has an estimated 700,000 e-bikes (registered), up from about 180,000 in 2006. Based on my observations, traditional bicycles are nearly extinct--at least endangerd (though that might have happened without the help of e-bikes). Buses are jam-packed and whatever bicycles you see parked at apartment parking lots seem to be collecting dust. This probably has a lot to do with the eroding bicycle infrastructure and longer commutes, as the urbanized area expands. If you have to share the bike lane with encroaching cars and trucks, or because of parked cars in the bike lane, you have to enter the car lane, it seems safer to do that on an e-bike, that can mix better with car speeds, compared to a bicycle. At any rate, e-bikes seem to follow the trend of replacing some combination of bus and bike trips. Even so, e-bikes are much more maneuverable and, given appropriate infrastructure, are much faster than driving during peak hours. Of course, these observations are in the context of the suburban lifestyle that we are living, so nearer the city center, the more bicycles one might see. Consequently, we’ve bought our family vehicle. An e-scooter we call “silverfish”.

Around the world in 7 days

I am in Bangkok for the Better Air Quality Conference 2008 (www.baq2008.org). My trip started in typical fashion, mechanical delay at Knoxville’s McGee Tyson Airport, making me miss my Washington to Tokyo and later Tokyo to Bangkok connection. This is the third time in a row that this has happened to me flying out of Knoxville, all on different airlines. This time was United. The gate agent called me up and told me that I would miss my connection and the only thing they could do was try the same itinerary the next day. She said that all flights were full and it would be impossible to leave any sooner. I told her that I found it hard to believe that at 10 am, there are no other seats on any other airline that would get me closer to Bangkok that day. After some patient persistence and a return to the main ticket office, they got me on a flight crossing the Atlantic. They seemed determined to keep me on United, although they have an

 obligation (I think) to put me on another flight.Twice in the same day did someone tell me that the airlines needed to be re-regulated. The live-and-let-die notion of capitalism in America seems to be fading with the economy. I’ve heard far more proponents of government regulation (in Knoxville no less) than ever before. Anyways, I flew to Frankfurt Germany and had a nice seven hour layover, which was really nice. European transportation systems are amazing. I asked a couple of American travelers that seemed to have taken that route before how to get around Frankfurt and where I might want to go on my layover. They explained to me that, by the time I picked up my rental car and dropped it off, I would have a hard time making good on my layover. I asked about trains and they had never considered it. Well, I knew the train served the Frankfurt airport (from Julie and my 2001 trip). After a little asking around, I ended up getting on the S8 train and into downtown Frankfurt in 15 minutes. From the airport you pass the train station with the high speed ICE trains coming and going. 

Once downtown there were rental bikes everywhere that you could call in and have them unlock it for you. If I had a phone that worked, I would have done it--1 euro an hour. I was fortunate to be there before rush hour so I got to see everyone coming in and the streets getting busier and busier as time went on. They had buses, streetcars, the U-Bahn local trains, and great bike infrastructure; many options for the car-less. This is the fundamental problem with High-Speed Rail proposals in the US, what do you do when you get there? There are only a few cities and corridors in the country that could absorb the riders on their public transit systems, leading to the inevitable car rental system. This could work, but to compete with air travel you would have to have vast garages for rentals presumably in downtown areas. It seems it could serve a niche, but not reach the level of Europe or Japanese systems, without significant land use and local public transit investment in cities.  After about 45 hours of travel, I will be in Bangkok, making it to my meeting with four hours to spare. Instead of flying half-way around the world and back again, I am truly flying around the world, West to East all the time, from Knoxville to DC to Frankfurt to Bangkok to Beijing to Chicago and back to Knoxville, all in seven days.

Biking for fun and more

The last few weeks have seen a pretty big shift in my commute pattern. I am teaching an undergrad transportation class that starts at 8:00 on Tuesday and Thursday and Avah started preschool and goes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The big challenge was trying to find a way for me to drop her off in the morning on my way to school. The challenge comes with her not being able to hop on the back of my Vespa (at least without getting some evil stares) and her school being completely inaccessible to non-motorized transportation. Well, the solution became, riding the city KAT bus to her school in the morning (on the way to work) and bringing my bike along. The bus drops us off at her school on Kingston Pike and I check her in. From there, I do some hair-raising road crossing to get to the other side of Kingston Pike and ride in the wrong direction down the sidewalk (yikes! for everyone involved) until I get to a point where I can get into traffic safely and not be mowed over by 50mph driving soccer (or hockey) moms. This has worked better than expected despite the one time we missed the bus, which comes every hour. I get to spend some quality time with Avah, she gets a kick out of riding the bus and can get some exercise and get to the office at the same time. This leads to the question though of whether bicycling can be taken seriously in a city like Knoxville. There are a lot of good efforts by the MPO to develop bike infrastructure, but so many critical links are not safe for bicyclists. The parks and rec department has built some wonderful bike trails, but they can be circuitous and the don't necessarily go everywhere. Most of the people I see are out there for recreation. Is it just that Americans aren't ready to commute on a bike yet? Would they if they had the chance (infrastructure)? How much would someone invest in a decent bike to 'give it a try'? These are a few questions I have in mind when I am trying to get to the University and think about ways to introduce more sustainable modes of transportation into our "multimodal" system. 

My family went on a bike ride organized by the Knoxville MPO (www.knoxtrans.org) last weekend. Some 250 bicyclists in a mob toured north Knoxville by bicycle, which surely allows you to see more compared to driving. We had a lot of fun, with the kids in tow in our small bike trailer. We had some problems/anxiety on Central Avenue as we were not with the pack and we were trying to ride our bikes on higher speed roadways (our entire family's lives in the hands of a 16 year old texting while driving). Well, we made it and when we got to the finish line, we were surrounded by bicyclists of all types. Most of whom seemed quite committed. The 20 year old Schwinn that I bought at the thrift store stood out like a sore thumb. This leads to the question, would Joe Public spend $1000 on a bike, then jump onto Central Avenue to get to work, just to try it out. I doubt it. I overheard a conversation with the owner of our local bike shop and he said that business hasn't increased despite ultra-high gas prices. Of course the average price of a bike in his shop is probably up around $1000 as well. He said that he sees people who are already into biking, using them more, but not many people running out and buying a bike. I wonder if bike sales have gone up at Walmart, and will an ill-fitting Walmart bike be something that will convert driver to biking? Where are the low cost, decent quality, commuter bikes? I haven't found too many of them. The classic transportation problem, is there no demand because of no (bad) infrastructure or is there no infrastructure because of no demand? Afterall, biking is a recreational sport.  

Hydrogen Road Tour in Chattanooga

Monday two of my students (Shuguang Ji and Casey Langford) and I went to the Hydrogen Road Tour in Chattanooga (http://hydrogenroadtour08.dot.gov/). For a couple of hours about a half dozen hydrogen powered cars (internal combustion and fuel cell) were displayed and demonstrated. It was quite an impressive demo, if you could ignore the tractor trailers with giant hydrogen tanks that accompanied them. This certainly demonstrates the chicken or egg challenge associated with developing cars first or hydrogen infrastructure. Not every H2 car can have a "station" following them wherever they go. Regardless, the vehicles were silent and local pollution free. It was also interesting seeing the different technology strategies involved, like the hydrogen gas powered fuel cell cars, with high pressure tanks, and BMW's internal combustion engine with very cool liquid hydrogen. The engineer told me the tank is so insulated that it would take 80 days for a cup of boiling coffee to become drinkable inside. Pretty amazing. At any rate, the reason I attended was to brush up on some of the technology, along with infrastructure challenges for a research project I am working on with Casey, along with Wayne Davis here in the Civil Engineering department. We are identifying infrastructure and fleet challenges associated with developing a hydrogen powered bus fleet in Knoxville. On a semi-related note, I've seen a few stories about using baking soda/water mixture that can supposedly boost fuel efficiency by 10-100%. I have been thinking about trying it out on my new moster truck (what do I have to lose?). I came across this PM article that tests it and so far has debunked it as a myth that violates thermodynamic laws.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/how_to/4276846.html?series=19

If I decide to go for it, it might be a fun experiment.

E-Scooters vs Motorbikes in Vietnam

With the price of gasoline increasing by over 30% in Vietnam, former e-scooter skeptics are re-considering whether e-bikes will enter the market and what affect they might have on local air quality. Here is my take that I just posted on the Sustran listserve.

E-bikes emit a less on almost all levels than motorbikes. Some recent work we've been doing in China shows that e-bikes emit 1/3 the CO2 as a motorbike. Similar improvements can be seen on almost all local pollutants with the exception of SO2, which has comparable rates, but this highly depends on local electricity generation mix. Another issue where e-bikes have an advantage is the ability for agencies to manage a few point emission sources (power plants), compared to millions of tailpipes. Finally, emissions from power plants are generally more remote and thus populations have less exposure to the pollutant than ground-level tailpipe emissions in dense urban areas. In the context of local "tailpipe" emissions electric bikes/scooters/motorbikes perform much better than gasoline motorbikes.

Lead pollution on the other hand is where electric bikes do not perform so well. This is something that the Vietnam EPA is addressing by developing a lead acid battery recycling system that encourages take-back into the "formal" sector, rather than backyard recyclers. I am working with them on this along with the development of an eco-label for sustainable battery production with an NGO, OK International (www.okinternational.org). Whether the Vietnamese can succeed in managing a "clean" lead battery supply chain is uncertain but they are certainly making an effort to address it, before e-bikes flood the market. Because of Vietnam's poor recycling infrastructure, a lot of lead scrap in Vietnam is being exported (illegally) to China, but that could change as more recyclers enter the market. It could be beneficial to begin looking at new battery technology for this new market, now that Lead has gotten expensive and Li-ion is coming down in price. One still has to address the recycling problem, but Li-ion could be more manageable than Lead.

There is also some work in progress looking at some market analysis, using a stated preference survey that we conducted in June. The initial results actually show quite a strong preference for e-scooters, based on performance, cost and other metrics. I will send an email to this listserve when I have a report with some solid findings.

To summarize, e-scooters will improve local air quality, energy efficiency, and GHG emissions in Vietnam (perhaps also improving cost effectiveness of travel and safety at the same time). Introducing e-vehicles into the cities will increase lead pollution, simply because most current e-scooters use large lead batteries, frequently. The cost of alternative technology (Li-ion) is coming down, potentially leading to more adoption (maybe with the help of regulators). Also, Vietnam policy makers have been more pro-active than most in addressing lead problems in the past couple of years (in my opinion), so there is a higher chance that there will be a robust take-back policy like we see in the North America or Europe, and hopefully this will lead to high rates of formal recycling.

Birthdays Party

It is the Birthday season in the Cherry household. Julie's is July 12th, Chris' is July 30th, Kylie's is August 10th, and Avah's is August 13th. So we have one birthday party after another. Julie's was at...well Chris' friends house, a big reunion of all the childhood buds. Chris' was up in the Smokey mountains on a camping trip. Avah and Kylie get to share their party because they happen to be three days apart. We had a "water fun" party. Basically a bunch of kids, old and young jumping around in the water. Everyone had tons of fun, even if the birthday girls were a little slow waking up from their afternoon naps. So we have a "wonderful" two year old and soon to be four year old. We also went fishing on the boat today and Avah got to reel in her first fish, about an 8" smallmouth bass.

Catching up with the Joneses

So, we went there. I used to be a bass fisherman and be on the water several times a month. I went to college in Berkeley and it became too difficult to get connected with fishing clubs etc, not that I had any time between kids and grad school. As a result, my fishing gear collected dust and I only went out a couple of times in several years, fishing from the shore and not having much luck. One of the problems is that I'm used to fishing from a boat. Well, my dad hadn't been using a boat much so last week he offered to lend it to us, and we took him up on that offer. We had it shipped out and it arrived last Saturday...only problem is that we didn't have a vehicle to launch with. My Vespa wouldn't do it and our Chevy Malibu wasn't able. So we were shopping for something that could pull a boat...dare I say SUV. Yes, we were shopping for an SUV, which started with a mid sized Land Rover, then to a Dodge Durango. No luck on any of these. What did we get...a huge Ford Expedition. OK, this was bigger than we wanted, but it had what we needed, pulling power and a third row. This is the best time to buy a gas guzzler, but I was slightly embarrassed driving it today. On top of that, it defies what I would consider my moral fabric. See this link to know what I mean http://christiansandclimate.org/. OK, my only rationalization (not justification) is that it will be parked 9 out of 10 days. OK, this thing also is 10 years old and has 152,000 miles and cost us $3100 so it hopefully won't depreciate much more. I think this is a good time to buy a gas guzzler. I am going to do a little experiment and see if the "vehicle effect" will actually increase my household's vehicle miles traveled (VMT) like the travel demand models predict. Check back in a year on that one. For what it's worth, here is the beast and our new boat that we took out today for the first time. We are trying not to catch up with the Joneses, but we are living blocks from a lake and a boat is going to be tons of fun for the family and me.