Episode 118: Andrew Salzberg, Loeb Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Today's guest is Andrew Salzberg, Loeb Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
The former Head of Transportation Policy at Uber, Andrew is just wrapping up a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, which was a one-year fellowship to study how new mobility technology can be skewed towards serving the public interest. Andrew has had a particular focus on advancing zero carbon transportation systems.
I was excited for this one, because transportation is such a key lever in decarbonization and one that we haven't yet spent enough time talking about here on the pod. We cover a lot in this episode, including an overview of the transportation ecosystem, where we are today, where we need to go and what are some of the barriers that have been holding us back. We also talk about the arc of Andrew's career and his time at Uber. I enjoyed this one a lot and I hope you do as well.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 (me), @mcjpod (podcast) or @mcjcollective (company). You can reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
In today's episode, we cover:
Andrew’s early passion in transit and transportation.
His background in civil engineering and urban planning.
His experience working in China on urban development.
Andrew’s time at Uber.
His perspective on where the U.S. is with respect to climate change.
How transportation behavior is hampering progress on emissions.
The role of ride share companies and the impact of autonomous vehicles.
His impetus for leaving Uber.
The importance of localizing action to improve transportation.
The big transportation levers that should be pulled to address climate change.
The challenges around local regulations and NIMBYism and the need to overcome it.
Lyft’s recent announcement to go 100% EV by 2030.
How the government needs to lead the decarbonization of transportation.
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
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Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I.
Today's guest is Andrew Salzburg, the former Head of Transportation Policy at Uber, where he spent six years joining in 2013 at 300 employees and leaving in 2019, when the company had grown to almost 30,000 employees. He's just wrapping up a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard University graduate school of design, which was a one year fellowship to study how new mobility technology can be skewed towards serving the public interest.
Andrew had a particular focus on advancing zero carbon transportation systems. I was excited for this one, because transportation is such a key lever in decarbonisation and one that we haven't yet spent enough time talking about here on the pod. We cover a lot in this episode, including an overview of the transportation ecosystem, where we are today, where we need to go, what some of the barriers have been that had been holding us back.
And we also talk about the role of the private sector. The role of government, the role of the U.S. versus China and other parts of the world. We talk about federal versus state and what some of the most impactful policy initiatives could be to bring about the kind of change that's needed. And we also talk about arc of Andrew's career, why he made the decisions he did along the way, his time at Uber, the fellowship program and also where he sits today. And what kinds of things he's looking to sink his teeth into looking forwards. I enjoyed this one a lot and I hope you do as well.
Andrew Salzberg, welcome to the show.
Andrew Salzberg: Hey, nice to be here.
Jason Jacobs: I'm excited for this one. Transportation is such an important lever for decarbonization and it's one that I haven't spent as much time on on the pod over the last hundred something episodes. So I'm glad that we're making the time today to dig in.
Andrew Salzberg: Sure. Yeah. Happy to talk about it.
Jason Jacobs: And you have some experience in the transportation world.
Andrew Salzberg: Yeah. I've been around transportation for 15 years or so, but I think I've been thinking about it for longer than that.
So, you know, I grew up in Montreal. And my dad is Dutch. So anybody who messes around in urban transportation ends up talking about the Dutch because they love to ride bicycles. And I think it's sort of held up as a pretty good example. So I grew up on a bike and got interested in transit and how cities work.
I have kind of been on the transportation path ever since I had any kind of career to speak of.
Jason Jacobs: And given that you're now focused at the intersection of the transportation and the climate path, have you always been concerned about climate change as well?
Andrew Salzberg: I think "always" is probably a stretch, but I think from as far back as when I was an undergrad, so that's like early two thousands. We kind of talked about it a little bit, but there was an earlier moment, I think, of climate being top of mind, at least in the North American context and this sort of Al Gore Inconvenient Truth era.
And so I have a paper that I wrote in 2006 about the overlap between urban development and climate change. And that kind of comes out of that previous moment. So it's always been something that I've been thinking about. And I think something that's powered my interest and choice to work in urban planning and transportation, because it's such an important lever.
So it's always been on the back of my mind, but over the last year, I've had a chance to really put it absolutely at the front and center, everything I want to do and ask some questions about how we actually move the needle on transportation faster than we have been in the past.
Jason Jacobs: And given that you have had quite a wide range of experience where you've hit it from different perspectives, if you will, over the course of your career. What are some of the key junctures or transition moments as you look backwards in your career thus far?
And maybe talk a bit about the "why" behind each of them.
Andrew Salzberg: Sure. I was a civil engineering undergraduate student a long time ago, and I think a lot of that there is some coursework there that has to do with transportation, but it's a pretty narrow focus on counting cars. I mean, anybody who's listening, who's ever done anything around traffic engineering.
I don't envy you, but the course work there is a lot about counting cars and how many cars turn left at this intersection. And how might we re-optimize traffic signals to make them a little more efficient at moving more vehicles. So I found that kind of a fairly limited perspective a long time ago when I was first studying it.
And so I studied urban planning at the master's level to get a slightly broader view that was beyond just sort of engineering more optimal efficiency for cars. So that was one of the first times I kind of made a bit of a change, because I was really interested in all the things we weren't talking about in most of the transportation engineering courses I went to, which are everything that people I think are aiming for in a lot of the cities we're talking about.
So bikes walking, public transport, those things weren't heavily factored into the kind of engineering focused transportation work that I had done before. At the very first level, that was me moving from the dominant perspective in how a transportation engineering is done to something broader. So I went to Harvard for grad school and ended up hanging out at MIT a little bit and made friends with a group called the Transit Lab.
And that's kind of an amazing group of people. You know, you walk into a room behind the door somewhere, and the walls are plastered with transit maps. And as people who are really deep in the weeds on the analysis of how to make public transport systems work better. So I spent a little time there and was lucky enough to work at Transport for London through that program.
And that was just a really eye opening experience. I think universally viewed as one of the best public transport operators in the world in London, you can make a case for different ones, but that was kind of a huge moment for me to get excited about that. And then when I graduated, you know, it was 2009 at this point so a bit of a tough economy for students graduating into. And managed to find myself working in China on the same issues, which was kind of amazing, because anybody who spent time there knows the rate of urban development and the scale of what's happening in China is just so unlike anything that's happening almost anywhere else in the world.
And especially on transport infrastructure. At the time that I was there building the biggest network of high speed rail anyone's ever seen. And they know they have more mileage with that system than the rest of the world put together metro systems being built from zero miles in a city to larger networks than things that have been around for hundreds of years.
So just watching that up close for four years, while I was at the World Bank was kind of amazing, both really all inspiring. I think some things that could have been done better, but just unlike anything else in the world. And then, you know, my most recent role before I was at Harvard for the year was working at Uber, which for some people who really are deep in the weeds on sustainable transportation was a bit of a pivot that they wouldn't have expected that we can talk about.
But for me, I think it was clear that was the early days, it was 2013 that I was looking at that, and that was early days of smartphones reshaping how transportation was going to be done in the future and thinking about how we could steer that kind of innovation to actually helping on some of the problems that I've been thinking about from a public transport, another perspective, and then to some extent about climate.
So I think I've been at some level chasing what seemed most interesting and impactful. And I think China in a really meaningful way was that, and I think in the early days of Uber, there was a lot of conversation about how smartphones and on-demand technology and mobility as a service, how all this stuff was going to really radically change how transportation works in the city.
So I kind of wanted to get a sense of how that worked on the inside and that's how I ended up there.
Jason Jacobs: And as you sit today, what's your assessment of I don't know how you answer this in a succinct, digestible way, but what's your assessment of where we are with transportation and where we need to go and take the lead as you will.
If you want to talk U.S., that's fine. If you want to look at it from a global perspective, that's fine. Answer it how you like.
Andrew Salzberg: Yeah. I think in the U.S. it's almost easier in a sense, cause it's so dramatic. I mean, it's one of the places where anybody who's working in the space likes to quote that transportation is the largest source of emissions.
And that's not just the kind of passenger transportation that we've been talking about, but, you know, freight and other long distance movements as well. So I think in the U.S. it's clear that it's not only the largest, but it continues to go in the wrong direction and not just in absolute terms, but even kind of per capita emissions have been increasing.
So I think to me it's pretty clear, you know, one of the reasons that I've really tried to focus on this is because we've done a pretty poor job, I think on transportation in particular, compared to things like electric power and energy generation, that some of the stuff you guys have been talking about on the podcast.
So I would say if you're gonna give it a grade, I don't think it'd be a great one. I think there's some exciting things happening, but you know, high level, the number's not only big, but it's moving in the wrong direction in the U.S. and I think a lot of countries, like I said, I spent a lot of time in China, but elsewhere as well.
And this is changing a little bit, but for a long time, a lot of people were following the U.S. model. So as people got wealthier and other countries, they were buying more cars and, you know, rates of automobile ownership, we're kind of following a graph, maybe not as dramatic as the U.S. in terms of how many cars per person we owned, but they were certainly increasing.
So I think there's a lot of logic to, if you can turn around and do better in this country, it has the potential to be beneficial, not just here, but beyond that as well.
Jason Jacobs: When you look at the fact that it is going in the wrong direction, what's driving that?
Andrew Salzberg: Some of it is just more driving at a basic level.
I mean, we saw a decrease in the amount of driving over the great recession, but that's perked back up again. And then I think some of what's been hurting on the emissions front is consumer preferance in some capacity for larger vehicles, right? The number of SUVs as a percentage of what's being sold, keeps going up.
There was actually a report just on the impact globally of SUV themselves as a driver of climate change and how important that is the IEA put out. So I think people have been buying bigger vehicles and driving more in the U.S. context. And I think other things that we get excited about right, every time you think about Tesla, I had someone tell me, when you think about Tesla, just remind yourself about the Ford F-150, which is one of the best selling cars in the country.
And I think is maybe more emblematic of what the typical car purchase looks like right now. So yeah, driving more, driving bigger to some extent has been really pushing things in the wrong direction.
Jason Jacobs: Do you have a clear picture in your head of where you believe that things should go?
Andrew Salzberg: Yeah. I mean, I think getting to zero emissions is the clear goal, right, for everybody. That's easy to say and hard to do, but one of the things I've been thinking about is how do you do that in different places? And I think there's a lot of different approaches in transportation rather than just talking about cars and car technology and whether it's getting more or less efficient. So there's a whole body of work on California's been a leader on this, obviously, and Trump's been making an effort to roll back some of the work around making cars more fuel efficient, and also pushing for zero emission vehicles. And how do you increase that, that as a share of the overall vehicle population. And that makes a lot of sense. And there's a whole body of strategies that are happening there at the state level more, certainly over the last few years.
And then there's, I think a whole separate parallel track and people debate, which one of these is more important, is getting people to drive less or certainly have to drive less. I think there's a whole really deep literature around that. That goes back a very long way from allowing people to build more densely so you can walk them more things to funding public transport, to making it easier to bike, to walk to new things like micromobility.
I mean, all those things are essentially in service of the idea of, yes, it's nice to make vehicle miles that you travel in a car, more efficient or even zero emission, but shouldn't we be also working to make it so you don't have to travel as much. So I think both those things are strategies to get you to zero. And I think the relative importance of them can vary.
One of the things that I've noticed, and other people in the space I'm sure would agree, there's some I think disagreements across those two camps, a little bit about which one of those is more important and which one should we be pushing for? Which one should be a priority, but frankly, they both are part of any answer that's going to get you to zero.
Jason Jacobs: So given how many years you spent at Uber, what role have the ride sharing companies been playing? Do they make things better or do they make things worse? And then what role do you see for them in the future? Or do you hope and advocate for?
Andrew Salzberg: If you go back and read some studies about if you lump in autonomous a little bit, right?
So the conversation around ridehailing, I think, is in some ways related to the conversation around what the impact of autonomous vehicles might be. We can talk about that separately too, but there's a lot of literature. And you can look at this from UC Davis or frankly from lots of other places, that talk about these potential for three revolutions to happen simultaneously in transportation. So you can get electrification of vehicles, you can get shared-vehicles and then maybe you'd get autonomous vehicles. And if you do all those things together, they might work better as like a set of three than they do individually. And you get fully electrically powered shared vehicles.
So you need less vehicles. They're used more efficiently; they're electric and you start to bring down emissions. There's a lot of papers that talk about, if you got to a hundred percent adoption i.e. everybody in the city is taking a shared vehicle like that in a place like San Francisco or anywhere, you could bring down emissions a lot.
Right? There's a lot of papers that do that, but they're sort of existing in a world where we've somehow got to a single system that's moving a hundred percent of people and is being optimized to reduce emissions, which obviously is not exactly how things work in practice. So on the one hand, you have a lot of papers that talk about wouldn't it be great if everything worked this way, and then you have a whole other set of papers that are based on empirically what's been happening. And they make a counter point, which is that as Uber and Lyft have grown, they make travel easier and cheaper.
And so people travel more, right? I think that's pretty true that you can talk a little about that "the rebound effect" in a lot of other sectors where if you make something cheaper and more available, you get more of it. And that's just as true in transportation. So there's lots of papers that have documented this, where you see people who use Uber can use transit a little bit less or travel a little bit more overall.
So you have tons and tons of headlines about congestion from these services because more people are using them. I think the reality is like both of those things are true. They're just talking about different things. And so I think the short term impacts on the climate front have probably been more travel and a little bit less use of things like transit.
So that's probably a net negative in the short term, if you're thinking strictly about emissions. I think my case internally was always that if you could combine something like Uber or Lyft with a set of other policies, you could get things steered in the right direction. So one of the obvious ones is how do you make and get those services to electrify faster than the rest of the passenger fleet, because that could be a big lever. And we can talk about some places that are doing that, but also how do you help to work against some of the overall increase in travel you're seeing? And so I think there is some alignment between ridehail rideshare platforms and some of the policy, but people wanted to see for a long time. One of things that I did Uber, when I worked there was help us fight for congestion pricing in New York, which is basically the idea that if you drive into Manhattan, you pay a toll and that toll goes to fund public transport and helps bring down the overall level of car travel.
And that's the kind of policy Uber or Lyft might do well from, if they're really efficient at splitting your ride between multiple passengers, which is a bit less popular right now, given what's happening. But I think overall has been a strategic priority. So there's things like congestion pricing or electrification, where I think you can find the kinds of policies you need to put in place to take the best of what's happening or potentially could happen with ride hail and seize on that.
But in the absence of that, I think it's not totally clear what the outcome is. You're seeing a lot of short term increases in travel and shift away from other modes. So it's a complicated story. But I think all those things can be true at once. And the question is kind of how do you enact policies that steer in the right direction?
Jason Jacobs: If one wanted to bring about change. I have to think that being the Head of Policy and Sustainability really for the largest ridehailing company, would have been a great perch to work from to try to bring about that change. So I guess, talk to me about the thought process for leaving and what was it that did not give you the confidence that that was the best vessel for you to have the impact that you desire.
Andrew Salzberg: At one level, I was there for awhile. So I was there for almost six years. I joined Uber when there was 300 something employees and left when there was 28,000 employees and help to do a lot of things while I was there from helping to start a product team, working on transit, to data sharing, to helping to put them in touch with what ultimately became Jump bikes, which has had a sort of unfortunate end recently we can talk about too.
But a lot of work happened while I was there. And actually towards the end of my time there, a lot of people we were bringing on board have the kind of city urban planning perspective that I had. So at one level I felt more confident that it didn't just have to be me banging the drum internally for the kind of things I cared about because there's a lot of people now who were there, who I think have a similar perspective and have business units that are built up around that, whether it's the transit team or other groups.
So, at one level, it felt like I could go because I wasn't the only person anymore who kind of was pushing for those things. And then I think it goes back a little bit to what I was just talking about, which is that I think Uber on its own can't really get to some of the goals that I'm excited about, right?
It's a mix of what has to happen from the public side and from the private side. So my favorite example is London, where Uber has committed to be a hundred percent electric by 2025, which is pretty soon, but that's only because in London they've had the authority through something, they call a "low emissions zone" to basically mandate that any vehicle, whether it's Uber or personal car delivery vehicle, has to be low emission very quickly, or you pay a super heavy fine.
And that's the kind of policy that has really spurred within Uber a ton of effort, you know, hiring teams, spending money. They have whole ways of like, how are they going to help drivers to get access to charging infrastructure and pay the upfront cost of cars that are more expensive for electric and all that's happening because of really smart policy from the public side.
And one of the things that I saw in my time was that. There was a lot of battles between Uber and cities and you can read all about them, but sometimes they were about the wrong thing. I was sort of excited whether it's congestion pricing in New York or low emission zones in London. That I think those are the kinds of things you need to have in place for Uber to do the kind of work that's actually going to help on climate.
And so my leaving was a little bit trying to say, well, can we bring these efforts together a little bit? That's kind of hard to do when you're on one side of that divide, right? So I've been thinking a lot about how do we essentially get the best out of private investment, tech investment in transportation with the kind of policies that we're going to steer it in the right direction.
So, you know, one level I was there for awhile. There were a lot more people than when I started, who cared about the kind of things I cared about. And I also had questions I think they went beyond what Uber could do on its own.
Jason Jacobs: What you're describing with transportation actually mirrors, I would argue, many industries that need to decarbonize, where if you rely strictly on market forces as some advocate that we should I believe as it sounds like you believe that you can make some headway, but it can only get you so far because of misaligned incentives. Whereas the marriage of smart and kind of high-octane, although that's a bad term for what we're talking about here, but innovation right married with the right kind of mix of carrot and stick from government is how to get to where we need to go.
So I understand your argument, that in order to think in an objective way, you need to step outside of having a horse in the race. But my question for you though is what can one actually do at that intersection given that these worlds are so separate and distinct?
Andrew Salzberg: I mean, I think that there are lots of places that are, as we speak designing policies specifically around ride hail.
And so I think, what can you do? I don't have a specific answer for you, but I think there's a lot of policy design; i.e. how do you regulate everything from bike share to ride hail to cars in general, the streets, et cetera. That's being talked about constantly and changed, especially in the kind of moment we're in, around COVID and reuse of streets, that I think there's a role for people to play, who've been inside a company like Uber or others in the space and express a little bit of how those companies operate and think and what their priorities are. And they think right now everything's a negotiation at some level. Private companies, in their dream world, many of them would love to operate without any regulation.
That's not how it happens. And so everything ends up being how are we trading off what we really want versus what the public wants. And I think I have found those conversations, maybe not as productive as they could be. And so I think, if you're asking, where's the opportunity to do that kind of work that brings these things together.
I think cities around the world, countries, states, et cetera, are designing everything from incentives, sticks, carrots around ride hail itself, or just cars in general or fleet operation. And each one of those decisions, you know, you probably have a chance to get it right, or get it wrong and do what you're saying, which is steer things in the right direction but try and capture the best of potentially whatever your right choice of dynamic or innovative or something company can bring to the table.
So, there are policies in place that are being put out adjusted, et cetera, almost every day on these topics.
Jason Jacobs: I want to throw out kind of an observation from my cheap seats and then you with a lot more expertise in the trenches on this would be great to have you weigh in. And that said, if you take any one region, it's paralyzingly complex, right?
Because it's like, if you ask how impactful can electrifying vehicles get, or if you ask micro mobility or you ask congestion pricing, or it's like, well, what do we do about suburban sprawl? What did we do about the future of cities? You know? Oh, with congestion pricing, what about equality? Because the further out, the more affordable it is, so who are you hitting with congestion pricing, the people that can least afford to pay it. Right. And things like that. So that's in any one region, right? But then you go to the next region and it's a whole different set of dynamics. So on the one hand, you want it to be purposeful for each region, but how do you get the most leverage?
You get the most leverage with uniform federal legislation, right. So what do you do with all of that?
Andrew Salzberg: Yeah, I mean, some of it is that you can, there are laws that do this kind of work where you have a pot of money or rules that say, okay, at the regional level, we have things called NPOs in the U.S. which are basically like regional transportation bodies.
And you can have legislation. This was just actually in the proposal that came out this morning from the climate action from the House Democrats that says, you know, at the NPO level, you have to reduce vehicle miles traveled, or you have to have a target for CO2. We're not going to tell you specifically how to do it.
Here's some things you might do, which I think is realistic to your point. You know, it's going to look very different to decarbonize transportation in Manhattan than it would in Oklahoma City or somewhere else. And so I think there's not going to be a one answer, but there's a lot of things that do carry over, right.
In some ways like we don't design vehicles, at least at this point, differently for each region. So electrification is probably something that's going to have bang for you almost everywhere. It'll be more impactful where the grid is already more clean and things like congestion pricing while you could have.
An approach to how you build that or a technology that's built for that, that can be reused in some places. And so you can have pilot programs that go across a couple of cities, but yeah, I mean, you're right. Every city is different, which is obviously what makes it interesting and provides lots of jobs for consultants and other people like me.
But yeah, I don't think there's one answer. And one of the things that I found frustrating in the transportation world is if you look at a lot of the, not everywhere, but a lot of the de-carbonization or kind of energy transition literature, to the extent it has a transportation piece, it tends to be really just about vehicle turnover and how fast can we electrify vehicles, which probably quantitatively in the U.S. nationally may be the single biggest lever, but that's not true everywhere. And it's also kind of limited and you end up missing all the nuance of what looks different in a place like Boston or San Francisco, or somewhere more suburban.
I feel like I'm sort of copping out your question, but agreeing with you that it's going to look different in different places. There are some things that carry over, but I think finding ways to enable local action is a good approach. And I'll give you one example where that's happening in the COVID era, where people are thinking about, well, how can we get people to move into downtown?
And as people start to come back to work, to the extent they do that, If people are still unable to use transit at its full capacity. And one answer has been opening up streets for things other than cars. So shared streets, slow streets, whatever your chosen term is. And that's a concept that looks different in different places.
And the kind of streets you might have in a slow streets program in Oakland are different than they are, where I'm sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the kind of concept how you publicize it, how you do it is similar. And that's really caught on you're seeing that catch on across the country. So, the same tactic can be deployed in different places, but you can gain experience from a bunch of different cities doing it.
Jason Jacobs: On the one hand, I could see making the case that it makes sense to educate and advocate at the local level in all different localities, all over the country and all over the world.
I think there's another case to be made that you should be advocating at the federal level, but leaving enough room for customization so that the local entities feel empowered to deliver things that are purpose built for their environment and circumstance. But there's another that says that you could even go a step above that and say, you know, if the U S is the only one that does it and the rest of the world doesn't step up.
And so ultimately it comes to Paris and other kind of more global agreements. And then from there, everything goes downhill until it plays out in all the localities all over the world. So if one were completely unbiased and didn't have a horse in the race in terms of local versus state versus federal versus international.
And all they wanted to do was just have the biggest impact on the problem to help ensure that the planet stays a nice place to be for humans and other life forms for generations to come, where do they invest their time and their resource. And what you're going to say is all the above, because that's what everyone says, but the problem with all of the above, oh, we need more, we need more policy.
We need more innovation. We need more breakthrough. We need more deployment. Great. All of the above. But what if you just told an orchestra? All of the above, like just play what your heart says. Right. But there's no conductor. So how do you make sure that efforts aren't duplicative at efforts don't cancel each other out, et cetera.
Andrew Salzberg: I feel like this is my challenge of facing enough against a more experienced podcast host; you already like ask your follow up question before I even get my first answer in. But I think to your question, I mean, obviously there's something nice in a dark way about thinking about transportation emissions in the U. S. Because per capita Canada is similar to Australia is a few other places, but really it's very bad here, right? It's a huge source of emissions. And a lot of that comes from passenger transportation. So first I would say there's something nice about focusing here in the sense that it's such an enormous problem. It's been going in the wrong direction, that your marginal effort...
Jason Jacobs: If you're going clean the house
Andrew Salzberg: start in
Jason Jacobs: the dirtiest room.
Andrew Salzberg: Exactly. Then I would say clearly the amount of resources that the federal government can bring. And has the authority to regulate things like car emissions in a way that's unquestioned, right? There's a battle right now about whether the state of California can continue to have the authority they have had in the space, which has been kind of granted by the federal government.
And there's some battle about whether that's going to continue. Federal government, there's no debate as far as I know that they have the authority to do that. I think what you would want, ideally, is that you would have the federal government in the United States really taking the lead. And if you look at some of the proposals that are coming out now, from house Democrats, including today, you know, there's some exciting stuff in there.
For instance, banning the sale of internal combustion engines by 2035, which is way more radical than even a couple of years ago. So my short answer to your question is ideally the federal government would really be leading on this front. I'm avoiding saying all of the above, but in practice, what you're seeing is that, you know, in the absence of that over the last few years, a lot of States have stepped up.
California has kind of been the leader on things like zero emission vehicles and other aspects of transport, decarbonization, and even stuff that I was mentioning before. Like how do we go beyond just vehicle electrification and think about reducing the use of cars overall. There's some bleeding rules that have been passed in California that are being implemented now that helped to do that.
So I think States in the absence of federal leadership have been doing that and even been banding together, right? The zero emission vehicle legislation in California, there's an Alliance of States that essentially adhere to that standard. So without the federal government leading, states have been doing the best they can.
And you see that on clean energy too, with things like renewable portfolio standards and other kind of state by state action has been picking up the slack. But I don't think that's what you choose, if you wanted to choose the best outcome. So I would say ideally, the federal government really be robust behind this and some of that could be federal standards and some of it could be, you know, one of things that I've been thinking about is how do you at the federal level allow people who want to be bolder; how do you get out of their way?
One of the things that Europe has been doing, that's leading the charge this question, is I was talking about London before, but low emission zones. You could imagine if Manhattan wanted to make a more aggressive rule around having every car in the city, be electric before a national rule, way before, that could be great.
And that's, what's happening in some of the cities in Europe and the benefits are big because obviously air quality disproportionately impacts low income people. It's really a problem in the core of cities. So federal government, in addition to doing things at the federal level, You could get creative about allowing people, you know, have the political will to be bolder potentially.
And obviously California has been one example of this, let them do even crazier things, right. And start to move the needle. And obviously everything we've seen around learning curves around technology, whether it's batteries or other things, you start to get some scale benefit from that. So the short answer is ideally federal government and we'll have an election in November and maybe a new one next year, which should be great. But then I think in the absence of that states have been doing some pretty exciting things and maybe we could let cities do even more exciting things on all these topics.
Jason Jacobs: So it's January 2021, and whosever president at the time or whoever the powers that be are in their administration, pick up the phone or send you a text or whatever means of communication they prefer and they say, Andrew, we heard your MCJ podcast. And we agree with you. The federal government is the biggest lever that we've got here in the U.S. to fix this transportation problem, which is critical for quality of life and for climate and a host of other things, but we don't know what to do. What advice do you have for us?
What should we prioritize in the first 100 days? And what should be the big initiatives that we put our weight behind longer-term?
Andrew Salzberg: Excellent question. I was worried you might ask that; I probably should have put this down on paper before I got in here.
Jason Jacobs: I would have given it to you in the prep, but I just think of my best stuff on the fly.
So that's why I don't always do my job prepping, which is good for, for keeping people on their toes.
Andrew Salzberg: Perfect. Yeah. I think, I think some of this is being talked about as we speak. You just watched the democratic primary where people were essentially debating this question, right? You saw people competing across when they wanted to commit to net zero for the U.S. as a whole, right?
You have people arguing for everything from 2050 to 2030, and even 2050 seen ambitious a couple of years ago. Now it's being criticized as being kind of not ambitious enough. Within those plans, there was all kinds of things that related to this problem. So I think at one level, the rapid move to zero emission vehicles kind of has to be a big part of this. It's easy to say; I think it's kind of complicated to think about how you would turn over the entire car industry in the United States, from producing what they produce now to a hundred percent electric by 2035, which is really soon on those kinds of timescales. But I think absent that kind of clear federal mandate, I don't think you're going to have a sort of battle for consumer adoption of EVs that happens without that that goes fast enough.
Jason Jacobs: What should we do to make that happen, Andrew?
Andrew Salzberg: Well, I mean, that is a good question that I think a lot of people who've been in the car industry longer than I have may know. I mean, I think at one level of signaling the intent to do that and making the rule is step one.
How do you do that? That's a transition that is brings along workers in the auto industry and a whole other set of issues that go all the way from down to the level of gas stations and where they're positioned in our dealerships and all kinds of other pieces of that is a big question that I will admit I don't have the full answer to, but it seems to me, step one is saying this transition is going to happen and it's going to happen more quickly than we've been talking about. And knowing that...
Jason Jacobs: It's like a new year's resolution; I'm going to lose 50 pounds this year. I'm going to declare it.
Andrew Salzberg: A legally binding new year's resolution, I think is more powerful. I think that's a really complicated question that a lot of people would've thought about more deeply than I have. I haven't really met a car person, which is one of the things I think about a lot, because my life I talked about growing up in Montreal and being focused on public transport and riding a bike that's the tradition I came out of. So I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to the real world of building cars. I worked at Uber for a while and we send cars to people using the phone app, but that's different than actually producing cars at the scale people do.
So it hasn't been my focus, but it's clearly a big part of the priority.
Jason Jacobs: Okay. So EV adoption is one.
Andrew Salzberg: Yeah, I think obviously in places where transit is super effective, it's great to expand that. And right now public transport is in an incredible hole, given COVID. So you've seen like 90% ridership decline.
So one angle is making sure those things are well funded and expanded. I think that's really important in some cities; nationally, it's not as big. You know, it's I think as a share of overall travel, I always hate to say these stats because there comes a pressing, but U.S. nationally, public transport, maybe 3% of all travel, 5% of commuting travel.
So, you know, if you were able to increase that by 50% or even double it, it would be enormous, but not probably the biggest quantitative lever overall. So that's one yeah, I think at one level the simple answer and a lot of what federal government talks about is more money. So a lot of money comes for new projects, capital projects for public transport.
So you could expand that in the current moment
Jason Jacobs: Funded by what?
Andrew Salzberg: Funded by, you know, however else things are funded. I mean, a lot of transportation funding in the past has always come from gas taxes, but there's clearly going to be a need to rethink that because if we're moving away from gasoline combustion cars altogether, that's going to go away and also more and more of the funding has been coming out of kind of general funding, et cetera.
So, yeah, I think if you only asked me what we should do, he didn't say how we should pay for it. That should be a second question where I get some more time to prepare. But I think one of the obstacles to more transit is land use, which is the most sort of classic thing to talk about, if you spend any time in the space.
And, you know, I just spent a lot of time in San Francisco where I think opposition to denser new housing is maybe more fierce than anywhere. I mean, it's pretty, pretty aggressive here in Cambridge, Massachusetts too. But I think the Bay area maybe stands out for the leader of the, not in my backyard, the NIMBY movement in the country.
You know, one of the things we don't often confront is that, if you really want to increase transit ridership more meaningfully, you have to allow urban development to look a little different. And the biggest obstacle to that right now is local regulations that are really hostile to new development in the kind of places people want to build.
And that's obviously not a federal control issue, but there are often ways that you can do. And I don't know the specifics of how you might do this creatively, but you know, incentives to try and change some of that work. If you're going to fund the transit line, like there's one right here near where I'm sitting that was funded in the eighties and federal money went into that.
But the zoning that surrounds those stations was restrictive to the point that you don't see huge towers at Porter Square or elsewhere. And how do you overcome that? Because I think it's really hard to think about expanding transit beyond what it currently is at without a change in urban development.
And to do that, you probably need some changes in local regulations. And then my last caveat on that front is, although it should be a priority, the truth is that cities in the U.S. are not China, right? They're not growing at this enormous rate. So probably Boston in 2050, just physically the Boston area is going to look pretty similar to Boston in 2020.
I mean, that's the truth, right? It's not going to be wholesale redeveloped into something that looks like Hong Kong. So we should be realistic, even if we're ambitious about what's possible with land use. So I think there should be a bullet in there around encouraging and finding ways to incentivize local governments to be less restrictive to urban development around transit to make those kinds of investments really work.
I think we've talked about there's a lot of tax credits and money that goes into people buying electric vehicles. And a lot of those have been geared, frankly, towards fairly expensive cars like Teslas and people have disproportionately benefited from those that are higher-income folks. So how do we target those a little more clearly for people who have been left out of the transportation system, or even get more creative about vehicles that are electric other things, right. There's been a huge spur and boom in bike sales and e-bike sales. Could the federal government think about are there ways to have fungible funding where if you don't want to buy an electric car you'd rather buy a, you know, a nice new electric bike.
Maybe there's ways to think about being creative around that could be something also to think about. So I think electric vehicle mandates, public transport investment expansion, finding ways to allow for denser development or encourage that and try and get over some of the NIMBY opposition, which I think is an enormous obstacle. Are some of the bigger levers that I would think about. And, you know, there was some proposals and some of the primary campaigns around just getting rid of cars altogether in some parts or places that makes sense. That's not gonna be a huge number of spots, but we're seeing what cities feel like with less cars in them that might be building some momentum in places like LA or New York or Boston or San Francisco for in the downtown core.
Maybe we need less and less cars to move people around. And can we find ways to kind of allow cities to do that kind of experimentation? It would be interesting.
Jason Jacobs: How are you feeling about the recent Lyft announcement about the commitment to get to a hundred percent EVs?
Andrew Salzberg: As someone who doesn't work there or work at their competitor? I feel nice about it as someone who just gets to watch. 'Cause I think one of the most powerful things about those kinds of commitments is that it raises the pressure on everybody else to make kind of radical commitments. So I think a hundred percent EV everywhere that Lyft operates in North America by 2030 is very ambitious, because we were just talking about, you know, a federal mandate that's being discussed. That's considered ambitious is all new cars would be a zero emission by 2035, which means, you know, the majority of cars would not be zero emission for a very long time, which means Lyft would be excluding a big portion of the cars on the road from operating on their platform.
So that's a real, like binding commitment by 2030. That would be, I think, well ahead of California, let alone the rest of the country. So I think it's a serious meaningful commitment if they get there. And I like it as someone who's just cares about them problem, and doesn't have to worry about being a Lyft shareholder or employee, and has them figure out that hard problem. From where I am I like it. And I think if you read in more detail what their proposing, you know, a lot of that is essentially putting the pressure back on public agencies to design policies that make it possible for them to achieve that goal. So it's a little bit of a flip to say, we're committing to something in order to get a set of other actors to basically also invest at the level that's going to make that possible.
So it's a bit of kind of a messaging jujitsu to kind of get a bunch of people on board to try and make that kind of announcement possible. But frankly, just as a person concerned about the world, that's the kind of level and speed we need to move at to make it happen. So I'm, I'm happy at the level. We should also worry about, does anybody go back and check commitments that were made know 10 years ago?
I often like to do that. And I was looking at some, you know, AV announcements from companies about when they were going to be fully autonomous and level four this and level five that we haven't been great at predictions or commitments in the past. So it's also good when somebody makes this kind of commitment to find ways to hold them to that.
And one thing it'd be nice to see with some intermediate commitments that are sooner than the 2030 but, on the whole, I think it moves the conversation in the morning ambitious place. So at that level, I like it.
Jason Jacobs: So given everything that we're talking about in terms of where we are and where we need to go, what does that mean for you in terms of what's next and how you're thinking about spending your professional time?
Andrew Salzberg: Yeah, so, I mean, I've been doing a few things and will continue to do that. So I've been working for some mobility companies, some great ones. So Transit App is one of them. The'yre a transit focused mobility company. I think there's a lot of interesting things we haven't talked about in how you make public transport itself a little more customer friendly and easily accessible and have some of the features of an Uber or Lyft where you kind of watch your vehicle arrive in real time and you can pay for it simply right now, when I come to Boston, I want to pay for transit fair.
I got to figure out five exact change or find some way to get a Charlie card somewhere. It's not the simplest operation. I think there's a lot we can do in tech around transit that is exciting. So I'm doing some of that work. I've been thinking a lot about how we have the kind of conversation you and I are having right now a little more quantitatively and rigorously, because I think one of the things that I watch in this space is that people tend to have their chosen solution that they care about.
And they might care about it for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do about climate, but they bring that view to climate change. So if you're a transit advocate or a bike advocate or someone who cares deeply about urban density, and I count myself as somebody who cares about all those things, you tend to come to this problem around transport de-carbonization with that as your framework for what the most important thing is.
And so one of the things that I've been doing over the last year, hoping to build this into something more accessible and a little bigger is just showing people a really basic spreadsheet of all the trips that happen in a place like Boston and letting them touch it themselves and design their own scenario for us to get to a 90% cut in emissions or an 80% cut in emissions or something really ambitious. Because I think when you confront the data, you start to see what the mix of trips is in a given market, and you get the bigger sense of what really is going to move the needle. What the biggest levers are. And just one example of that, a lot of conversation in micro mobility has been focused on the percentage of trips that happen that are shorter than three miles.
And a lot of us cities is very big. It's like 40% or 50% are really short trips. And, you know, wouldn't it be great if you could capture those on to modes like micromobility, that's a huge number of trips and all that is true. But the truth is that because they're short trips, they're not actually that important for the energy problem, right?
A one mile trip in a car is only 1 / 30th as bad as a 30 mile trip in a car. And the reality is we have a lot of people who are traveling very long distances in cars, and those are kind of the biggest drivers of emissions. So people who do short trips, you know, the mode split on those tends to be better.
I.e.more people are walking or taking transit or cycling already. And so the potential shift there is like, actually, not that important. You know, maybe if you got to zero emission completely for everything less than three miles, you might only be cutting emissions by 5%. And I think that kind of gets lost in this conversation where we have a lot more adjectives than we have numbers.
And so I've been building a really simple tool for people to kind of use in workshops and models and stuff like that to have that conversation. I'm trying to write about the problem a little bit more. Because one of the things I think is just it hasn't been a super quantitative data-driven grounded conversation on this problem.
So I'm finding ways to make that happen. So it's going to be a mix. I think of advising, consulting and maybe a little bit of advocacy slash I don't know what the right name for that last bucket is, but keeping the conversation a little more realistic, grounded, et cetera. And I think I've drawn a lot of inspiration from certainly before COVID what was happening in the climate movement.
And you're seeing that in the raised ambition of a lot of the plans that are coming out now, groups, like Sunrise Movement or what Greta is doing. You know, it's getting people to say, we want to be zero emission by whatever date, which was way sooner than it was. You're seeing that in your interviews with people all across the spectrum. I haven't seen as much of that kind of trickled down into transportation.
So kind of building that bridge a little more, something I'd like to do.
Jason Jacobs: Awesome. So is there anything that I didn't ask that I should have, or any parting words for listeners?
Andrew Salzberg: No, I think we've covered a lot of it. I think, for listeners, it seems like to me, this is something I think we interact with every day.
I think that's why it's so compelling. Like everybody has a view of transportation and so I think if we can turn that into a little bit of action that the state local and federal level that's, to me, what's going to unlock this ultimately kind of been re-convinced if I ever wasn't that the government has to lead this transition.
And when they do that is gonna be a lot of space for all kinds of interesting startups that we're seeing, but expanded tenfold. So, you know, pay attention to who's saying what locally, federally at the state level, and go out and vote for candidates who care about decarbonizing transportation more quickly than we have been.
Jason Jacobs: Awesome. Well, Andrew, this was an incredibly substantive discussion and I thought it was great. So thank you so much for making the time and best of luck. I'm excited to see what you dive into.
Andrew Salzberg: Sure. Thanks for having me.
Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at MyClimateJourney.co.
That is ".co" not ".com". Someday we'll get the.com. But right now ".co". You can also find me on Twitter at @jjacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
