Transcript

Familiarity Breeds Liking | Luis Enrique Loria | TEDxUniversityOfAberdeen

what do you guys like do you like nature do you like Harry Potter movies do you like a sport squash football rugby they like pizza I like buses in fact my friends make fun of me because of that they said what they did to my desk after the last Christmas right the comedian sir yes those are pictures of buses with red hearts on them that's a picture of me with a red heart and a bus underneath it and both it's the read I love buses now when prepping this talk one of my colleagues one of the fellow speakers asked me well do you actually love buses and I told him maybe but I'm not in love with buses and there is a difference in that trust me now having always had this love for buses it's something I've developed over the past few years and to tell you how I got into buses I'm going to start with a brief anecdote two weeks ago it was at this big international conference about the future of bas services it was held right here in Aberdeen it gathered some of the major bus operators from around the world and Europe and some of the industry leaders now they were all sharing experiences of how to implement new technology cleaner fuels and build no efficient but efficient bosses or low emission buses now it became clear to me as the conference went on that we've made a lot of progress in the technology of the buses there's a learning process going on as we build more buses we are learning how to do it from the engineering side of it but when the discussion turned on actually ways to implement or bosses what are the next steps for it there was a bit of a controversy now on the one hand bus operators demanded that government's implemented policies to incentivize the use of low emission buses and the government people that were there they said it was the fault of the bus operators who wouldn't commit themselves to new technologies so it became a back and forth now these two are not mutually exclusive but in the discussion it seemed like a blaming game and in this blaming game there was no mention of the bus users themselves what they want what they need what they demand out of it service which I found quite interesting so in one of the sessions we one of the panel sessions which are three of the UK largest bus operators I stood up I introduced myself Lewis University of Aberdeen and I asked them their simple question do you think people actually value if they're using a low emission bus no there was a brief silence I could tell they thought of an academic with these questions so it was a bit of an awkward five seconds but that one of them said no I don't think so and then there was a brief discussion between the three of them and the moderator which was open to the panel but in the end they all seem to agree no I don't think so which I found quite interesting because three years ago I asked myself the exact same question do people actually value low emission transportation and if so could this be used as ways to implement new transport and just like them I was clueless I didn't know so I decided to do research on it so I set myself to try to find out if people actually value bosses now transportation is a really broad subject there's air transportation there's sea transportation there's road transportation there cycles I wanted to focus on public transport because not much had been done at a time when I wanted to get published so I decided to focus on buses since it's a most common form of bus and my love for buses began but what makes bus is so interesting oh for starters they're everywhere we've all used a bus at some point we use them to commute who use them to go shopping we use them after a night out if we've ever been on a night bus it's quite an experience some of you may have used it to come here but the reality is they're essential for our communities and they have been for quite a while this is a picture of a 1905 bus from London's route 11 perhaps one of the oldest routes in the world it runs from Hammersmith to Liverpool Street fast forward 50 years this is a 1950s bus serving the same route route 11 from Hammersmith to Liverpool Street fast for over 70 years this is the new route master-servant route 11 from Hammersmith to Liverpool Street now it's clear that buses have gone a technological evolution an evolution in style certainly they're much nicer to the eye they have Wi-Fi now they have screens they're more comfortable the rights are probably less bumpy one would expect so but one thing hasn't changed in the past 100 years they are still powered by diesel now this all is very convenient we've been using it for over 150 years to power our vehicles there are global supply chains ready to keep our buses running there's the expertise we have mechanics we have engineers but the reality is diesel costs has it's short comments we've been perfecting this transport basis and based on these of you but in the process of it we've been choking ourselves and we've been choking the planet the combustion of these of you produces emissions now there are two types of emissions there are the greenhouse gas emissions we are very famous which caused climate change and have global consequences and there's a second group of emissions that's not much talked about that's there's not much talk about them and those are the emissions that degrade the local environment the local air quality that surrounds us is the emission the smoke we see in the pictures that one we breathe in when we're standing next to a diesel engine now two of these summations are nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter both of which are produced are really high concentrations we not diesel fuel is oxidized or is combusted invention and one example where the diesel combustion of what diesel combustion has had an effect on the local air quality can become we found quite near from here now this is Union Street and this is the result of me standing outside a famous very good place I really liked which name I won't say now from the laughter they know where it is if you've ever been to Union Street and you haven't noticed there's buses running up and down all day every day in fact there are over 30 routes that use Union Street every single day now Union Street is perhaps one of the most famous streets in Scotland it runs from west to east it has lots of pedestrians it has lots of shops lots of restaurants of pubs but lesser known is the fact Union Street is one of places with the worst air quality in Scotland in fact Union Street is has been consistently ranked in the top five most polluted streets nationwide and this is widespread across the UK this is a map of the concentration of that nitrogen dioxide I mentioned before wherever you see red whenever you see orange green that means it's bad we can see a lot of red hot spots where the series in the UK are we can see red where Birmingham is where labour police Manchester Glasgow Edinburgh now all of the cities I've just mentioned they are in breach of the minimum safe level former nitrogen dioxide and nowhere is this more clear that in one particular place Oxford Street in London this is perhaps one of the most famous shopping streets in the world it's a tourist landmarks of people visited every day and yet mr. Khan is not wrong Oxford Street is the most polluted streets in the world now when I first found out about this I was a bit of a shock Oxford Street it's in the middle of a shopping area there's no factories there's no industry near it but this is also sweet awful trade is closed is restricted to only buses or taxis now the only diesel vehicles allowed on Oxford Street are buses there's a lot of pedestrians in Oxford Street we're breathing in all of this now this show there is a coronation in the amount of high bus transit in an area and the air quality of that area and take it into account that most streets that have high country high bus transit area high bus transit also have high pedestrian foot area for traffic it makes it an even bigger problem because those nitrogen dioxide salts particulate matter that I mentioned before are the ones that are killing us they have health risk they come with health risk and they have women studies that show that they cause premature death so something has to be done with this process right but the reality of is less than one percent of UK buses have low emission technology the existing schemes are just boss fleets of one or two buses implemented by a sitting of a local government here and there but there are all isolated efforts it's not part of an age one strategy or it's certainly not a priority of of local governments one of the reasons for this low uptake it's uncertainty uncertainty is one of the major hurdles when you have a new technology in this case green technology in buses there is uncertainty in the technology so will it work we have to develop the supply chains we have to develop the expertise there's uncertainty how people will perceive this people are actually valued the benefits of these rings to our community and on top of that there's uncertainty of who's gonna pay for all of this green technology is expensive who's gonna pair that but who's gonna pay the bill of this you know this is where the research my research steps in to try to address that uncertainty try to find ways and try to understand what is it people value and for this we turn to a local product the a burning hydrogen bus project Aberdeen is home to Europe's largest hydrogen bus fleet two years ago as part of a three-year program ten hardware and buses were introduced as part of an earning program so understanding hydrogen could actually be used to power buses in my case I used it as a case study to try to understand what is it people value in their bus service because I've read in such a really nice example because we have people that use the hydrogen buses and we have people who use diesel buses and we can test for differences between the two of them for this we used an economic tool called a discrete choice experiment which is just a fancy name for an economic thing that values what people care maybe people care about the frequency of their service maybe people just care about the punctuality of the service in our case we introduced emissions and for this to run the discrete choice experiment we have to go to the streets and we have to ask people so we set out there this is economics being done in case you were wondering how it looked now I want to pause here I want to give a shout out to our interview team here I come from Costa Rica it is a rather warm place so let me tell you one thing there's nothing like being out there on a winter morning or a winter afternoon in Scotland with an iPad open for a buzzer to show up so I want to give a shout out to our interview team so we were out there for eight weeks in November and December and we gather interview data try to ask people what they felt was they were wise well well they were waiting for their bus for this we use a survey instrument held on an iPad which contained the discrete choice experiment which was designed by myself and colleagues from the health economics Research Unit and it had input from other departments within the University and input from the City Council after we were there we gather all the data and we plug it into the model using econometrics I'm not going to go into the details of this I don't want to bore you after you have a glass of wine after you had a cupcake with the details of how economics is done but I will tell you this running simulation method we can construct the model that tells us what is it people value in a past service and now here comes the really exciting part I hope first off people who use diesel buses they prefer services that are cheaper they prefer circuits that are more frequent they prefer services that are more comfortable and they prefer services are more punctual now I'm not telling anything new here you all knew that before have going through all the hassle of doing interviews and service and running this thing but it gives us confidence that our model is correct and on top of that people who use diesel buses they seem to value a reduction in the emissions that caused the local air quality degradation those nitrogen dioxides I talked about before those particulate matter now if we compare this with the people who use hydrogen these are people who regularly use the hydrogen bus services right now they also prefer services that are cheaper more punctual more frequent more comfortable that they all value even more the reduction in the emissions that cost a local air-degradation and they value the emissions that cost me in-house gas for that cause climate change now this shows the difference between the two of them furthermore on top of that only random order and try to predict what is the what is the people what with what kind of service people would choose the hydrogen people they are more likely to choose a service that we serve the ones they're using now whereas the diesel people they're more likely to choose a service that does not resemble the one they are using now now this is interesting because both of them report the same level of satisfaction but it's short somehow it shows that the diesel people feel that they're missing out on something but there's something out there for them perhaps along with this evolution in the green technology by experiencing the good or the green buses or the hydrogen buses they're also there can also be an evolution in the green mindset of people in the disposition towards a greener future now as an anecdote and to further emphasize this when the hydrogen buses were first introduced in Aberdeen there was a major opposition for them they were too expensive I'm William pounds per bus how many schools could be by with who could we build with that on top of that when the buses started running on average in streets they kept breaking down and there were no spare parts the mechanics didn't know what to do with the engines they were electronic so to get a spare part you had to shape it from Germany or Sweden so reinforcing that idea on the newspapers you'd see the picture of the hydrogen balls on a tow truck they don't work so much money two years after this 85 percent of the respondents from her serving thought that the hydrogen buses was a good idea so with this we can go to City Council's we can go to bus operators on tell them look if you introduce these services people are actually going to appreciate they're going to value them which usually introduced even more and by introducing even more we can expose more people be more people can experience them creating some sort of a snowball effect a green snowball effect if you will because we're talking about green stuff and this way we can turn this into this we can develop we can put forward a green fleet out there now I guess I want to leave you with two messages today the red messages I learned from the hydrogen boss project one bosses are actually really cool you should get into it you'd go the Union Street and spot bosses and take pictures we can share them if you want over here all night until to address that uncertainty that was at the beginning that uncertainty I mentioned before yes it is important to know what people value but to understand what people value we have to make sure they experience what they're valuing this is the case of the hydrogen cross project or to put it in a nutshell as one of early in boss user told me when I asked him what did he think of the boss user of the hydrogen bosses now that he has experience reducing them he said i how can i said in scottish the hydro bows nine i goodnight but are fine he said there was a slight containing that I am not sure of that translation I certainly botched the how you pronounce it but my guess is he liked them so there you go thank you [Applause]