This week on Talking Headways we’re listening in on a one-on-one conversation between Julie Eaton Ernst, Climate Resilience Practice Leader at HNTB and Dr. Cris Liban, Chief Sustainability Officer at LA Metro. They chat about the co-benefits of transportation, the evolution of the definition of transportation and making change in small steps.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Julie Eaton Ernst: I’m wondering if there is, from what you’ve seen locally with L.A. Metro, and nationally, as part of this larger thought leadership, what are some of the key messages you take forth for what the transit community is looking at when it comes to the climate crisis in terms of solutions and challenges?
Cris Liban: I’ll answer your question this way. I’m a transit rider. I’m a transit rider who has a choice. I can drive my car. I can afford to put fuel in that car.
But I chose to take transit, I chose to experience that with the more than 70 percent of our transit dependent population here in Los Angeles... to better understand not only the struggles of people, but how to improve the transportation system... I work with my colleagues, 11,000 strong here in LA Metro, that we try to keep [service] on time and reliable. Try to keep [it] safe, try to keep [it[ clean. And at the same time allow for economic upliftment of the whole community and reducing, burdens as a result — in many parts of our county and whatever those burdens are, we don’t have time to talk about [that].
I start the answer that way because, I did mention earlier that, I was trained as a scientist, but in my graduate degrees, I trained as an engineer, and as an engineer, you tend to offer solutions — compared to as a scientist, you’re trained to ask the questions, right?
Julie Eaton Ernst: Yeah, to diagnose the problem. Scientists diagnose, the engineers solve. It’s that combo.
Cris Liban: So sometimes I feel like I’m schizophrenic in a way. I’m asking the question, but at the same time I’m trying to answer the question... because, again, going back to your question and on, what I’ve seen, what in store and how do we reconcile these experiences locally to what people might be thinking nationally. There’s really no fundamental difference, I think, at least from what I’m seeing the issues are. You did mention the National Climate Assessment, that came out back ... in November last year.
And we’re so happy to actually see the White House roll it out. We were there in Washington, D.C. to get that through. And there were four key messages in the transportation chapter... Climate impacts are real. There are multiple issues that are human caused, but what we found out during that assessment is that the risks of climate are essentially getting reduced because of the strategies and the solutions that we humans have come about in realizing the climate crisis.
Part of our assessment included this discovery, actually, of the evolution of the definition of transportation. Transportation traditionally has been, linked to, oh, it’s about buses and trains and airplanes and ships and boats and active transportation, bicycling and those types of modes and walking, right?
But what we’ve discovered as well is that, because of the technologies that we’ve produced over the course of many years, people are now talking about not only those, but the internet. The delivery of information pipelines has always been part of the transportation definition, at least for us here locally. But people may not necessarily realize that pipeline distribution is also part of the transportation paradigm. And it’s because of redefinition, or at least the awareness on this new definition of transportation, we need to, as transportation professionals, actually think a little bit differently. Not only because of what we’ve seen during the pandemic — this black swan event — and how to become more resilient, so that black swan events like that won’t affect us economically and socially and in a significant way. So we need to rethink about how we plan, how we construct, operate, maintain and procure for these systems. So that's the second message.
There's also the third message where we need to think about the who benefits... There are "co-benefits" that, we may not be necessarily thinking about — the health benefits indoors, for example, reduced carbon dioxide because of the reduced carbon dioxide outside. We have a graphic in there where we outline what could be, and how policymakers should be rethinking about the co-benefits of transportation.
But more importantly, I think is the fourth key message in there that, despite all the conversation about the technologies, the zero emissions vehicles that we might be producing and all the great discoveries and achievements that we’ve seen in the clean tech revolution, there are unintended consequences around the world that we here in the United States, in this great economy, in this great country of ours, that we don’t see and are not aware of. We point to those unintended consequences of mining for these battery components, the unintended consequences of — we have one co-author, for example, and, they essentially have lived in in the Alaskan region, for a while. That’s where she grew up and they used to be able to go across this tundra from their house to the hospital and now the permafrost is gone. It’s not a big lake and it takes a few hours to actually go from their house to the hospital now.
I think that last one really resonates in many of the public meetings that we have gone to. Us bringing those things out in the open not only spurred conversation, but made people that I’ve talked to in the last, almost, year about this assessment, really assess the strategies that they have long sought to implement, but now with the unintended consequences of those strategies as part of the equation, are now not rethinking, but, making sure that, especially in overburdened communities not only here in the United States, but anywhere and anywhere else in the world, that those overburdened communities would not continue to be overburdened for the benefit of the few.
