All right, So maybe let's get started.
Hello everybody.
Welcome to today's seminar.
This is a joint event between USF and CTECH.
So at USF, we do have
the Friday transportation seminar
organized each Friday during the semester.
And it's sponsored by
the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
and also Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR).
It's also sponsored by three Tier One UTCs
at USF and also the National Center of Congestion Reduction at USF.
This is a joint event together with CTECH.
CTECH is a Tier One
UTC sponsored by USDOT, with four partner universities,
Cornell University, UT El Paso,
UC Davis, and University of South Florida.
My name is Yu Zhang and I'm
a professor in the CEE Department
at USF and also with CUTR.
So today it's our pleasure to have Dr. Oliver Gao
from Cornell University to
deliver a talk on Smart and Healthy Cities.
Oliver is the director of CTECH and he's
a professor with
the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
at Cornell University.
I have known Oliver for a long time.
He focuses his research on the
environmental issues in transportation,
sustainability issues in transportation.
And his research focuses on modeling and
development of systems solutions for
sustainable and intelligent infrastructure systems.
You can see that he's a very productive researcher and
has published many papers in
very prestigious transportation journals and beyond.
And he also served as
the editor in chief for Transportation Research Part D,
Transport and Environment before.
So, without further introduction,
I will give the floor to Oliver
and thank you for accepting
the invitation and thank you for delivering this talk.
Looking forward to it.
Wonderful.
Thank you Yu and thank you all for having me.
It's a great pleasure to join your seminar series.
Good afternoon everyone.
It's a Friday afternoon.
So I will try my best to make
this talk as informative as possible and also in the meantime,
I want you to really enjoy this process.
I would like to go ahead and get started
right away. Let me see.
I'm going to start with two questions.
Maybe someone can help me get started.
Saeid, I saw you were here earlier.
So if I may ask you the first question.
So as an individual,
what is your most valuable asset?
Are you there? Can you help me answer this question?
Just you as an individual,
what is your most valuable asset?
I guess?
The knowledge that you can gain
and use it in our area, in our field.
Great, thank you for helping.
When we think about our assets,
of course, when you are working hard to get
your degree and after you graduate,
you are going to make some money and
you're going to put some of the money in
the bank. That becomes one part of your assets.
Of course, you'll make more money.
You're going to buy a car.
You're also going to probably buy a house with a car.
These are all very important assets.
But now Saeid, let me ask you again.
There is one asset,
that if you don't have, all these other things that I listed here
mean nothing to you. Can you think of that asset? My job?
What else? Anyone else would like to give it a try?
Of course you have many assets,
but there's one asset which if you don't have,
all the other things mean nothing to you.
Health. Thank you Yu.
Saeid, does that make sense to you?
Yes.
That's right. You can see that because we really work hard.
You work on your homework, on your project.
But from time to time,
we have to pause and think about what is
most important to us, which is health.
Now, if you look at health
in this nation, US, you can see that
we actually now spend about
18 percent of the national GDP on healthcare.
So what is healthcare?
Healthcare is essentially taking
care of people after people get sick.
And now I just wanted to throw one question to you
so that you can keep thinking throughout this discussion.
So we are spending 18 percent
of our GDP on healthcare.
But health care is only
taking care of people after people get sick.
But how often
have we asked or has our
healthcare system asked how did people get sick?
And we always know that, we are told to
preventive measures can be much more cost effective.
But how often do we take preventive measures?
So now, this is the first question regarding health.
Now, let me ask you a second question.
For the state of Florida,
for the city of Tampa,
and also for a nation like US, India, or China,
what is the most important asset for a county,
for a city, for a municipality, for a country?
Can you think of any assets for a country, for a state?
Anyone? Christina, are you there?
I'm just trying to ask
names that I can see on the Zoom panel.
I would say, people.
I think that is a very important asset. Absolutely. What else?
We have people answering in the chat box.
Infrastructure, natural resources.
Beautiful, beautiful.
So you can see that in the natural resources that
it is a very important asset and infrastructure.
We have smart people in our chat box.
And also, Saeid
as you mentioned, people, right?
I bet you did not see my slide before,
but you can see you have answered this correctly.
These are all very important assets.
So let's look at infrastructure.
In terms of the infrastructure,
what is now going on in Washington DC?
What is the big thing now going on in Washington DC?
What is the big thing now many UTCs are concerned about?
It's about our next infrastructure bill.
If you look at these infrastructure investments
from developing countries to developed countries,
a large proportion of our GDP,
a significant amount of money,
is invested in our infrastructure, right?
So here in this talk today, actually,
we're going to focus on how our individual
most valuable asset and a nation's most valuable asset,
how are these two sets of assets related?
How are they connected?
They're actually very closely related.
You can see that most of the time for
an individual, it's hard to figure
why infrastructure is related to one's health.
So let's look at this.
How are they related?
So speaking of our health,
based on health researchers,
there are three major factors that affect our health.
Genome, phenome,
and the third factor is actually exposome.
Exposome, genome, phenome.
Of course, nowadays people are talking a lot
about working on the genetics.
But that is really a two-sided coin.
We don't know really know how like
when people talk about CRISPR or
gene editing.
But let's be practical and realistic.
Among the three factors that affect our health,
you can see that it's really exposome
that especially for civil engineers,
is so close to us, right?
So speaking of exposome related to health,
we have to look at our cities.
We know that there's a whole world,
we have been talking for more than
a decade about urbanization.
Now, more than half of
all the population is living in urban areas,
in the city areas.
So any city you go to, if you're flying to any city,
this is going to be a
typical picture you are going to see.
Of course this is a picture of New York City,
but I can imagine if you're flying to
say Beijing, New Delhi, or São Paulo,
this is a typical picture you see here.
So in this picture, what do we see?
And also if you ask a deeper question,
why do we build these cities?
We build all these cities,
we build our towns to serve people.
But now in this picture of a typical city,
what do you see in this picture?
You don't see people at all.
All you see is essentially infrastructure.
I can give you a statistic.
Imagine that if you collect all the human bodies in
this city and if you look at either the mass or
the volume of the human bodies versus the whole size,
the whole mass of the city,
the total volume of human bodies accounts for less than
0.01% of the whole volume of the city,
which consists mostly of infrastructure.
We are building all these huge cities
to serve less than 0.01%,
that is the body or the mass of human beings.
And don't forget how we build the cities.
We move concrete.
We move cement from
mountains to cities and we build these concrete jungles.
And of course, you can imagine one pound of
cement from the production
all the way to the usage in the building.
One ton of cement corresponds to
one ton of carbon dioxide emissions.
So what are we doing here?
Right?
Now imagine that you are
taking an airplane and you get closer to the city.
You check in to a hotel, you look out of
the hotel room, now you see people.
Now when you see all these people in the street,
you can see all the people
having to do with transportation. Either walking,
or taking the taxi, taking the bus,
or taking the subway train, right?
So let me show you another picture here.
Among those in the audience,
you either have children or adolescents,
and you were once children.
Can you imagine what these children are doing here?
They are actually playing with the ants.
They are moving the rocks along the path of the ants.
Now can you imagine if one of the kids
puts a rock on the path of the ants,
what would the ants do?
The ants will adjust their behavior
and adapt to the new environment.
So this is why I actually say that
these kids here are building the urban infrastructure for ants.
And also the ants will adjust their behavior.
So now you look at this picture again, Saeid.
Imagine if you're in the hotel room
looking out from the hotel window.
Now what do we see on the street?
I see people using infrastructure for their daily needs.
And then from the previous slide here,
now you look at this, do you see any analogy?
You know like people moving,
people living in this infrastructure,
do they seem like ants, you know,
kind of facing those rocks in this picture?
Yes.
So my point is that.
I'm going to say that human activities,
our daily life, our behavior.
Of course, most of us,
a lot of us think that
we are in a graduate program
in a very good university, right?
We feel we've been very successful,
we feel that we are in control of our life.
But look at this picture,
I can tell you actually,
you are in control of
no more than 10 percent of your life,
your lifestyle, the way you move.
For example, this morning,
when you went from
your apartment to your classroom to take the courses,
your behavior,
you saw that okay
I'm moving, I was walking by
but you were following certain paths. Those certain paths
were defined by the existing urban infrastructure.
So urban infrastructure defines your behavior.
And more importantly,
the urban infrastructure investment
is one, irreversible.
Once it's invested, when it's built,
it's very hard to reverse it.
And the second, as soon as
infrastructure is done, it will
start shaping your behavior.
Just look at, of course, the US.
We have been very successful.
Especially Hollywood has been very successful.
All the Hollywood movies, the American dreams,
the lifestyle that
many developing countries have picked up.
That dream.
Look at what happened in
the past few decades in developing countries.
Even successful developing countries like India and China,
their economy has developed so much.
Their urban infrastructure.
Look at the roads,
look at the buildings.
And then you look at what is happening to those children.
Before, when I was young,
I went to school riding a bicycle or walking.
And now all the kids,
most of the time, they are
in the backseat of cars.
So when they grow up, cars are like their legs.
The future generations
of the current generation in the US,
they will be so used to
the ride-on-the-wheel lifestyle.
And then in the future we will realize, oh,
actually we should not do that.
We want to change our infrastructure.
You realize that the difficulty is,
reversing the infrastructure.
Those kids, those future generations
are used to cars.
They don't want you to change.
You can see the cycle here.
So how is our built environment, including transportation, how are they
shaping our lives and health?
Just going to give you some quick statistics.
Traffic safety. Many of you have
probably conducted research in traffic safety.
Just look at these statistics.
All these yellow car crashes,
car accidents, and also the injuries,
they all translate into big bills of health cost.
So now what do we do?
Let's do our best to make our transportation safe.
But even if we make our transportation safe, are we okay?
I'm not sure if any of you have seen such a picture.
Standing behind this bus could be more dangerous
than standing in front of it.
Standing in front of the bus could be
dangerous because you can see
that the bus could hit you and it could be an accident.
But even when you are standing behind the bus,
most of our buses nowadays are powered by diesel.
Diesel fumes, diesel emissions, can cause cancer.
They can kill. Actually you can see that
based on the paper published in 2000 in Lancet.
More people are killed by vehicle emissions
than by traffic accidents.
Let's say, if we make our transportation
safe and clean, are we going to be okay?
Unfortunately, look at the obesity rate
from 1996 to 2016.
Look what's happening.
Now I hope you
agree with me that
infrastructure does significantly affect our health.
So in a brief summary,
you can see that while we are
enjoying the mobility service,
enjoying the goods coming from all the different places,
all enabled by transportation.
But not many of us
realize this huge cost, this externality.
Sorry, this is a beautiful Friday afternoon
and I kind of
painted such a gloomy picture in front of you.
We cannot help asking ourselves what's wrong,
what's the problem?
As researchers, as future leaders
when you see all these issues,
you will ask "What is going wrong?
What's the problem?"
Since most people
are probably either studying
or are in the profession of transportation,
you may be very familiar with
this picture. From the left to the right,
this is essentially the evolution
of our human transportation.
What did we gain?
We got faster, faster and faster.
We gained a lot of physical efficiency.
You can see that throughout this process,
there were a lot of innovations, right?
But it was along the lines
of improvement in the physical efficiency.
And in addition, human beings,
we are not only smart,
human beings are also greedy.
We wanted to achieve
all this physical efficiency
through economic efficiency.
We want to spend the least money to do all these things.
If you look at the decision-making,
either yourself as an individual
or group decisions in Washington DC
for our infrastructure bills,
you're going to see that mostly they are
looking at these dimensions,
physical efficiency, economic efficiency.
But how often
can you see that these kinds of
tailpipe emissions would come into the equation?
No.
They were not in the equation.
But if such kind of issues
are not even in the equation,
how can you expect that the cities
would put your health as a priority?
That's why you can see last year when we were in
the pandemic and people
started thinking about cities again,
many people fled away from the cities.
And you can ask
why we are building these cities.
What criteria should we follow in building our cities?
I think nowadays it's really a good time for all of us,
from individual citizens to the decision-makers,
to academics,
it really gives us the opportunity to think about
what we have been
pursuing in our city and regional planning,
and in our transportation.
Well, our education system, universities,
have also been problematic.
Look at USF, look at Cornell.
Here at the bottom
we have this infrastructure.
Civil engineers contributed a lot to this.
So civil engineers, mechanical engineers,
or even operations researchers,
they are trained to
optimize how we
can make this whole system more efficient.
But while they're building these things,
they do not realize that emissions that come into
the air will pollute the air that we breathe.
However, civil engineers, we seldom know that.
And plus, this air pollution
will in the end impact public health.
So let me just ask all of you in this audience.
How often have you been in
the same classroom or in
the same conference where you have civil engineers,
mechanical engineers, environmental scientists,
and health researchers together
talking about urban design,
talking about new technologies?
Unfortunately, our education system has also been siloed.
Each department has
their individual silos.
So imagine that if we're producing these silos,
a student who will end up in
the siloed government departments.
So how can we imagine that we can,
we will be able to view
this whole system and see all these problems? Because look,
the root of the problem, for example, from transportation emission
is really related to transportation
which is in the hands of
civil engineers or transportation engineers.
But the problem is up in the air.
We have never met a scientist
who published science papers,
major papers to call out all these problems.
But civil engineers, transportation engineers,
they probably don't know that.
So that's why you can see that.
What can we do?
What must we do to overcome all these issues?
That's why the Center for Transportation,
Environment, and Community Health,
this USDOT center,
a very unique center, we are promoting,
we're advocating the system integrative approach
to infrastructure,
transportation, environment, and health,
from planning to the design and operations management.
How can we do that?
So you can see now
for most of urban planning,
this is separated.
First, we want to build
quantitative models to translate
all the infrastructure policies and plans and designs
into the impacts on the environment and on health.
First you need to be able to quantify that
because the other story I told you so far,
if you tell the same story to the
mayors, to the governors,
they'll say, "Oh, Oliver, I want to do something,
but I don't know how,
what will be the effective way?"
So as researchers, as educators,
we have the responsibility to develop new knowledge,
develop signs, and develop
tools to support the practitioners.
So first we quantify the impact.
And in addition, we want to proactively
fit all these impacts back into the planning, design
and decision process such that we avoid mistakes.
As I mentioned earlier,
infrastructure investment is irreversible.
So now with this system approach,
which is better with today's modeling capabilities,
we can help the decision-makers
avoid those deep hole mistakes.
How do we do that?
Alright, so here I show a simplified flow chart.
Sorry this might be a very busy chart for you.
But of course you can see that as I mentioned earlier,
since one of the roots of our problem
is this siloed education, siloed training,
that's why you can see from the training,
we want to have more engineers,
planners to be equipped with infrastructure systems,
analytical views, and tools.
We don't have many people like that
so far, but I have been very fortunate.
It's interesting that when I was doing my undergrad
I got my undergrad degree in civil engineering.
But in the meantime, I got to do
a degree in environmental science.
When I was doing my senior thesis at that time,
my senior thesis topic was
transportation and air quality in Beijing.
That was back in 1996.
I can tell you the air quality back in
1996 was much better than what Beijing has nowadays.
So anyway, and then when I was
doing my PhD, my PhD advisor,
she is a transportation emission modeler
and the other two committee members on my committee,
they are what people
jokingly call the Caltech mafia of air quality modeling.
So I had two committee members
with expertise in air quality modeling.
So I have been fortunate to be
trained in this cross-disciplinary way.
So you can see
now we look back to
these models from economic development,
energy systems, policy, technology, behavior
and then through all these transportation models,
emissions models,
air quality models, BenMAP,
exposure models, and then together
you can see that here at CTECH we have
integrated all these models together into
an integrated analytical tool for us to analyze
different policies from economic development to
behavior change, to technology adoption.
You can see that of course, we have
all this feedback from the transportation, right,
the traffic, emissions, and then
toxic air pollutants,
greenhouse gas emissions, all this and
feedback on the top to the land use.
And also you can see in
travel demand model we have activity-based,
the travel demand model,
US EPA's MOVES model for emissions modeling,
and then AERMOD and also the exporter model.
All these things can be integrated.
So here, I just want to give you some specific examples.
As I claimed before, I said that infrastructure
impacts our health.
Is that true?
Right, so this is a study where we looked at
about 13,000 heart failure patients
in New York City from 2012 to 2017.
Of course, we also definitely control
the individual covariates like their age,
gender, BMI, education, income.
After all those variables had been controlled,
we looked at the impact of the built environment.
For example, the walkability of
the neighborhood, air pollution, traffic exposure,
and all these
different individual components, right?
So this is the result of our model.
So this x-axis shows the odds ratio,
the odds ratio of a patient dying due to heart failure.
You can see that after we have
controlled all the individual variables,
all these built environment variables,
they all have odds ratios significantly above one.
Which means that they all significantly
impact our physical health.
How about mental health?
So we look at the incidence of postpartum depression.
Basically, baby blue,
that occurs in some women after they give birth.
There is a high tendency that they could develop
this postpartum depression, or baby blue.
So we again look at this data about
10,000 individuals,
control their individual covariates,
and look at how the built environment impacts
the rate of developing depression
after giving birth to babies.
Again, you can see that all
these built environment factors,
they turn out to be very significant
in affecting the odds
of women developing postpartum depression.
So here, this is another example where
we developed a software tool that
combines the activity-based travel demand model
of New York City with
EPA's MOVES emission factor model to support
the transportation conformity requirement by EPA and the DOT.
So we can see that for any future scenarios in New York City,
any transportation or infrastructure investment,
can be modeled through first the travel demand model,
and then this post-processing
software to give the decision-maker as well
as the general public how all the future transportation
plan's are going to impact the emissions and air quality
in the New York City area.
So this software has been used as
the official software since 2012 for
transportation conformity for
New York City. By the way, New York City is so far
the only city that has been equipped
with this web-based software.
Here you can see that we also have very finely resolved
hour by hour, and link by link emissions,
that can be used further for
exposure assessment.
And then of course, when emissions come out in the air,
it will be transported to the downwind.
The tricky thing is that, you know,
the atmospheric system is not only non-linear,
it also has so many different photochemical reactions.
That's mainly what many
atmospheric scientists today do to develop
all these non-linear complicated models to
simulate what is happening
physically and chemically in the atmosphere.
So this is the result showing the ozone concentration
and PM2.5 concentration after
considering all those photochemical reactions.
So again in our group, we have integrated
all these things together and then we apply,
for example, that software to look at
now a very hot topic,
congestion pricing in New York City, right?
Cordon pricing. They're talking about people entering
into lower Manhattan, beneath 60th street.
They're talking about charging a cordon pricing fee.
So we looked at how
the different tolling rate would impact the emissions.
The good news is that we
show that actually this congestion pricing,
of course, for the decision-maker,
they care a lot about the revenue.
But our study shows that actually,
if you charge a toll of $20 for that cordon pricing,
you can reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as
PM2.5 emissions by about 15 percent.
So that is really a good thing for the general public.
You're not only enjoying reduced congestion,
but you also enjoy reduced emissions.
Also, we applied our model to look at another scenario.
What if we electrify our transportation systems?
Of course, now post pandemic,
you look at the success of Tesla, right?
And now I think for many decision
agencies, including the federal government,
we are talking so much about
transportation electrification and what
would be the air quality and
health benefit of such strategies?
So we conducted a study using
our integrated modelling system
and using Houston as an example.
And our results show that actually,
if you completely electrify
the transportation system by 2040 for Houston,
each year, you'll be able to save
about $2 billion of health cost.
So we also looked at the freight transportation.
If you clean up the freight sector because freight,
diesel trucks, so that has
a lot of diesel PM that can cause cancer.
So we look at a different climate
and clean-up policies for the freight sector
and we show again the air quality and health benefit.
So essentially you can see that
using an integrated systems approach,
we can proactively quantify the potential impact of
any of our infrastructure from policy
to technology adoption, to congestion pricing.
And we can find out
what that would imply for the general public.
And then we can inform the public,
we can inform the decision makers.
And also we can fit all these
back to optimize our investment policies.
So we have done it for New York City and for Houston,
we can certainly do it for any other city.
So this is my second to last topic.
I described all those problems
and we had certain policy solutions,
but we all know that
transportation is
a demand driven service sector, that's nature.
So we have to think also about demand, the behavior.
So how can we take advantage of
information technology for behavior change?
I just want to give you a quick example.
How can we use information to change human behavior?
So for example, imagine if you have
a Google Map in the GPS.
It's not only telling you the shortest path
in terms of time.
What if we can also tell people
the emissions along different paths
your vehicle will generate.
And more importantly, what could be
your personal exposure to particulate matter, pollution?
Imagine that on one route,
it's like you're exposed to two cigarettes.
And second is about equivalent to three cigarettes.
Would that possibly change your behavior?
Right?
Of course,
for us to be able to tell
the exposure we need to be able to model
and monitor the air pollutant information ubiquitously.
So actually we find out that the cellular service network,
the wireless transfer network,
those signals are affected by weather and
weather in turn affects air pollution.
We develop algorithms to
make inferences about air quality using
this ubiquitously distributed
wireless communication network.
And then we inform the travelers.
So this is a picture where we
did a simulation for Fresno, California network.
This is when people are just using regular GPS,
no air quality information.
And you can see how congested things are
because everyone is trying to take the shortest paths.
Right? We all know that.
And now this one nothing has changed
but in addition to telling them the shortest path,
we also tell them the air pollution information.
And then of course,
all those behavior parameters were based on
econometric studies, willingness to pay,
how you are willing to pay for reducing,
for example, 10 percent of the air pollution.
All those behavior parameters are used in the simulation.
So what difference did you see
from the previous slide?
The beauty you see here.
It's very intriguing because
for many cities when we are dealing with congestion,
we're talking about congestion pricing.
We're talking about
tolling people.
But we all know that congestion pricing is regressive,
right, there are very serious equity issues.
But now if you look at this picture here,
what we did is that we just tell
people the air pollution information and people adjust
their behavior voluntarily and the outcome is
that it not only helps reduce exposure of these travelers,
it also magically reduces congestion.
So you don't have to toll people to reduce congestion.
All we need to do is to tell
people the air pollution information.
So this is just an example showing
you how powerful information could be.
My final points.
If you agree with me that
our infrastructure is so important to our health,
and then we have to ask what determines infrastructure?
That actually brings us to a higher level question.
It's called infrastructure finance
because we all know that,
who pays for infrastructure
has a better say about how infrastructure
will be built. So far,
you know that for our transportation infrastructure,
some of you, you know that we
have the highway bill, right?
We have the highways superfund,
which is based on the federal gasoline tax.
For the states or for the municipality,
they want to build new roads or something,
they apply for funding from the federal highway superfund.
But now you see we are trying
to promote cleaner vehicles.
We want to vehicles to burn less gasoline
that means that the gasoline tax will go down.
But on the other hand,
we all know that the US infrastructure,
as the ASCE has evaluated it is at a level D. Very bad.
On one hand, we are having a reduction in revenue.
On the other hand, we need a lot of
money to fix our roads.
So where do we get the money?
So that's why now a lot of people are talking about
public private partnership, PPP, right?
So basically the idea is that, you know,
introducing the private sector to come into
the investment of our future infrastructure.
Of course, when the private sector comes in.
They don't come in,
just invest for the good of the general public.
They want profit.
So anyway, this is essentially
going to be a game.
It's going to be a game between the government,
the private parties, and the general public - us.
And also this game is different from the game
you play overnight in Las Vegas.
In Las Vegas if you lose $200 overnight,
you come back home, your life goes on.
But these infrastructure games
are decades long.
And through the process, the contracting processes.
There are different stages.
So, while so many people,
including many politicians in Washington DC,
talk a lot about PPP, public-private partnership.
But not many people really understand
the intricacy of this PPP game.
Because how is this game
going to have equilibrium?
How are you going to be able to maximize the social welfare
while satisfying the Bayesian incentive compatibility
and also thinking about the interim individual rationality.
So this is another study that my group looked at.
But you can just go back very quickly.
In this one, look at the bottom right.
We wanted to incorporate the emissions
directly into
the mechanism design of infrastructure finance,
such that emissions are early on
already in the equation
because if it's not in the equation,
they are not going to be considered, right?
So this is basically another thing we're trying to do.
So you can see that all of us,
we are facing a megaton problem
which requires a megaton solution.
That requires a multidisciplinary system approach.
It's not just civil engineers,
mechanical engineers, environmental scientists or health researchers.
We need all of us working together from
engineering and natural science to social science and technology, right?
So also in practice,
we need multi-sector,
trans-sector collaboration in planning, designing,
and managing our future infrastructure systems.
Look, this is the community.
This is a community,
this is the city we're living in today.
Look at this child.
Look at what is surrounding her.
That could be your child,
it could be my child.
And she could be hit by a car while
she's breathing all this polluted air.
We certainly don't want our future generations
to live in such a miserable environment.
We want to build the cities of tomorrow.
We want our cities of tomorrow not only to be smart,
but also to be healthy.
That's why I feel that it really calls for all of us
to work together and first of all,
change our view, change our paradigm
and take a system integration and
innovation approach
towards the future of our communities.
I believe this is my last slide. I will stop here.
Thank you.
Great presentation. Very visionary.
Thank you so much Oliver.
And I didn't mention that
our seminar is actually hybrid
which means that we have the online session
and we also have USF students actually
in the classroom also listening to Oliver's presentation.
So now we open the floor to questions.
Please feel free to unmute yourself,
or you can put your questions in the Q&A of Zoom.
And Oliver, when you asked
the questions at the beginning about what is important,
we actually had a lot of answers in
the meeting chat as well as in the Q&A.
And I think many of them got the answers right.
That's right.
I saw Amy's answer - your health.
That's wonderful.
Okay. Questions from our audience?
I know it's a lot of information.
It's very, very comprehensive,
lot of information in many different areas. Saeid?
Yes.
It was a really interesting presentation.
Thank you, Dr. Gao
for that. It made me think about so many things.
You gave us an example that when you were a kid,
you used to ride a bike to school.
Nowadays with advanced technology,
I think all the kids are using public transportation and buses.
Aside from
all those physical health problems that
the new technology might cause,
I'm thinking about the mental problem.
Do you think that people that lived
at the time
when technology was not as advanced as now,
lived happier than we are?
As you said, we are making everything efficient.
More efficient. We are trying to decrease the cost,
but are we making people happier?
And if not, how should we change
our perspective to make that happen?
That's a beautiful question.
You can see that I turned back to this slide.
I mentioned earlier, right?
I think our cities are like concrete jungles.
And I mentioned that in concrete we use cement.
And you know that cement is produced by
processing the rocks from caves
in the mountains.
And Saeid, your question reminded me of course,
if you think about
our ancestors, where did they live?
They lived in caves.
And in the daytime they went out
to pickup fruits or vegetables.
Then at night they came back to the cave.
So to expand your question,
are people nowadays living in New York City,
are they happier than our ancestors living in the cave,
picking up apples and pears and eating?
So which lifestyle is better?
Exactly, that's my question.
Technology always makes worry about that,
that we are making everything efficient
but we're creating a lot of
mental health problems for people.
That's right.
So that's why
I'm calling for a paradigm shift from
individual level to a collective level.
Right? What is the purpose?
So for systems engineering,
whenever you start something,
system engineering prompts people to ask the questions,
"What is our goal?" "What is my objective?"
But somehow, you can see that in
our daily life, politicians,
our students,
we are kept so busy to be efficient,
such that we seldom
pause and think about the purpose.
And the "why". That's why Saeid,
I was just joking when I first asked you what is
your most important/valuable asset,
you did not know.
Yeah. Yeah. Great.
We have questions from the meeting chat and also Q&A so
one question from the meeting chat is
from Jennifer Brown and she asked,
"Could you please expand on how to tell
people about emissions to effect the change it needs?"
So basically how to improve the awareness
of the environmental impacts from transportation?
That's a very good question.
So maybe let's see
this slide.
So it's really emissions.
You can see that when you look at the statistics,
wow, more people are killed by
vehicle emissions. But in our daily lives,
if you think about,
when you think of a car accident,
you think about that bloody thing and
the person being injured or killed in that.
That would make an impact on you
and you will either tell yourself or tell your children
that traffic safety is the most important, definitely.
However, emissions are killing people.
Can you imagine a picture in your mind?
It's very hard. You cannot even imagine
how emissions kill people.
But now, Jennifer, let me try to give you a
another scenario or picture that will
get you to probably realize the importance.
We all know this story.
Right? If you put a frog in gradually warmed up water,
like in a bottle of water and you put
a frog in the water and you just heat that water gradually
in the winter time,
for example.
What would the frog feel
in the very beginning? Very comfortable.
"Wow, the water is becoming very comfortable."
But then gradually
it gets so used to this warm water.
And at a certain point,
it realizes that "Oh, the water is too hot."
But what does that mean?
It's already too late.
So I want to use
that analogy to tell you that vehicle emissions kill people
like you kill a frog in the gradually warmed up water.
So if you can, I hope if you tell this story to people,
they will see that.
But I think you did bring up
a very important aspect for our researchers.
It's really, you know,
we have all these scientific knowledge.
We have all these discoveries.
But communication. How can we
communicate all these things effectively
to the general public, right?
That is so important.
That's why, actually, Cornell,
in collaboration with USF, some professors at USF,
are having this community buddy program [Healthy Buddy Program https://www.hbuddy.org/]
to help with seniors.
So what I'm trying to say
is that engineering is not simply just math or equations.
Now if you look at today's talk, look beyond it.
Engineering is actually everything from
communication all the way to mathematic model making.
Thank you, Jennifer, for that great question.
Thanks Oliver and another question from Shanjun Li says,
"Could you please talk a little bit
more about this study on depression?
For example, the data and the
method used and the policy implications.
If green space or proximity to
public transit helps mental health,
could you put a dollar value on that benefit?"
And I think you did mention
how much it can save the health
costs if the emissions are considered in equations.
So can you elaborate on that?
Yes, sure,
one clarification and then the answer to Shanjun's question.
So I did mention that the health savings
but that was a case study looking
at what if we electrify transportation in Houston?
And we used BenMAP, exposure,
health risk, and also translated into statistic value.
Yeah, so that was basically about,
that was for electrification.
But this one, Shanjun,
this was an empirical study
looking at the data.
Actually, this is your area.
It was statistic modeling after controlling the
individuals' variables.
We controlled those.
It was more of a hypothesis test and we wanted
to find out whether or
what built environment factors
are associated with the incidence
of this postpartum depression?
And we have found out that you can see, even distance to
the bike path, or distance to the green space,
accessibility to the green space, they all play a role.
Towards the end of our paper,
we did make some recommendations.
For example, of course, in the green space,
which is always a very important thing.
But we did not do
any quantification because at
this point, we're not able to yet.
So for example, if you invest
this much money in building some more green space,
then what would be
the coefficient corresponding to
the improvement in mental health?
That part is really very tricky.
And of course, this was a collaboration
between engineering and also Cornell Weill Medical.
So we were working with them because
they had the health data.
But I think probably in the future,
if we can also work with economists like you,
we can probably add
some more dimensions in terms
of cost effectiveness assessment.
Thanks Professor Li for the question,
and thanks Oliver for the answer.
Do we have more questions?
Do we have questions from the students
in the classroom, Christina?
Yes.
I saw one attendee,
so maybe we should go there. Christina,
please let me know if we have questions
from the classroom.
We have no questions [from the classroom] right now,
we increased our attendance in classroom a little bit
so they're still thinking about it.
I saw that Sean has a question
about using vehicles as probe sensors.
Absolutely.
Because the thing is that nowadays,
the cost of sensors is coming down significantly.
So think about Tesla.
Tesla is essentially a moving sensor,
a moving set of sensors, right?
I think it's kind of if we can take advantage of
the vehicle technologies to monitor this air quality.
But you can see that monitoring air quality
is not the ultimate goal.
It's really through the monitoring of this information and
distributing that information to
the travelers to change their behavior,
that if we can make that happen,
I think that will be great.
And in the meeting chat also,
someone asked
if a link to the recorded
session could be sent to the attendees by email.
So this is a joint event between USF and CTECH.
Actually, we will work on
this recorded presentation and
put the captions on it. In about two weeks we
will post it on the CTECH website [https://ctech.cee.cornell.edu/].
So I will put the website here
and then maybe after two weeks you can
go directly to the website and you can see the recorded seminar
https://ctech.cee.cornell.edu/events-2/impacts-of-transportation-and-urban-systems-on-health-and-the-environment-webinar-series/
So another question, coming from Gina Park, says,
"How can we factor in a structural problem?
For example, lower-income households in
the less clean environments in the
integrative model of transportation,
health and infrastructure."
Wonderful question, Gina.
We are currently finishing up two papers
related to environmental justice and equity.
Essentially, you are bringing up
this very important dimension
of the environmental injustice,
lower income people or
certain ethnic groups or
racial groups that live closer to the road.
So currently,
we have two ongoing studies.
One study is that we are looking at the quantification
of the disparity in
exposure to these transportation related emissions.
The second one is even more interesting.
We are looking at,
if we electrify the transportation system,
how would that impact this disparity?
We have an existing hypothesis.
My hypothesis is that,
adopting cleaner vehicle technology will
help reduce the disparity.
Here is the rationale.
Because so far a lot of people, when they talk about,
when they think about
equity issue in adopting electric vehicles,
they are mostly looking at okay,
rich people tend to be more able to
afford or adopt a cleaner vehicle.
But think about New York City as an example.
Many rich people, they live on Long Island.
They commute every day from Long Island to Manhattan.
And if they're driving a conventional car,
they are going to emit along the way in Queens,
where relatively poor people
are living in the Queens area.
Now imagine that if those rich people,
they adopt electric vehicles,
they buy electric vehicles.
And then when they drive actually,
that's why I'm hypothesizing that
electrification could be one of the really good technological solutions,
not only reducing the overall emissions,
but could mitigate the disparity.
This is our hypotheses.
We're doing modelling to verify this.
And another thing we're looking at is also like the rural
versus urban differences in terms of this disparity.
Because we recently finished a paper looking
at the future three revolutions,
how they impact air quality and health.
We have already done that, and now we
are looking further to
study the equity implications
of the future three revolutions,
which are shared use of electrified autonomous vehicles.
Thanks Oliver. So you talked about electrification in
transportation. There is one question from the audience.
And the question is,
"Electrification transportation is crucial
for global climate stability
but the electrification transition is very
slow due to to a number of factors.
So how do you entertain
this disparity between the demand for
electrification and the lack of technology
and money for developing countries?"
I think first of all, it's interesting, right?
I would like to answer your question from two aspects.
The first aspect, again,
looking at what is happening in Washington DC.
The Biden administration is trying hard,
it's trying hard to get that $3.5 trillion bill.
In that, and I know Shanjun is also aware,
that there is going to be
a huge amount of
money targeting transportation electrification.
Because of course in this country,
if human behavior changes,
there is momentum, right?
It's a habit.
It's probably very hard for people,
for you to change human behavior all of a sudden.
Many people are going to switch to
electric vehicles. It is a gradual process.
But what I can see is that at least in this country,
that process is now much more
promising from the national policy level
to the technology level, right?
I think technology is, in
the past couple of years,
a few years, technology,
this mileage, this range anxiety
has been mostly addressed
by the battery technologies.
I feel positive about
at least the near term trend
of transportation electrification.
And you also probably realize that many studies
now are being conducted.
For the developing countries,
while you might
think that developing countries
might be at a disadvantage.
But if you look at that from another perspective,
I see it as an opportunity for leap-frog.
The reason is this. Just look
at the example of China,
and I think in DC,
the Biden administration and other politicians,
they're talking about what has happened in
China in terms of transportation electrification.
So that's not necessarily,
I think, a disadvantage.
And also what is happening in India,
like in the Tata company.
Of course, in a lot of other developing countries,
while in the near term,
they might not be able to adopt
electric vehicles as fast as the developed countries.
But if you look at the overall life cycle,
development cost of
transportation electrification technologies,
and the adoption cost,
I still believe
that the developing countries
without the initial investment in the technologies,
they might be able to enjoy
more mature and less
expensive and cleaner technologies.
Alright, thank you so much Oliver.
And I think your talk
definitely gave the audience lots of new thoughts.
And also you gave some kind of
direction to the students for their future research.
And you have demonstrated
how the interdisciplinary research is
so important to connect
transportation environments and public health.
So this is great and
thank you again for delivering this talk.
Thank you all.
It was a great pleasure to talk to you
I hope you'll find some of
the views helpful for your future development.
Of course, if you have any questions please do
reach out to Yu or directly to us.
We'd be very happy to answer.
I put the link of the CTECH website in the chat,
so please write that
down if you want to visit
it later for the recorded seminar.
And I want to thank Dr. Gao
again and also thank
the audience for attending today's seminar.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. Great.
Bye-bye.
Bye. 2654