good afternoon everyone welcome to
uh the its weekly seminar
um you know our original schedule
the speaker professor carolina on sarah
unfortunately could not make it
due to health reasons so we have a
switch of speaker and topic and
you know we want to thank our own
freezer ceiling
and who step up and on such a short
notice and give us
the seminar today
friezer is the director of the rogue
ecology center
at uc davis and a long time affiliate
and member with its
uh freezer with without much to do i'll
let you
take the floor all right thank you
michael
uh so i as as its staffer pointed out i
i only have one little
screen so if there's uh anybody has
questions as i go along
please unmute and just ask um or you can
wait until the end i'm i'm fine either
way
uh and as michael said i'm with the
roticology center at uc davis and the
rhodicology center is affiliated with
its
uh you can find out more about our work
at road ecology.ucdavis.edu
and today i'm going to talk about the
various silver linings uh the impacts of
the pandemic
on traffic and you can see um
one of the ways that we think about and
look at the pandemic in the background
showing the you know the widespread and
varied distribution of effects
of the pandemic which we're all familiar
with now
[Music]
i'd like to acknowledge uh that this the
presentation is not intended to
take away from any of the pain
discomfort and
loss that people have suffered
throughout the world and and in the us
and i want to acknowledge the um all of
the things that people
do in healthcare for us related to the
pandemic including my own wife who's in
healthcare
i want to thank medical colleagues and
and colleagues at the california
department of public health for some of
their help with some of the things that
i'll talk about today
uh special thanks to dr david weijin
who's a
analyst and programmer works for me
and thanks to several students who who
supported by ncst and helped with with
this work as well
these are undergraduate students who who
helped with the work
this work has been partially supported
by different funding sources
the majority of the work was not funded
and it was done um
uh basically because we could as a as a
kind of a fun
project and finally i want to
acknowledge uh george floyd and all the
other
um black and brown men um who are been
unfairly treated by police and
and continue to be every day so as we
know the pandemic had a lot of different
effects uh throughout
the world i'm going to focus on the
united states and this is just showing
a a range of charts of the first
the first parts of the pandemic when we
were we were pretty deep into
infections and cases and deaths and we
thought things were going really badly
at that point
um and you know we didn't know how bad
it could get but as you can see from
these
charts from different states there was a
pretty wide variation both
in the number of cases per day which is
on the y-axis
and the change in the number of cases
and so
in this month is being shown which is
basically late may
some states were going up other states
were coming down like connecticut and dc
excuse me district of columbia and some
were staying relatively flat
and a lot of this had to do with how the
different states were managing
uh the exposure to the coronavirus uh
in public spaces and uh one of the main
tools that the the states had
and other local jurisdictions had was to
order people or advise people to stay
home
[Music]
so uh the chart here shows the different
start dates
for statewide orders for stay at home
across the u.s the earliest was in march
15th
ours in california i think was around 3
20 march 20th
but the bay region had already started a
regional state home order
and the latest one was in early april so
in towards the end of march almost all
states most states
had instituted a stay-at-home order
and the the consequence of this
um as we know for travel was both a
reduction in overall
travel and um disproportion of
reductions in different modes
so air travel and transit enclosed
spaces with people you didn't know
basically a lot of that shut down to a
large degree
and there were a lot of outcomes of this
some of them
were maybe negative economic outcomes
there were probably a lot of positive
health outcomes
in terms of the coronavirus being
propagated
and actually research on zoonotic
disease or diseases of uh
animal art in which coronavirus covet 19
is probably one
shows that the more elaborate
transportation systems you have and the
more efficient the transportation is
the faster these kinds of viruses can
spread
and get way beyond the public health
abilities
in almost every country to detect
and control these so we
take advantage of and enjoy very
efficient transportation systems
but the viruses do too and so the
stay-at-home order was a was a very
effective
method at slowing down the parentavirus
uh
but it obviously didn't um make very
many people happy
so i'm going to focus on some of the
things that came out of the
shutdown and traffic that we can think
of as good or silver linings which is an
expression
um in the english language meaning
there's a benefit to
something that otherwise might seem
harmful
so one of those was and i'll talk about
each of these reduced traffic leading to
reduce crashes
reduce traffic leading to improved air
quality and climate change
and i'm going to focus on my focus on
the climate change gases
and then finally reduce traffic and
reduce impacts on wildlife from
collisions with traffic
so there's these different kinds of
benefits that that we saw
i'm going to refer to a
vehicle mods travel data set quite often
and use that in
as um as the quantification of travel in
in the us and this these data come from
streetlightdata.com
uh they have made um
pretty much immediately during the
reduction in travel and in the
beginning of the pandemic uh they
started making their data sets available
for free online
um now i think they're still free for
non-commercial entities and you just
have to sign a
data sharing agreement and they measured
county scale vehicle miles traveled
throughout the u.s and so for each
county
there was a daily estimate of vehicle
miles traveled and this came from
the movement of cell phones uh
and and then using algorithms to sort
out was that movement related to
pedestrian travel or some other kinds of
travel or driving travel
and they came up with an estimate for
each county for the vehicle miles
traveled
and so you can see right here if you
look at the dates on this
chart here um this is march 1st at the
beginning over here and this is
the end of february 2021.
so the travel went from
around eight to nine billion um
miles traveled per day uh and dropped
off about fifty percent
uh throughout the us to about four
billion
um miles traveled per day and so this is
about a 50
reduction and as as we know now
we're later in the pandemic we saw a
return
over time throughout the u.s and this
varied quite a bit among states some
states had fairly rapid return
by may in some states traffic was almost
back to normal quote unquote
in california traffic actually stayed a
little lower
it remained about 10 or 20 percent lower
than normal uh
even now and so there was a lot of
variation but overall in the us
traffic mostly returned to pre-pandemic
levels
by summer by mid-summer there was a
seasonal
uh reduction in travel through winter
this usually happens
however you'll see in a later chart that
this drop
from around eight or nine billion back
down to six
is about twice the size of the drop that
we would normally see
and this may be due to continuing surges
in the pandemic and you can see this in
the graph at the bottom right
where we had this winter surge in cases
per day on the y-axis
and so this is december 2020 at the
bottom of the the um
x-axis there on the right and this
corresponds roughly with when we saw
a larger reduction than usual for
wintertime travel
in the u.s and this this
reduction in travel varied throughout
the country so um as i pointed out
and this shows it spatially so a lot of
northeast states
uh had bigger reductions in travel than
other states throughout the country
including
larger than california
in california and other states there was
a some effects
on speed there were
news stories california highway patrol
saying that there was more
speeding very very high levels of
speeding
and when we looked at the caltrans
sensors on pims
we did see occasionally that there were
those really excessive speeds
but if you look at the column here
this is looking at multiple highways in
california and looking at the peak speed
change between
before the stay at home order and after
and the peak speed the 95th or 99th
percentile
miles per hour only changed by a few
miles per hour
uh for these different highways the
average speed
also changed but only by a few miles per
hour so it seemed like there was an
increase in speed
but um one thing that might be happening
is that it's the california highway
patrol is having easier time
catching the people speeding or an
easier time seeing the people speeding
and so we we don't necessarily know
which it is but we certainly know that
there was some increase
in speed in terms of crashes which are
quite related to speed um there was
actually
a decrease in crashes of all kinds and
i'll walk you through these
these charts here so the top
um chart starts january 1st 2020
and it goes to february 28 2021
and so i'll just highlight this area
right here this is right
when the statewide and the bay orders
started and the red area these are
all traffic collisions and the green
areas the subset that are
injury primarily injury crashes there
are a few fatal
crashes as well so traffic
crashes of all kinds declined 50
uh within the first two weeks of the
pandemic and then went up to about 80
percent of normal
through the summer and this was
paralleling the changes in traffic in
traffic volumes as well
which only went up to about 80 for 80 or
90 of normal
in the summer uh there were a couple of
events
right here in um and this these were in
southern california they were major
in central california there were major
rain events and this led to a sudden
spike
in in crashes including injury crashes
but otherwise the the level the numbers
of crashes stayed very low
through into the mid-summer fatality
crashes did not change
and in terms of absolute number and what
that means is
since we had a reduction in the number
of vehicles and vehicle miles traveled
that means there was actually an
increase in the rate of fatality crashes
per vehicle mile traveled per vehicle
so this is um that's something that
probably worth looking at and actually
major injuries also have the same thing
and that's that's consistent with the
idea that
you can see in this previous graph if we
look at
this chart this is 405 showing the speed
on
on 405 in southern california
and normally the speed would go down
during the afternoon this is the period
shown here and this is due to rush hour
traffic everybody slows down
but during mid april on 405
traffic speeds stayed fairly constantly
high
and so that's consistent with the idea
that you would still have
more fatal and major injury crashes
which tend to occur
with high speed crashes a lot of this
information comes from a system of ours
called chips which is a real-time
querying of traffic crash information
throughout the state it's the only one
of its kind
and it's it's very spatially accurate
and
so if anybody is interested in traffic
safety feel free to contact me about
about using these data the reduction in
crashes that we saw in the injury
crashes was confirmed independently with
sacramento regional hospitals reporting
declines in vehicle accidents and also
injuries to pedestrians and cyclists
during the same period of before the
stay state home orders into april
and that's not a change that we would
normally see in say 2019 there was no
change at all
the crashes were distributed fairly
evenly throughout the state
in terms of reduction and so on the left
you can see the pre-pandemic condition
map this is density of crashes
throughout the state
and on the right is density of crashes
in april mid april
and you can see the basically the red
colors dimmed the orange colors dimmed
all the the colors got slightly less
intense indicating there's fewer crashes
but the distribution of those is fairly
even throughout the state so no single
region benefited from this
um from this reduction costs these are
estimated costs using federal highway
administration
coefficients for how much different
kinds of costs
how much different crashes cost and we
looked at pre and post order
state home order costs and basically
california
saved about 40 million dollars per day
in crash-related costs
from before to after the order and so if
you were to look at that over
say a month 30 days and that's 1.2
billion dollars saved
from reduction in crashes
the next thing i'm going to talk about
is greenhouse gas emission reductions
the as opposed to the previous section
on traffic safety
this is more based on
estimates calculations of estimated
greenhouse gas emission reduction so the
previous section was
i would call it real data and this is
more estimate so just keep that in mind
and i looked at several different
aspects of this one is how did
estimated fuel use change how did that
look in terms of carbon dioxide
equivalents for fuel combustion
and then what kind of changes might that
result in in terms of fuel taxes
and fuel tax revenue is really important
to most states as we know
because it can it's the source of a lot
of transportation funding
and for those states that are working on
improving
transportation and making it more
sustainable in terms of greenhouse gas
emissions
a reduction in fuel tax revenue might
actually reduce the state's ability
to make those kinds of changes so
there's these kind of opposite effects
as you reduce
fuel use you're actually improving the
greenhouse gas emissions situation
but because it also results in reduction
in fuel tax revenue
you might affect the ability of states
to implement
climate change policy
so this is the same um you can same kind
of map um
i showed before so because vmt
reduction has a parallel proportional
decrease in
estimated greenhouse gas emissions the
map looks essentially the same
and what you can see is this variation
among states as i said before
there's also a variation over time and
i'm showing the example here from
california so
this is a little different chart than i
said before the beginning of the x-axis
here is january 1st 2019
and so we can think of this as a typical
year of vehicle miles traveled where
there's lower travel in the in the
winter and spring it increases during
the summer
a lot of that is tourist or recreational
travel and it goes back down again into
the winter
so you can see a similar shape for 2020
but the whole curve is lower and what i
mean by that is if you take
the average here of about 1.25
billion miles traveled per day in
california
there's about a 25 reduction between
summer of 2019 and summer of 2020.
so and this is true for winter spring
and all the other comparisons you could
make so there's a
there's a reduction from normal so even
though we did have an
increase of traffic increase in traffic
um
coming out of the um the early days of
the pandemic
up into the summer the increase led us
to a new normal
which was slightly lower than uh
previous years
so this this shows um the the
oops sorry i gotta change something here
um can't see my own results because the
screen share
bar is in the way
i'm going to um just pause it for a
second and answer a couple of questions
that showed up in the chat bar which i
just noticed
there's one
uh one question could we account for the
lower emissions curve for 2021
for california with traffic coming back
to 80
to improve fuel efficiency and higher ev
sales and so basically with that 20 25
reduction in estimated greenhouse gas
come from uh
improved fuel efficiency and uh ev sales
and i i don't think so
um others on the seminar listening
seminar may know
may study this and um but the
information i've seen
that would be a very rapid turnaround i
don't think we've
had that rate of increase in fuel
efficiency or ev sales that could lead
to that
degree of change so i would say that's
entirely due to a continuing
pandemic response okay so estimated
greenhouse gas reductions
basically took all of the travel in vmts
converted that to
equivalent fuel use based on average
fuel consumption for the fleet of autos
in the us
and you can see the table a lot the raw
values along the bottom here
basically the s because vmt decreased by
50
therefore estimated um
carbon dioxide equivalence decreased by
50 from
pre to to pre-pandemic to um
post stay-at-home orders and you can see
the percent reductions these are eight
weeks so
approximately this green area here an
estimate there is about one to two
percent of annual greenhouse gases
in the us um were reduced during that
period
of the pandemic and so that's
that's a very high um that's a very high
rate so if we were to do
a one to two percent reduction in
greenhouse gas emissions
um uh regularly every year
then that would be about half of what we
need to do in order to meet our paris
climate accord
um goals and then the second period here
i highlighted in green
this indicating that there may be a
second
response in terms of reduced traffic
because of the
the surge that occurred in late fall
into winter
and so i think that that's real i
haven't
uh investigated well enough to say for
sure but i think there's been a second
reduction in traffic that
took place during that surge which would
also help us to meet those
paris climate court um goals
so if we had about a four to five
percent reduction in greenhouse gas
emissions per year
i mean help us meet our california and
also
u.s goals for greenhouse gas
emissions and with the just a couple of
months of traffic reduction due to the
pandemic
we got halfway to meeting those goals uh
in that one two month period terms of
fuel use and revenue so taking the same
estimated
approach of taking uh vehicle miles
traveled and and getting an equivalent
fuel use
we can see that there was a reduction in
in estimated
fuel use from almost 3 billion gallons
per day
in in sorry police in march to
um one and a half billion gallons in
per week in april this actually resulted
in a big savings
to drivers they spent about five billion
dollars
per week less in purchasing fuels
but there was a knock-on effect because
if you buy less fuel you're paying less
fuel tax
and the fuel tax is collected by state
and local governments
and so there was approximately half the
billion dollar a week loss in fuel tax
revenue
in the u.s and in california
we have both the think of it as the
regular or normal
tax and then we have the sb1 fuel tax
supplement
and there was a loss of one or two
billion dollars in
the sb1 fuel tax supplement from this
decrease in in fuel purchases
in california and that could have an
effect on
subsequent activities or planned
activities under sb1
because those activities are based on
continuing revenue streams
and this is the last thing i'm going to
talk about is impacts to wildlife
this is actually one of the primary
things we study at the rhode ecology
center maybe not
surprisingly and it's it's i'm going to
use the same kind of model or
approach they use for the previous ones
and that is to look at the
before and after the stay-at-home orders
as an indication of the pandemic effect
while recognizing that some of that
effect has continued on
even until the beginning of this year
so wildlife vehicle collisions are
usually among the top
three threats to wildlife in most of the
world
and what that means is that if you
if you look at what causes
excess wildlife death or human caused
wildlife death throughout the world and
impacts to wildlife populations
traffic collisions or vehicle collisions
with wildlife
are usually among the top three so in
california
all of the top three um or two of the
top three
of uh impacts to wildlife from human
activities are related to roads
one of those is fragmentation meaning
that if you think of
wildlife as living in a you know a
rectangle you put
roads cross hatched across it then those
roads will break up
that that area that habitat area into
small pieces or fragment it into small
pieces
which will affect wildlife populations
and wildlife species in a negative way
and could eventually lead to their
extinction so that's the effect of the
roads by themselves
once you put traffic on top of those
roads not only are those roads
fragmenting the wildlife and separating
them into small groups
but individual wildlife are also dying
and in some places at a high enough rate
that you can have local extinction of
certain species meaning that they just
go away completely
because of collisions by vehicles
so the um this familiar chart now in the
top left you can see the traffic changes
in
california since january 2019
and um we compared the rate
of wildlife vehicle collisions in
california and three other states in the
united in the us
between the period late february to
early march
and mid april so basically before and
after the state home orders
in each of the four states
and we call this um these two periods
which i haven't referred to
before period one which would be the pre
think of that as the pre-pandemic or
pre-stay-at-home order period
and period two which is the post-state
home order period
so in the top right here this shows the
four states california idaho maine
washington that we looked at and i put a
red box around
an important piece of data these both of
these tables are from a publication
which is
the citations at the bottom of the
screen
uh and it's um i think it's open access
if anybody wants to
to access it and you'll see a lot of the
names here the same ones i acknowledge
these are all undergraduate students
and it's their first publication so i
was happy that we could do that and
thanks to
ncst for their support for that so
across state highways this is a slightly
different way of looking at traffic so
we looked at both vehicle miles traveled
and for these four states there was also
state highway information some of it was
estimates and some of it was real
measures and so in california for
example
we looked at 20 different state highways
and interest rates
for what the reduction in travel was
along those in terms of traffic volume
and so you can see the percent change in
in traffic
due to the stay at home order for these
four states the average was about a
third or 30
reduction in highway travel uh it's a
little bit less than the estimated
reduction from vehicle miles traveled uh
and
it's not clear why exactly that that
would be the case except that you might
expect there to be
continuing uh use of state highways and
interest rates for freight
travel whereas you might expect there to
be a reduction in local travel by
by people who aren't moving freight in
response to the pandemic
so the table two here at the bottom this
is our primary uh data set this is
represents tens of thousands of
of observed animals um found dead on
roads
over a six-year period and 2020 is our
year of interest so the way this table
works is that the
the rows correspond to different years
and then going across the top each state
california idaho maine and washington
we looked at the daily rate of
collisions
reported to emergency so these are state
reported collisions of the large
wildlife the daily rate
between before the state home order
period one
to after the state home period sorry
stay-at-home order
and for every state there was a
statistically significant decrease
in the rate the daily rate of wildlife
field provisions reported to
emergency personnel from before to after
the state home order so just as traffic
was reducing by about 50 percent
uh the rate of collisions with large
wildlife decreased by about a third
across the four states when we looked at
previous years
there was never an occasion in any of
these states
where the rate of wildlife vehicle
collision went down
from period one to period two and the
only statistically significant change
that ever occurred
is that it would go up so normally in
california we would have no change or
an increase in the rate of wildlife
field proposing
on highways from period one to period
two
and what we found is there was a
decrease and suggesting that
the um the phenomenon we were seeing
across these four states was a real
reaction to the reduction in traffic
and this is consistent with the
literature which is shown
previously that when you have a change
in traffic when you have higher traffic
highways versus lower traffic highways
uh
you can see a difference in the rate of
wildlife vehicle pollutants
what we have here is something entirely
different there has never been an
experiment like this
where traffic volumes were reduced by
half
and then to study the effects of
wildlife so this was a this was an
unintentional
but excellent experiment in traffic
reduction and impacts on nature
so in the united states we have about a
million
wild animals per day of any size killed
on roads and highways
about a third of those are birds and the
remainder are
reptiles amphibians so lizard snakes
frogs turtles
and then various sized mammals um from
the smallest
rodents and chipmunks mice and chipots
and so forth up to the very
large bear elk moose and so forth
so about a million per day wild animals
of all sizes die on roads and highways
in the united states
so one-third reduction in this rate of
mortality
could mean that over the course of the
traffic reduction
um during the pandemic tens of millions
of animals that would have died
didn't die so it was a
net saving in terms of wild animals
dying on roads
and if we look at the history of
protection of wildlife
in the united states this is possibly
the largest conservation action that has
ever been taken in the united states
since we created the national park
system so we have
since we created the national parks
which had a lot of benefits to wildlife
we've never intentionally or
unintentionally done anything
as significant as this traffic reduction
to benefit wildlife so conclusion
so i'm just going to sum up all of the
things i've already talked about
um after the shelter in place orders
there were the following
um kinds of positive impacts
the first is that total travel in the us
dropped about 50 percent
after the stay at home order there was
variation among the states
and among counties and i think that that
variation could be quite interesting
uh one thing i didn't mention that we
looked at is that
the states that had the greatest
reduction in travel
also had the fastest response in reduced
coronavirus
uh propagation and that's what you'd
expect if you have
fewer people driving shorter distances
and not being exposed
you would expect the pandemic to slow
down in states that
returned to normal levels of travel very
quickly
into the summer they were the states
that we saw
in the summer have the fastest surges in
coronavirus so there's definitely a
very interesting disease transportation
connection there
there's also for those of you who are
political um
people there seem to be some
relationship between how much traffic
changed
and who the uh who the state voted for
or the county voted for
in the 2016 election so
that's probably not surprising but it
was something else that was interesting
to look at
in california where we have the the best
data
to look at crashes uh it's real-time
data we saw
a about a 50 reduction in crashes of all
kinds per week
except during an exceptional rain event
uh in 2020 and then
um there were actually a couple more in
the winter of 20
uh 2020 to 2021.
the costs associated with crashes uh
declined about 40 million dollars a day
and so there was a
if we looked at a two-month period uh
there was about a two billion dollars
uh savings to society from these reduced
crashes
estimated greenhouse gas emissions also
declined as you might expect
and it put the us on track to meet paris
climate court goals
however uh that statement um
is based on the idea that we might
either repeat this kind of behavior
or we might use the behavior in a
learning fashion
and say if we want to meet the paris
climate accord goals we either have to
drive less
or use less fuel and maybe more
electrification
in order to meet those goals fuel tax
revenues in the us declined
about half a billion dollars a week
during the eight weeks after the order
and that's going to have knock-on
effects for transportation
implementation i'm sorry i just noticed
i've got this
gh2s hanging out there it's going to
have knock-on effects for
building transportation projects which
actually would be a positive thing
if we have reduced fuel tax revenues we
might build fewer roads and highways
which is a net benefit for nature and
you don't often hear that in
an its seminar but building less roads
and highways
is beneficial to nature that being said
if we had policies that reversed
some of the negative impacts of
transportation by either reducing the
road system
or reducing the greenhouse gas emissions
then we would want to fund those from
fuel tax revenue
and so this would have a potential
effect on that so in california
reduced sb1 fuel tax revenue
could have had a knock-on effect on
the ability of the state to implement
some of its transportation-related
climate policies
and finally impacts to wildlife declined
about a third in four u.s states
between march and april and that effect
no doubt continued on
through the um
uh sorry i was just looking at one of
the questions there's a statement
through the reduction in traffic so
we're going to look at this again
now that a year has gone by to see what
kind of net effect there was
over the entire traffic reduction period
in california because california
did actually have a an overall reduction
in travel
and that's it um thank you very much for
your attention
i'm going to go ahead and answer this
one question
um before moving on to all the rest of
the questions
so a question from the lindell price
what is included in the costs associated
with crashes
so the way that the federal highway
administration
uh and to some degree nitsa uh calculate
these costs are there's the
the very localized causes to costs of
the vehicle damage
potential injury to the person driving
or passengers
and then there's these other external
costs there's insurance costs there's
emergency response costs potential
traffic delay
costs and all of those go into average
cost per incident
for different incident types and they're
very broad categories
so property damage only crash might cost
say 15 000
on average but you know um
you might have a a very small accident
that only costs a few hundred dollars
or you might total your tesla and it
sets you back a hundred thousand dollars
so
you know there's a very wide range but
we use the average cost for incident
type
and corresponded that to the incident um
the
traffic incident types that we record
and that's how we did the
crash cost testament
so um thank you for those questions
thank you for your
your time and your attentiveness and
i'm happy to take any more questions
thank you frasier
and i would like to remind our audience
that
for students you can use the raise your
hand
feature from zoom to ask your questions
and
for our other audience you can use the q
a
to feature to ask questions and since
this is also a class for our students so
we'll go over the questions
from the student first and then i think
today we have
an ample time to probably answer all the
questions
do you have a question you can uh use
the wrist
hand um function from zoom
we have a couple of questions in the
chat do you want to um
join me to deal with those first i
noticed gray had her hand up
yeah go ahead
so hayden can you ask you a question
sure yeah i was just wondering if you
saw in your relationship between income
and driving changes
driving behavior changes yeah that was
actually the way we were starting to
look at that was the relationship
between income
and ethnicity and crashes uh
and we i started working on that with my
colleagues at uc davis medical center
to see if there were disproportionate if
uh benefits basically
were people working from home who maybe
were well off
and um maybe more white
white collar like me maybe we had
fewer crashes because we were able to
work from home but people who were
termed essential meaning they didn't get
to work from home
they still had to drive and maybe they
were exposed to more crashes and we
started to look at that
but then my medical colleagues at the
medical center were drawn into the surge
and they weren't able to focus on
research anymore
because they were in the emergency room
so
um yeah we weren't able to do that but
that's a really that's a really critical
question
and i think it's a great policy question
because
it points out uh this another kind of
effect of the pandemic not only were
people um potentially more uh impacted
who uh in certain ethnicities or income
groups
um from the pendant from the coronal
virus itself
but then if they were also in work
situations
where they weren't uh that they had to
keep driving they had to keep being
exposed
then they had a disproportionate um
negative effect as well from that
and so there's um i think a lot of ways
you could look at that
thank you very quick question ray
ray you are you're next yeah uh thank
you
uh thank you for a great presentation it
was really interesting
uh i'm i want to go back to the
um saving money and you mentioned that
the number of
um emergency calls
for animals have been reduced or in
a third i think so do you have an
average cost of each call that goes to
emergency call
so this third reduction how much money
we
we saved for that right
um well the closest we could get to that
is because a lot of those actually
resulted in some kind of
um potential effect on the vehicle or
the passengers
then there's the same kind of cost you
could give to the
uh all crashes um not just the ones
related to wildlife
um but i didn't do that typically in
california in previous years
uh we about our cost from collision to
wildlife is about 250 to 300 million per
year
and so if there's a one-third reduction
uh let's say it's just it's a one-third
reduction for a couple of months
then it's going to result in
let's say 15 about 15 million dollar
reduction in
in cost of crashes associated with
wildlife
that's my top of the head estimate of
that benefit
so that's that's certainly a benefit
it's not as big a benefit
as all crashes for any reason and from a
wildlife point of view
uh i think the primary benefit is just
the wallet didn't get killed
and not just the large ones which are
the only ones that we we had data for
but all of the other 95 of the rest of
the animals are much smaller and they're
not recorded
so all of those animals are going to
receive that benefit of not getting
killed
yeah my point was that um if you could
compare or justify i know it's a it
should be justified
from another different point of views
but
if you justify that loss of
gas revenues with this amount of savings
and
and so on the gas how does the gas
revenue
uh how does that relate to the wildlife
part of it um
when you know you you mentioned that the
gas revenues
have have dropped because of the
pandemic you get restless driving
so um like
money speaking i was thinking okay
yeah we are not earning the money that
like
the um tax revenue but we are not
spending the money
right yeah yeah yeah okay yeah that's
that totally makes sense
um actually uh this the
the savings from uh reduced crashes
if i'm recalling correctly was greater
than the
um reduced fuel tax revenue so if you
think of that as
two two uh streams of income in society
one is a cost to society and the other
is a
it's a transfer of funds really within
society
but their reduction in crashes saved us
more money
than we lost in terms of fuel tax
revenue so as a net benefit from that
point of view
but if you work in transport a
transportation agency
you don't necessarily want to see that
right because your budget's decreased
and so that was i mean that was a bit of
a sticky point i think
last summer where we had a lot of press
coverage for some of our reports was
um we were saying hey we have these net
benefits and actually drivers are
spending less on gas and that's good for
them
but the transportation agencies in the
state were suddenly faced with these
shortfalls of
revenue uh and there was a lot of
scrambling to really figure out well how
much is that going to be and what are
they going to do about it
i don't know what the outcome was they
don't they don't necessarily share that
publicly
thank you yeah you're welcome
trisha you have a similar question about
the reduction of fuel
revenue would you like to ask that
yeah i that might have been answered
just now
my question was what do you think is the
short-term effects
reduced uh income from the fuel tax
yeah i think it's it what probably
happened is that there was a lot of
uh negotiation pretty hard negotiation
because the
the fuel tax revenue decrease probably
was a 10 to 20
reduction in our i'm just totally
estimating this in
the state's transportation budget and so
whose project gets cut
whose program gets cut you know that
that was what it must have been a huge
question mark
um going into the end of 2020 because
that was
um it's current year money and it's also
projecting into the 2122 budget
so uh you know i'm sure it was a
a big scramble i don't know what the
outcome was i don't know who what they
decided to cut whether they decided to
cut
you know paving or lane work or if they
decided to cut
transit and climate change um
related work i have no idea but that
would be a definitely a good thing to
find out
one of the things that we tried to do
related to that we wanted to
basically create an analytical approach
that is that was a rapid response
to what was happening in the pandemic
and
a rapid response analysis of these
policies
so that in the future if we are in a
situation like this
we're not waiting for two years or
something for papers to come out to say
what happened
instead we can have an immediate
analytical response and say
this is what's happening you know here's
what's happening right now with fuel tax
revenues
what should we do about it you know so
just shorten the the
gap between the events occurring and
then the
analytical and then policy response to
those events
any other questions from our audience
i i i have a question um
you know this uh shelter uh
at home place and uh the reduction we
have
clearly we showed that there's a
benefits
to the environment and reduction of
accidents and also it's increased the
welfare for
animals and like people doing fasting
you know from time to time and you
suggest we
should implement a traffic fasting uh
policy or incentives so people may be uh
not driving uh in some days and do
traffic fasting
either as individual or as a group and
then
not like dramatically like what happened
in the
covert era but you know in a year maybe
you can practice that for
a few days or you know
spread it out and so if we want to do
that
what kind of mechanisms can we uh
sort of have these kind of policies or
measures
yeah no i think i think that's a great
idea a road diet
you know a traffic diet uh is an
excellent approach
and actually we we could say well this
is what we should do
but i think what's actually happened is
that a lot of people certainly in
california have decided
this is what we're going to do or this
is what we have been doing
and so the the the net reduction in
traffic that we're still experiencing
about 20 reduction that's probably a
consequence
of this changed work behavior in part
and it's also probably a consequence of
people
uh gaining a new practice they they shop
less frequently
or um you know they change their
visiting habits to relatives or
or you know recreation and tourism um
if we if we maintained that we'd
suddenly have this huge reduction 20
reduction in transportation related
greenhouse gas emissions 20
reduction in crashes and all of these
things that have real costs associated
with them
uh would be a massive economic benefit
and a benefit to nature
and if we think about well what's our
behavior like now
and are we okay you know well the
primary stress of the pandemic
i doubt it's primarily driving i think
the primary pandemic stress is
am i going to get coronavirus and then
what's the economic
outcomes of all of this and are we going
to are we going to make it
so i totally agree with you i think uh a
traffic fast
periodically is is um or i would call it
a traffic diet
uh is something that we've learned how
to do and we should just keep doing it
um and then that combined with
electrification and other things
will get us on that that path to the
paris climate accord
it will be really interesting to see how
some of this
the new habits or or new norms that we
learn
from this pandemic and how long does it
last
whether it's stick or or will disappear
very quickly and
and i think there's probably a lot of
further study to uh after the banana
[Music]
yeah i mean the the expectation i think
last summer as
traffic was increasing again was that oh
we're just going to go back to normal
whatever that was
and what i think we've demonstrated is
that and maybe it's just a continuing
effect of the pandemic so maybe i'm
still being too optimistic
but i think one potential optimism
is that that reduction in traffic we if
we work hard we can make that stick
and suddenly you know we're on our road
on the road to the past climate
affordables
uh and i also study sea level rise and
climate change effects
and uh if we don't get on the road to
the paris climate accord
we're going to have a totally different
level of effects the pandemic will be a
learning experience
because you know all of the things that
could come with climate change are going
to be
pretty severe uh so you know i really
really hope that
that happens the learning process you
know
the silver linings yeah and also
you know the way people work and the
workplace change and the relocation and
a lot of that have a longer term
consequences um so yeah this is a
it's a natural experiment that will have
a lot of a lot of uh i think interesting
things
that that you know people can study for
for a while yeah got a couple more hands
up
okay so let's uh let me look at my
screen and
i cannot um okay maybe next page
don't see any exactly
um yeah i can i can
speak um yeah all right okay yeah please
okay yeah i just had a question about
um so i think during the pandemic we've
seen
a decreased use of public
transit and to some degree maybe a
decreased trust
of it do you think that that will have a
lasting
impact or potential like increase
in individual vehicles
being used immediately post
pandemic yeah what are your thoughts on
that
yeah no i'd be guessing just like most
of us right um
that i suspect there will be a a long
impact i don't think it'll be a forever
impact
and um because you know we've had we've
had
uh scares before there was sars uh for
example
um there was there were definitely
short-term impacts on travel
um i can't remember where i was going at
the time
south korea or vietnam but um
there were there was definitely a lot of
concern then
and uh we thought oh it's you know
people will be really worried and they
won't but no one thinks about it anymore
we didn't think about sars for a long
time until proven 19 came along
so i think one a good thing a bad thing
about being human
we forget quickly right as a group so
um i think that we will forget what it
was like and within a couple of years
you know the same same people who might
be using transit or want to use transit
will go back to using transit maybe
we'll do it slightly differently maybe
left hand sanitizer with us
uh but um yeah i could see it happening
and i think the the way that's going to
happen and this is where
it's maybe more difficult is
if the funding for transportation
continues to be
more and more directed towards transit
then
and less towards um highways
then the incentive is going to be there
more and more to go to transit because
roads and highways will be busy they'll
be congested hopefully
and so it'll push people into transit i
mean that's
that should be our goal um
and then the idea of if the transit
being safer i think that it's just
it's really difficult to get away from
the fact that you're in a confined space
that may or may not have good filtering
air conditioning
uh and you know you just kind of have to
deal with it
um all that being said the people who
use transit are
they maybe fall into that same category
of the people who are disproportionately
negatively impacted during the trans
pandemic
because their opportunities for travel
may be limited to transit
versus being able to drive the vehicle
so i think we really need to work on
um making it inconvenient for
everybody including the well-off
white-collar people
uh to drive vehicles so that we can push
everybody into transit
and that'll increase the popularity and
support for it
any other questions
does trisha have your hand up yeah i
have a quick question
um this is again on the fuel tax do you
think that
the drop in revenue from this past year
is encouraging um people
to restructure their revenue streams
like ideally in the future
we wouldn't they wouldn't be relying on
fuel
yeah yeah it's definitely um the the
currents go back and forth so sometimes
people say well we need a fuel tax
revenue because that's a good
index of driving activity um and then
sometimes
there's a push back saying well that in
a way it encourages
um the construction of roads because
then you get more fuel use and therefore
more revenue
and so there's a perverse incentive
there
um i think that the
the response the natural response or
artificial response whatever it is
state transportation agencies to the
reduction because they all rely on fuel
tax revenue
um over the last year i'm sure they're
looking at
non-tax revenue streams
in order to not not have this kind of
situation occur again
and it could be that something as simple
as
a legislative package that says when
this occurs
we'll give you an extra bump from the
general fund um i'd be surprised if that
happened
uh so and outside of that happening
really you've only got limited things
left
there's um registration car registration
fees and
but those are annual and not not the
they don't have the frequency
so i'm sure there's a mad scramble um
but i wouldn't want to guess as to what
the solution is i mean there's an
obvious solution you just increase taxes
so that you can pay for stuff when you
need it
but um i must be living in sweden or
something to say
that so i'm not sure that's going to
happen here
these are great i love these speculative
questions since i love speculating
so thank you for to everybody for those
um
there's another question here in the
chat
aditya ramji have you had a chance to
review the new transportation
infrastructure bill by the
administration and it
includes anything towards increased road
safety and wildlife transportation
conflict
or alternatively with the new
infrastructure bill exacerbate any of
these issues
well the one good thing about the
infrastructure bill is that it doesn't
have a lot of road and highway
funding compared to the size of the bill
i mean there's there is
a lot of funding in there for
conventional transportation
but there's a lot of funding in there
for other kinds of infrastructure as
well including schools
um so in in that way it's i think it's a
good thing
there was a proposed bipartisan uh
amendment to the bill
a couple of years ago this was when the
bill was a previous bill but the same
kind of idea
and it was for 300 million dollars to
improve
wildly people conflict across the u.s
that sounds like a lot but if you divide
it into 50 states
um and or even if you do it proportional
to travel california would get
30 million in in one calculation or it
would get six million in another
calculation
and there's one wildlife crossing being
built in southern california right now
that estimated cost is 60 million
dollars
it will be the largest in the world but
these crossings
this is a type of activity you could do
to reduce this wildlife vehicle conflict
they're they're expensive just like
anything like a bridge
so that amount of money 300 million is
is really a drop in the bucket
um california alone should be spending
uh you know that order of magnitude on
reducing wildlife vehicle conflict
but as you'll notice from you know its
seminar series and other
seminar series those kinds of impacts
impacts to nature are not a priority of
transportation
even though they are in ecology
transportation is one of the biggest
impacts
by humans on nature that's what we study
on the transportation side of things it
is not a priority
it's rarely ever discussed and i think a
lot of that comes down to
to actually fix that would cost a lot of
money
so it's easier to ignore it than to
actually address it
so i'd be surprised if the new
infrastructure bill did much to improve
this situation um hopefully this
hopefully i mean there are other states
in the u.s that do much more than
california
they tend to be republican states which
is always an irony to me
um but you know is i think states
they that that's really where we're
going to find this kind of action is at
the state level
somehow friday you can you can see the
questions but somehow i
on my screen i cannot see any of these
checkpoint
questions uh yeah so it's good that you
can see that
[Music]
there's no more in the chat and i'm not
sure if there's any in the q a
i don't see any in the q a so let's see
if there's any other hands up do you see
any hands up
michael um not
from my screen yeah i don't see any
either
yeah well um if not we'll stop it
i want to thank our speaker freezer
again
and see everybody next week
thanks everybody for your great
questions thanks michael thanks ikea