The COVID-19 pandemic is having huge impacts on transportation. Telecommuting trends may persist. Traffic is down, bus and train schedules have been slashed, and air travel is at levels last seen in the 1950s. COVID-19 is affecting transportation today, and the pandemic will likely have huge impacts on how we get around in the future. This blog series explores intersections between the COVID-19 pandemic and the “3 Revolutions” in transportation: shared mobility, vehicle electrification, and vehicle automation. The goal of this blog series is to identify key strategies that can help transportation leaders in pursuing climate and equity objectives – after the worst of the pandemic subsides. If we can respond to the enormous challenge that this virus poses, it will also enable us to increase the resilience of our transportation systems, and respond to similar crises that may emerge in years to come.

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Part 1: COVID-19 Will Not Cancel Shared Travel

When the virus wanes, what can encourage people to return to shared travel—and ensure it is safe to do so? Shared travel makes transportation more affordable, equitable, sustainable, and logistically feasible. But fears of sharing may linger. Shared modes will need to come back safer, better, and more reliable than they were prior to the pandemic, or people will not share.

Transit

During the pandemic, public transit has been one of the hardest-hit modes of transportation. Data from mobile apps indicates that transit ridership has plunged by 50% or more in major cities around the world and transit demand in the United States has dropped by nearly 80% nationwide. Google reported that in early April, foot traffic at transit stations was down by more than 50%. These numbers are especially stark when compared to other transportation modes. Apple, for instance, has recorded a 76% drop in routing queries for transit during the pandemic but only a 45% drop in queries for driving. Similar patterns are being reported overseas. Researchers at ETH Zurich showed a much larger decline in the use of public transit than other travel modes.

While this transit ridership freefall is unprecedented, transit was already in big trouble before COVID-19. Most U.S. transit operators saw declining ridership and fare revenues prior to the pandemic. This is due to many factors– including increased competition from ridehailing and reductions in barriers to auto ownership. But the pandemic may take the difficult situation for transit operators from bad to worse. Fare revenues only cover a small portion of many agency’s budgets. Local funds tied to tax revenues make up the large part of many of our nation’s transit budgets. The looming pandemic era recession could serve another hit to those transit agencies reliant on sales taxes. Federal funding will play a key role in filling growing budget gaps. The CARES Act includes $26 billion to support transit, but it may not be enough for many struggling agencies.

Transit operators will need to leverage additional resources to tackle both COVID-19 issues and broader ridership decline issues head on. Operators are already working with health authorities to keep transit workers and riders safe during the pandemic. Operators are taking a number of different types of actions including by erecting Plexiglas barriers to protect drivers and ticket sellers, frequently cleaning stations and vehicles, eliminating fare payment, and implementing other policies and procedures designed to minimize potential contamination. Personal protective equipment (PPE) is a priority for drivers and riders in paratransit shuttle services, where close interactions are often necessary in order to secure passengers’ wheelchairs into vehicles.

These practices will need to start now and continue as the economy reopens. New informational campaigns will also be critical in raising public awareness of safety practices, ensuring that people feel safe and comfortable enough to return to transit. And as though implementing these safety protective practices is not enough work, agencies will also need to redouble their efforts to compete for riders. The coming era for transit will require innovation. Flexible service options and new financing tools will enable operators to strategically fill gaps and bring back riders.

Ridehailing

The two main ridehailing service providers, Uber and Lyft, have taken a variety of steps to respond to COVID-19. Remarkably, both companies are discouraging use of their services, displaying messages that remind consumers to travel only when necessary. Both companies are also providing some drivers with cleaning and sanitization materials (though perhaps without fully meeting demand).

Both companies have paused shared ride features (i.e., UberPool and Lyft Share) in their respective apps. The pandemic could certainly have sustained impacts on the popularity of shared ridehailing, despite the previous period of growth for shared ridehailing. Pricing structures and marketing will affect the rate at which consumers return to each, and there may be a role for policy. Collaborations between ridehailing companies and public health officials to restrict access to shared vehicles for those with contagious diseases could also bolster consumer confidence in ridehailing safety. Ridehailing data and other travel data can also help experts track how diseases spread (or predict how they could spread).

Ridehailing services also filled various gaps in the transportation network during the crisis. Ridehailing can be an alternative option for those dependent on transit, when transit schedules have been cut. Both Uber and Lyft are partnering with healthcare organizations and hospitals to offer nonemergency medical transportation for those without ready access to a car or other convenient travel options. The nation’s largest microtranst operator, Via, developed a semi-private version of its app dedicated to helping essential employees get to work. This type of gap service could be a good addition to a city or region’s emergency preparedness planning efforts.

Bikeshare and e-scooter share

Bike gears and scooter wheels kept turning during the early stages of the pandemic. Use of bike and e-scooter sharing services (i.e., micromobility) in places like New York and San Francisco spiked in March as people sought to avoid traveling in confined spaces. As concern over COVID-19 grew, cities and companies disagreed on the appropriate role for micromobility. The City of Sacramento asked Jump (Uber’s scooter division) to remove its shared bikes and scooters from city streets. Lime and Bird, two of the largest micromobility companies in the world, paused operations in markets across the world. Yet Wuhan, China simultaneously relied on scooter-based delivery to supply residents on lockdown with groceries and other goods. The e-scooter company Spin argued that its service enabled essential workers to travel safely.

The story of micromobility during the COVID-19 pandemic yields two lessons. First, micromobility—like ridehailing—is an important complement to public transit. Shared bikes and scooters may not be able to get people as far as commuter trains and buses, but they can help keep people and goods moving around dense urban areas when other travel modes fail. Second, cities need to work with health authorities and researchers to understand the true health risks that shared bikes and e-scooters pose—and then coordinate with each other on an appropriate response. If the risk is low, cities could promote bike and e-scooter sharing as good alternatives to public transit or driving during health emergencies. Many cities also already subsidize use of shared bikes and e-scooters for historically underserved populations. For these communities especially, but also for all communities, additional subsidies that support frequently cleaning micromobility units will ensure that riders are safe.

The bottom line

A safe return to shared travel is necessary— and it will be a difficult task. The challenges in our immediate path are significant, but the first step is envisioning good outcomes for a sustainable transportation future. Without a commitment to shared mobility—especially mass transit and pooled rides—we will see a resurgence of single-occupant vehicles and an undermining of progress towards climate and equity objectives.

Almost all trucks today are powered by diesel engines and fossil fuel. Changing how trucks are powered is essential to solving the problems of air pollution and climate change. After all, trucks account for a substantial share of both pollutant emissions and CO₂ emissions on California’s roadways. But what are the feasible strategies and costs for reaching a future with zero- or very-low-emissions trucks?

This question becomes even more challenging when focusing on “long-haul” trucks. Such trucks, typically tractor/trailer Class 8 vehicles weighing up to 33,000 pounds unloaded, can travel 500 miles or more per day, and have some challenging energy requirements—they must be able to carry enough energy, or have rapid access to it, to be able to travel these distances with up to a 40,000-pound payload.

From a regulatory perspective, the California Air Resources Board is in the process of proposing a new truck sales mandate that would require truck manufacturers to sell ZEV trucks, starting in 2024.

How can we power such vehicles with zero emissions? At the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis, we strove to answer this question from a research perspective by looking at four technologies designed to provide power to long-haul trucks while producing zero tailpipe emissions. These technologies are: a catenary system; hydrogen fuel cells; dynamic inductive chargers embedded in the roadway (capable of charging moving trucks); and battery electric vehicles (BEVs). The first three of these are covered in a full report (here) and BEVs will be covered in an upcoming report.

We compared the technologies to each other and to a baseline diesel truck—in terms of technical requirements, current status, challenges, costs, and the potential for future improvements and scale-up. We considered both the vehicles and the energy infrastructure they would need to operate. We modeled a future (maybe 10 years out) where both trucks and infrastructure benefit from economies of scale. For our comparisons, we simulated a situation with 5000 trucks travelling 500 miles of roadway per day (which is a lot). We amortized the vehicle and infrastructure costs over this level of service and over many years (i.e., 20 years to pay off the infrastructure, 5 years for trucks with some resale value).

Though there are many factors affecting the comparison, and we consider a range of sensitivity cases, the figure shows our “base case” results: costs per mile for diesel and the first three technologies. The three cleaner technologies are all within 30% of the cost of diesel but none quite match it. The preliminary results for BEVs (not shown), based on slightly different assumptions, indicate that their total costs in a long-haul situation could be on the low side, ranging from $0.45–0.82 per mile versus $0.58 per mile for diesel.

In all cases the range of costs reflects uncertainties in vehicle costs, infrastructure costs, and energy costs. But it’s the energy costs (brown part of bars in the figure) that appear to be the most important and most uncertain. Electricity could run from $0.10 to $0.25 per kWh, depending on the nature of the contracts, whether pricing is closer to retail or wholesale, etc. Future hydrogen costs could vary from about $5 to $8 per kg (when derived from electrolysis), assuming large scale development and access to relatively inexpensive renewable power. The base technology, diesel, has a cost that is highly dependent on oil prices, which could range from $50 to $100/bbl or even higher. High- or low-end assumptions on each of these energy prices leads to a relatively good or poor position relative to the others.

Figure: Relative cost per mile of different technologies based on 500 miles of roadway.

But what exactly are these technologies? What are their advantages and disadvantages?

In the catenary system, overhead wires deliver power through a pantograph with electrical contacts rising off the top of the vehicle. Catenary systems have been widely used for light rail and trolleys, so the technology is well developed. Trials of catenary trucks are underway in Sweden and the Port of Los Angeles. The major challenges would be to install the infrastructure and provide another power source to trucks for when they leave wired roadways.

Dynamic inductive (or “wireless”) charging similarly provides electric power to moving vehicles, from a series of transmitting coils embedded in the roadway. The charge is delivered, with about 90% efficiency, over a short distance to a receiving coil on the bottom of a vehicle. The challenges and costs are like those of the catenary system, but this system would require installation of transmission coils in road beds. Like a catenary system, this system would require the installation of at least hundreds of miles of infrastructure before it would likely be sufficient to attract users—truckers willing to invest in the equipment needed to be compatible. Indeed, this chicken-egg dilemma is a factor for all four technologies: which comes first, investment in infrastructure or vehicles?

Hydrogen fuel cell (HFC) vehicles use hydrogen, as a liquid or compressed gas, to generate electricity from an on-board fuel cell. The hydrogen takes up less volume and weight than do batteries, and refueling is much faster than battery charging. A hydrogen system could also be scaled-up more cheaply and evenly than catenaries or inductive charging. However, infrastructure challenges are considerable in terms of the transportation (or on-site generation) and storage of hydrogen, as refueling stations would have to be 10–30 times larger than diesel stations. Two HFC trucks have been produced, the Vision Tyrano (200-mile range) and Nikola One (800- to 1200-mile range).

Battery electric long-haul trucks typically rely on plugging-in to be recharged (though we do assume some battery electric range for trucks accessing catenaries or dynamic induction systems). Most battery trucks currently have a range of less than 250 miles. The major challenges in applying this technology to long-haul trucks are the large quantity and weight of the required batteries. We estimate that about 1200 kWh would be needed, with a weight of well over 10,000 pounds. This means long recharging times and a potentially large reduction in payload (since battery weight takes away from what could be allocated for goods). In our analysis we assume some reductions in battery weight in the future and access to fast charging, but these two concerns remain.

As long as available electricity is from low carbon sources (namely renewables), the CO₂ emissions for catenary, dynamic inductive charging, and BEVs would be low. (The electric grid in California is targeted to be fully renewable by 2040.) The same is true for HFC trucks using electrolytically generated hydrogen, though in the nearer term, the lower efficiency of these trucks (and production of hydrogen) would mean higher CO₂ than the pure electric options. CO₂ would also be considerably higher if the hydrogen were derived from steam methane reforming of natural gas, which is common today.

In sum, each technology has several advantages and challenges, and there is no obvious winner. From the point of view of infrastructure needs and scale-up, hydrogen may have an advantage. Battery electric trucks provide an attractive option with lower infrastructure costs and potentially lower overall costs but would compromise payloads unless the weight of batteries comes down significantly or compromises are made on range. Finally, catenary and inductive charging systems could work best in areas of dense truck traffic but will need to be extensive enough to work for trucks covering many miles and will require the biggest up-front investments.

Two major questions that need further research are: How do we best manage scaling-up each technology? And how large will public investments and incentives need to be to create a self-sustaining system with adequate infrastructure? The UC Davis STEPS+ Program and Sustainable Freight Research Center will continue to work in this area.

This blog is drawn from a Caltrans “Planning Horizons” educational forum presented by Dr. Fulton this spring. To view a video of his presentation click here and select March 2019. To access the PowerPoint from the presentation click here. To access the full report that this blog and the talk are based on click here.