we also have in that in that category vermont tenants providing vies information referral and advocacy for tenants and mobile home program much those likewise for people primarily in mobile home parks and tonight i have here with me a guest who was who was good enough to  take a little time out of the evening and and be with us his name is richard watts and the cars you folks at uva i'm sometimes have so many overlapping and twisting kind of titles and functions i'll let you explain that ok but thank you ted and great to be here  mostly we're going to talk about transportation in a for a number of years i worked at something you v m called the transportation research center which looks at how we can make our transportation system work for people and also reduce its environmental and energy  impacts right now i teach in communications and i teach in policy and i teach in media and i directed something else called the center for research on vermont which is about understanding some of the great things we do in vermont and how they would we relate to larger things happening in the world well yes you're right we have way too many complicated how whatever but basically i teach i think about policy and i think about vermont right so as it is mentioned th transportation is kind of the main focus and of course being the fair housing project person i like to keep tarring it around to the role that transportation plays  overall in creating more affordable and and more inclusive communities that people of varying incomes and people of varying backgrounds can afford to live in locations that are that are more affordable to them that are had that have better access to resources  of municipalities things the services the jobs and all that comes along with that and also the inherent efficiency that provides in terms of both reducing cost to the people living there as well as the positive impacts on the environment so i guess let me just start with a question  for you how expensive is transportation as a part of you know the common budgets of people and of course particularly interested in  percentage of income that lower people would have that lower income people would have to pay right so one thing one way to think about this is when we say transportation people often in their heads will do like self i if if i ask you how much did it cost you to go to boston people often do a calculation of how much it costs in terms of gasoline and we don't always think about the sunken costs of owning a car if we own a car and what all the money that goes into may knits and all those things so there's a long way of saying that on average owning a car can cost somewhere between six and twelve  year when you take in the cost of the vehicle and the cost of the energy to run the vehicle it can be as much as thirty percent of somebodies income and as year income goes down those fixed cost still exist so it becomes a higher percentage of your income so people of very low income may pay as much as fifty percent of their total household costs goes to maintaining the transportation goes to allowing them to access you know a system that they can get places and we know in my the bigger agency that my program is a part of  programs for primarily for lower income people and trying to help people in various kinds of crisis situations and so forth and the whole car factor and the dependency on cars is is it's really pretty dramatic in terms of the impact right if somebody is current in my car breaks down they can't afford to have it fixed if it you know they get involved in an accident can't afford to get it back on the road you know in addition to what's already been mentioned the just upkeep insurance you know the all the things that go along with maintaining a car and that's especially bad the further those people have to live away from where they need to go to work to go to the doctor to so we know a bit about this in vermont because the there's an organization here v e c that just did a study where they looked at how much your transportation costs depending on where you live and it makes sense that people sometimes move further and further away from where they work because those houses are cheaper and yet at the same time the further away they are than the more expensive it is to get to work and so when you look at this map that this the put together is just stunning and you can imagine it the further you are out from burlington in those sort of commuter shed some more expensive it is your transportation might be and if your income is low that's a higher proportion your budget and i think that part of what we've done over time is we've become trapped in such a car dependent society that there isn't really any options for getting around for some people and we really need to think about ways to allow people to have other options besides us driving drilled down the town of georgia to focus on and talking to their planning commission some of the facts about transportation and housing location issues this interesting dynamic came out that they have they have it's a pretty small town so there's not a huge amount of a number of jobs there but there are there is some small industry and people working there are having to live north of georgia where it is cheaper to afford housing and then they commute down to georgia then you have people living in georgia who work in shouldn and county some in burlington who can't afford to live in this area and live in georgia so you have this very interesting transportation yes demick yes now i think that it's just we've got ninety years of building the system we have we really have to start thinking about ways to allow people to have other options and we're trapped and we spend so much money supporting the existing system that if we could rethink it we could give people more alternatives cheaper alternatives alternative would add to the quality of living well  you know one of the things i because a large part of what my fair housing project does is has less to do with individual cases of discrimination although we're concerned about that also but it has to do more with systemic issues with the kind of ways that zoning bylaws that permitting process needs and all those things that tend to make it more expensive to build housing especially less expensive multifamily housing closer to downtown and  it seems like when i talk about transportation issues a lot of times people especially further out in the state in the smaller town say well we're never going to be able to afford public transportation and some cases maybe they actually could someday but aside from that given that they cannot though they most likely will not at least in the near future then you don't look at just the transportation but you look at where closer to where people need to go yes you know and sometimes we talk about this in transportation terms mobility the ability to go anytime anywhere you want and access the ability to access the things you need as access then you start talking about where you live you know because then you can access the things you need without having to have a car because in this society the way the system is built the only way you can have complete mobility is be car dependent but if you think about in terms of what do you need and you might think about in terms of where you live in the other message that we're talking about here said it's it is more expensive than people realize to live further away and and you make that choice because housing is cheaper but at the same time you have these other costs that aren't always factored in yeah yeah so the complicated individual  consideration if you're seeking housing where can i afford to live in terms of the actual cost of the housing but then as you say there are other costs that  of counterbalance that people caught in that can't help it because if they were in more expensive housing then they would possibly be out on the street right  down well you've thought about this a lot ted but i'll give you one idea and see what you think of this so ok transit we talk about public transit and then we say we can't afford it and it's too big you know  but part of the problem with public transit is that most people many of us don't ride it because we have cars and we can afford our cars and parking is free or almost free so why wouldn't you drive your car you already have all the costs associated with owning a car so my suggestion in those along those lines is that we need to think more about making it more expensive to park we do that you v m although we haven't changed the rates in ten years so people do pay to park and then bus is free so that incentivizes everybody to ride the bus and the more people who ride the bus than the more constituencies there are demanding more bus service and then the more potential bus routes are there are and then there's it makes it  how do we build places that allow people to walk bike drive less that allow people to ride busses and hawken but right aristos right well i think we need champions need leaders we need policies public policy at the government level and at the company level so there's a lot of companies could you just instantly overnight start trying to incentivize her employees to drive a little less start charging a little for parking make the bus really cheap in is those people start riding the bus then they ask for more routes and it becomes a positive feedback loop and as far as building places that are great burlington there are many great places in vermont one of the interesting things about vermont is we have two hundred thirty five village centers because in they haven't been destroyed although many of them are challenge but we still have these small walkable places if we could just invest more in our sidewalks and in and in helping people figure out ways to make those attractive places to live in a way we have these little dense pockets that then could be connected via transit can create more affordable housing opportunities and you know in the context of our discussion i would say more affordable housing and more affordable  a antiquated system of zoning bylaws they require a couple parking spots prairie hire a lot of parking and that require huge acreage per unit of housing right and that require huge set backs right from streets right and that even though it begins to fly in the face of some of the state law they often will to the to the best of their ability exclude multifamily housing sometimes senior housing is considered ok but even that is often right not looked on positively so this is a matter of getting people you know because people only change i think with several factors one of course some people just recognize well this is not good for other people is not you know we may have our nice home here in town center but this is not good for all those other people but then also there are people who own businesses maybe want to expand businesses maybe want to increase the number of people consuming their you know buying and consuming their whatever goods and services are selling so what we're trying to do is really convince people and there's a lot of information backing this up that generating more affordable housing closer to downtown increases the economic vitality of the town so it's not just  know a thing you do for other people it's a thing you do for the good of your own town right you know your own self interest right that's a great vision so you know in that context obviously  rick that enables more density right also creates more opportunity for public transportation exactly because if you don't have people scattered all over creation and you know it makes it more affordable to provide the transit people can access yeah now there's a direct relationship and many people study that certain density is helpful one stop because you don't molt you know a multi stops state now and so it's back to sometimes in the nineteenth century when they were much more densely populated than they are now so people you know tend to get this mindset that oh this is we just because of the fading population and the density close to you know where their businesses and you know services or yes yes yes yes so i understand that you have this is a curiosity to me i mean i have some ideas but you have concerns about electric cars that are often being promoted as the answer to states energy environmental impacts and i'm curious what your concerns are and i talk so much about the church and ironically i used to run a electric car project but so i have to  concerns i do think that electric cars are part of the solution to reducing the energy and environmental impacts of transportation but what happens too often is that we lead with electric cars is the only solution and that's because it's easier for policymakers because they're basically saying you don't have to do anything different we're simply going to switch the fuel in the vehicle you drive and what it does ultimately so that's it's easy for policymakers to say we're going to electrify everything but what it does ultimately is it takes those folks in the first adopters of electric cars are going to be the most impassioned about change it takes that entire constituency out of doing alternatives because once you have a car every study shows you're going to drive it that's that's why you have it and you can't really encourage people not to use their cars you can't really promote public transit you can't really promote biking or walking if everybody is driving and so you can we can argue about the environmental benefits of electric cars from all the way from building them to that process in the plastic in mining the rare minerals you need for the batteries but just putting that argument aside what i am concerned about is that by saying electric car electric cars a solution it's undercutting these other solutions that we really need to do and it leaves out people who can't afford to own a car people who don't drive for whatever reason those who are too young to drive those are too old and we know now in the state the u s live your ability to drive probably by seven to ten years so there's a whole constituents as of people that aren't going to be able to fit into a car only world and we need to start with the alternatives work on those like crazy and then say and we can also do this that's my argument tad yeah  yeah you know some of my environmentalist friends say yeah but you can't do richard it's a rural state you know we're all going to drive and yes there's always going to be driving but why can't we at least try and start bending it a little bit to make the actual options more by you know i think it's important to any time you have a kind of a movement to replace one thing with another thing but yet still have basically the same kind of systems you know the same roads they run on the same distances between locations then you have an added factor with electric cars of  especially lower income people are not going to be able to afford them at least for a long time and so they're still stuck and maybe even worse stuck harder to get you know right the only kind of  internal combustion car they can get or they're kind of the dregs that are what they already get unfortunately right or break down easily and cost us a lot of gas and imagine if all those i don't know if you're going to name me more than we've already well we don't so often we think about energy so in vermont right now about forty percent thirty to forty percent of all the energy we use is us transportation and because it's almost all purchasing gasoline almost all of that leaves the state in it's been identified as about one and a half billion dollar leaky bucket so we are spending f honor's collectively almost one half billion dollars all of which is exported out of the state ok so there's an economic issue there we haven't and then there's the environmental impacts so again transportation is leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions in vermont there's also other things associated that comes out of tailpipe ok but in addition to us there's all these social factors that we have identified related to our car dependence so for example as a country we're getting heavier and heavier there's a direct relationship between the fact that we drive more and more every year robert putnam the sociologist in this political scientist did this affect us work about relationship between your community and how much you spend driving and he found statistically that every ten minutes you spend driving commuting away from your community you're ten percent less likely to be engaged in your local community and so there's there's a direct sort of relationship between all that time we spend in a car which is a week to two weeks a year and how much we time we have to participate locally when i when i think of the  commutes you know when you're specially when you get outside of vermont and you know some of the areas and the kind of commutes that people do in the time they spend commuting you know it just boggles the mind really you know that we can even you know but you know what's happened is that the car is this really robust thing it's attractive it's confortable the radio works you go on this bubble some of the smartest min designing ads to hook us on this culture and so it's it's and we spend so much money supporting it through you know ninety percent of the state's transportation budget supports this system so changing that is going to be really difficult but i think that there's all lot of people who are left out of the system and that's part of why we need to change it well it you know all of this is  cost right transportation costs and clearly there's a very distinct link between where people live and how much time they're go driving if they have to drive it all right and some cases in the right locations they might hardly ever have to drive if at all but what we have in in vermont almost different from you know big metropolitan areas you tend to have concentrations of very low income people and in abandoned downtown abandoned by white people and people with money although there tends to be some reversing of that which has its own problems with gas yeah but those people have to  you know in order to get to what to what they already get to what they need to do you know because there's virtually no fresh food there's you know so few opportunities in so many ways or they have to travel and generally they do not cannot possibly have their own cars for the most part so they have to you know use overburdened and not well maintained  public transportation to get out right then you have people more tend to be more white and more higher income you know traveling in the suburban areas  and sometimes some downtown areas and so this whole kind of segregation thing that's both racial and socio economic feeds the transportation issue and not as much does and often these big infrastructure projects are located in poor neighborhoods yes exactly i mean that goes all the way back to you know system the late fifty's early sixty's he did well i've i've had the signal that we are approaching the end of the show and i just want to say that i think  this has been very interesting discussion i certainly appreciate your willingness to come on and share your knowledge and expertise with us and i hope that people who are viewing this may come away with you know some thoughts and you know you can get in touch with us you know if you have questions you want to run by our suggestions or whatever for sure so that's been my ted and it's good for me to get reminded of all the house in issues and how well they connect with transmission yeah they really do think you very much again