By Jessica Castillo
UC Santa Barbara has students who travel to campus in gas-fueled cars, electric bikes, and by carpooling or on public transportation such as buses and trains. Kenneth Hiltner, an English professor, and the chair of UCSB’s Sustainability Transportation Committee says transportation has gone from comprising a third to more than one half of the carbon footprint produced by the university. This spring, the Committee sent out a survey questioning what modes of transportation students take and how far they travel, hoping to find out why transportation emissions are still high for a campus so focused on its biking infrastructure.
Students across all departments were sent this survey, asked to track their forms of transportation from Apr. 3 to Apr. 7, and then answer questions such as how many miles they had traveled as well as their opinions on electric bicycles and resources on campus. In a recent interview, he discussed the survey and a new facility that will replace and improve the Associated Students bike shop located on campus.
UC Santa Barbara English professor Ken Hiltner chairs the Sustainability Transportation Committee, which recently surveyed students on how they get to campus and back.
Q: What is the Sustainability Transportation Committee and how long ago was it established?
A: I have been the chair or the co-chair for five years. It is a subcommittee of the Chancellor’s Sustainability Committee. That’s the environmental and staff committee and we deal with things like solar on campus and all those sorts of things.
Q: Why are emissions from transportation your focus?
A: It became clear that transportation was going to be our number one problem. The reason for that is because we can address terrestrial-based problems. For example, for electricity on campus we could put more solar in and that would take care of that. There are ways to become more efficient. For transportation, with staff and faculty flying to conferences and all, and people commuting, it was clear that while we could reduce things [on campus], transportation emissions were not going to get reduced. When I first started, transportation was just a third of the carbon footprint on campus, but now it’s significantly more than half. It’s not that transportation became a bigger source of emissions but that everything else went down.
Q: What is a short-term goal you hope to achieve with the data from these survey results?
A: I want to figure out ways to improve and benefit the people commuting as well as environmental benefits. Once we know that we can share that information with groups like the MTD [Metropolitan Transit District], which is the bus line in Santa Barbara, and come up with solutions. I’ll give you an example. MTD is starting something in the fall called “MicroTransit” here, and Goleta will be a test site for it. How it will work is if you live in Goleta and live three to four miles away, you’d take a car, but we want to discourage that. You could also take something like Lyft, but it isn’t that great of an environmental solution either. Instead, MicroTransit is a fleet of vans that hold up to eight people, and one spot is an accessibility spot, and these are all electric. You’ll have an app, just like you might have Lyft, and you’ll go onto your app and say where you want to go. Instead of picking you up exactly where you are, it will show you a stop nearby.
Q: How is UCSB encouraging emission-free transportation on its campus?
A: So, in this [sustainability] committee we work with a range of groups on campus like the sustainability office and UCSB’s transportation office, and we also work on projects related to bicycles. For example, there’s a brand-new facility being built by UCSB’s Associated Students, replacing the Associated Students bike shop on campus. It’s a $5 million facility and I think there’s going to be nothing like it in the U.S. especially with the amount of dedication we put into our [UCSB] biking infrastructure and making it work. It will serve as a bike repair shop and will introduce workshops focused on bikes, such as bike etiquette. If you live in Isla Vista you know that bicycling can be a very effective means of transportation, so we need to make a commitment to it.
“It became clear that transportation was going to be our number one problem,” said UC Santa Barbara English professor Ken Hiltner, who leads campus sustainability efforts.
Q: What is the long-term goal regarding this survey?
A: My long-term goal is to reduce greenhouse emissions. But on the other hand, for other people, it’s also to make it a more convenient and more pleasant place to be. Since ’06, the undergraduate student population has grown 25 percent, so we need to come up with alternative solutions for people. We think there are things that we can implement now, and we’d like UCSB to be a model for that. We want this to be a sample of another way of living.
Jessica Castillo is a third-year Sociology major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this article for her Digital Journalism class.