Transportation SWAT Team Feedback
The first bit of feedback given by a member of the audience was about electric vehicles. These are not specifically talked about in the summary of the report. An infrastructure would be needed in order for these to work well. It is something that could be looked into in future meetings. Along with this, it was noted that the University is currently developing five stations for type two charging with plans for type one charging to be active within the next week. It cannot be ignored how the energy is generated as well. Emissions are still produced by generating electricity to power the vehicles. Another audience member gave an idea about having a parking incentive to people who are driving from a distance and parking at a station. There are people currently on campus who park at a charging station and take a shuttle the rest of the way. It was suggested that the parking rate could be reduced for these people who are commuting with electric cars and taking a shuttle further to promote this practice.

It was inquired about the fact that all types of fuel has hydrocarbons in them and all will affect the environment. The answer to this is that there are different amounts of environmental impacts based on what molecule is the byproduct of the fuel source. The topic of offsets was discussed and what ways were being considered for keeping them local. Currently, the team has not come up with a lot of ideas of how to do this but in the coming months a more comprehensive strategy will be developed to start this process. Traditional offsets would apply to this like having more plant matter and renovating buildings to be more efficient.

Air travel was the final topic of discussion during the forum. It was commented on about how air travel is a function of the global reach as a campus and the more air travel that there is, the more global reach the campus has. A suggestion along with this was to have a carbon tax on air travel that could be used for offset funding. The estimations for projects can include this carbon tax and allow for the campus to improve, get more funding, and travel more while still offsetting the carbon emissions. Wotjek mentioned to the forum that the team would like air travel to broken down from absolute air travel into departmental. This would allow departments to see their own progress and account for fluctuating numbers in a department. Also, this can be used to provide incentives for efficiency of air travel on a departmental basis.

Dear Ben

I am pleased to provide you with our consensus final report.

I was able to address the concerns your raised regarding (1) clarifying the nature of purchased off-sets, and (2) making it clear that we are not necessarily requesting a new OFFICE be established for Sustainable Transportation, rather we would like to see a director of Sustainable Transportation appointed.

Regarding the specification of revised targets.  Our committee had extended discussions on this topic and our position is stated in the report as follows;

"Our committee recognizes that the 2015 goal of reducing carbon emissions by 30 percent relative to the 2008 baseline is unrealistic. Similar concerns can also be raised regarding the more distal targets.  It is the position of our committee that insufficient information is available to provide adjusted transportation emission targets at this point in time. Until such time as substantive decisions have been made regarding strategies to reduce carbon emissions and/or to allow the purchase of carbon offsets, it will be difficult to develop more specific data-based targets for transportation emissions."

We understand that you would have preferred to have new and explicit targets set for intervening years between 2015 and 2050 but it is the position of our committee that there is insufficient data to develop such predictions.  If you or other committees want to take up this task, we would not object.

Thank you for your help on this important and exciting project.

On behalf of the entire committee,

Sincerely

Wojtek

Dear Colleagues:

I have tried to compile the information we discussed into the next draft of our report (attached).

It would be good for us to try and agree on the content before I convert it into the requested format for out chapter.

Do you think you could take a look at the draft and use "track changes" to make any edits.

Please get the draft back to me by end of business on Wednesday so I can start working on the final version of both our report and the re-formatted version.

Many thanks for your help and hard work

Wojtek

Dear Colleagues

Thanks for all your hard work.

Everyone made the deadline :-)

I have attached the compiled and edited draft of our recommendations and an agenda for today’s noon meeting

See you soon

Wojtek

Hi All,

Attached is the addition of strategy 5. As we only briefly discussed this strategy and I am fairly new to the team I look forward to any and all feedback!

Thanks,

Justin

Attached are the revisions for Strategy 1. I did some major cutting in transitioning from the original version and presented the items we’ve discussed (and added a couple of others as well) essentially as the new strategy for moving forward. - Pete Varney

Hello all, 

Attached is my summary of the meeting from October 2, 2014. 

If there is anything that you believe needs to be updated in it, please feel free to let me know.

Thanks,

Ben Cigelnik

Hi all, 

Unfortunately, I will not have time to review and offer detailed feedback as things have caught up with me trying to do preliminary work for being out of town for the rest of the week.

Some things I would like us to consider though for our future is:

• To work closer with parking and thinking of how we can create incentive programs. I thought it’d be a good discussion to have with the Director of Parking or someone else who could help make decisions on this behalf 
• I believe in order for the Campus Bike Plan to be implemented then there needs to be a Campus Bicycle Coordinator
• However, if we do want to push for a Campus Bicycle Coordinator then I was thinking we could push for something larger which would encompass this role but instead push for Sustainable Transportation Coordinator. I believe a sustainable transportation coordinator would be beneficial for our university because this will connect all forms of transportation and there is large room for growth in this area of sustainability. I believe this person would be the bridge between transportation and the university in aiding in the completion of our iCAP goals. In addition, be able to push for the Campus Bike Plan, creating better walkability plans, working with MTD, and so forth 
• I believe for bike sharing program the university should work with community partners like MTD, City of Urbana, City of Champaign, and CUPHD to pull together funding together to fund a community wide bike sharing feasibility study in order to help us implement our campus bike sharing program. In addition, I think it should be discussed if its best to have a bike rental program for students instead of bike sharing and how to best create a departmental bike sharing program

Those are some initial thoughts. I look forward to hearing how the meeting goes. Please let me know if I should clarify anything. I will limited access to email prior to our meeting. 

Thanks,

Grace

Dear Transportation SWATeam,

The iCAP Working Group met today, and would like to thank you for your report!

In the hopes that it will provide some assistance as you formulate your recommendations for the revised iCAP, to be presented at the iCAP Forum on October 22nd, we wanted to provide you with some additional files:

1) A "template" for the iCAP sections that we ask that you use. This was written using Transportation as an example, so it should be easy for you to use!

2) A "resources" document that summarizes the 2010 iCAP strategies, excerpts from a document that was put together back in FY13 summarizing progress at that time, a set of links to relevant pages on the iCAP Portal, and a list of the questions in the STARS report that are relevant to your team.  The STARS report is how our campus gets "graded" on our sustainability performance, so these questions may inspire ideas for things the campus should be doing.

3) A table of emissions in your area as determined by the Clean Air Cool Planet calculator, which represents our officially reported emissions.  You can fill this in with your proposed goals, and include it in the template.

4) A summary of all of our emissions in different categories, for context.

5) The Clean Air Cool Planet calculator itself, updated for FY2014, in case you wish to dive into how the calculations are performed.

We hope this information will be helpful to your team.  If there is anything we can do to help you with your important work in the coming month, please just ask!

Cheers,

Ben

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Professor Benjamin J. McCall

Associate Director for Campus Sustainability

Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

campus-sustainability@illinois.edu