9/09/16

Summary: This meeting was our inaugural meeting for the year. On the agenda today was the creation of a team description, a review of ongoing projects, and planning for future meetings.

In attendance:

    Josh Feldman

    Claire Dondival

Ankit Singhai

Yangfeng Ouyang

Pete Varney

Lily Wilcox - Active Transportation Coordinator

Olivia Webb - Sustainability Programs Coordinator

Topics Covered:

Team Description

We collectively crafted our team description for the iCAP portal, which can be found at:  https://icap.sustainability.illinois.edu/project/transportation-swateam.

Project Slides

Renewable Fleet Study:

Claire and Petehelped foster a discussion about the current types of alternative fuels for campus fleet vehicles. Currently, natural gas is the only type of fuel seriously looked at. One concern was that the gas CNG, while possible to implement, would be somewhat costly and have little payback unless driven many miles. Electric vehicles were brought up, but are currently not part of the market. Biodiesel was also mentioned, but its performance in cold weather is a concern.

Staff Mode Shift:

Lily discussed the ways that this project will reduce single occupancy vehicles. One idea looked at was bike sharing, which has been tried by Purdue but does not have much payback economically. Lily also discussed “It’s your MTD too”, which features social bus-riding trips which introduce MTD to campus employees.

Bike Plan:

This was a summary of effort to make campus more bike-friendly. This would include having more, and better, bike parking. UIUC was recently recognized as a bronze-level Bike Friendly University by the League of American Bicyclists.

Future Meetings

We decided that every other Friday at 1pm is a good time to hold meetings. We will be holding meetings in the National Soybean Research Laboratory. Our clerk Josh will send out reminders.

On March 3, 2015, the Chancellor's Capital Review Committee formally approved the 2014 Campus Bike Plan for inclusion in the official Master Planning documents.

Dear Transportation SWATeam,

Morgan and I had a very nice discussion with Pam Voitik at F&S late last week, and I wanted to brief you on some of the key points as they relate to the iCAP revisions.

1) F&S is in favor of hiring a full-time "Active Transportation Coordinator," and having that person report to the Transportation Demand Management Coordinator (Stacey DeLorenzo).  "Active Transportation" (as you probably all know, but I didn't!) is industry lingo for all transportation except single-occupancy-vehicles.  So this person would be responsible for mode shift, the Bike Plan, and so forth...basically the last two bullet points in item #6 on page 30 of the current draft.

2) Pete Varney and his team would be the sensible locus for efforts related to shifting the fleet more towards EVs and bicycles, and exploring renewable fuels for the fleet.  [The second and third bullet points in item #6 on page 30.]

3) The first bullet point, about air travel, is outside of the scope of F&S, and should perhaps be a focus of iSEE or another entity in the domain of the Chancellor or Vice Chancellors.

4) The Campus Bicycle Plan is essentially finalized now, but F&S is working on ascertaining exactly what entity should formally approve it. 

Pam's suggestion is that it should be approved by the campus leadership (rather than by F&S), but the responsibility for implementing it should be with F&S.  This would give the Plan more authority/heft than if it were approved by F&S alone. There is reason to hope that this approval will be finalized before the iCAP.

Cheers,

Ben

The Campus Bike Plan is still under revision, but a newly updated version of the draft is now publicly available. Comments via the online feedback form are still welcome at http://go.illinois.edu/bikefeedback. 

The new plan is available at: https://icap.sustainability.illinois.edu/files/project/37/May_2013_Draft_Campus_Bike_Plan.pdf