Anjali Grover (2:34)

So Ryan, are you still driving your EV to work these days?

Ryan Panchatseram (2:37)

I am. Every day. Why do you ask?

Anjali Grover (2:40)

Well I just read this study about how we're not transitioning from gas cars to EVs fast enough. Basically, that means if you look at the total number of miles that everyone drives, too many miles are being driven by gas cars instead of EVs.

Brian Lagerberg (2:54)

How bad is it?

Anjuli Grover (2:55)

To meet our climate goals, we need 95% of all the miles that we drive to be electrified by 2050. But as of 2023, we're only at about 7%.

Ryan Panchatseram (3:05)

I mean, 10%'s not bad, right? EVs are pretty new, but that's a big gap. How do we get people where they need to go without their cars?

Brian Lagerberg (3:14)

Right?

Anjali Grover (3:15)

I wonder something similar. What would happen if we just drove less overall? And I found something for us, Ryan. Today we're going to a state that actually has reduced the number of miles people drive, whether they're driving electric or not.

Anjuli Grover (3:32)

Hi everyone, I'm Anjuli Grover. Welcome to Speed and Scale, a podcast from Ted. This is the show where we focus on the best strategies to slow down climate change.

Anjali Grover (3:42)

Today, it's all about transportation. Because in the US the transportation sector emits the most carbon pollution out of any other sector. But there's one place that has made a huge impact in reducing emissions from Washington State.

Anjuli Grover (3:57)

Over the last 25 years or so, Washington reduced the total miles that people drove more than any other state. And not just by a little, but by a lot. On average, each person drove 1,400 miles less each year, while the rest of America drove more, 240 miles more. It wasn't the explicit goal, but the state now saves roughly 9 million gallons.

Anjali Grover (4:20)

Of gas each year. That's pretty remarkable considering how the US is a country designed for driving. Most of us are pretty dependent on our cars. But when most of the country was going in one direction. Long commute times, bumper to bumper traffic, smoggy air, how did Washington State go? The exact opposite, it turns out. They focused on the bane of work life, existence, the dreaded commute.

Anjuli Grover (4:51)

Washington's success started unexpectedly with a catastrophe. In 1989. It was hit by one of the largest oil spills in US history.

Brian Lagerberg (5:00)

The Exxon Valdez had hit ground up in Alaska and Iraq invaded Kuwait in the August, I think, of 1990. So both of them had impacts in the state of Washington, both in terms of prices of the gasoline the people paid, but also the crude oil that comes into the state. It's delivered in the same kind of tankers that the XMLD's was back then. I think there were 280 tankers entering Puget Sound A year. And so there was a fear. What happens if we have a problem with one of them?

Anjali Grover (5:36)

This is Brian Lagerberg. He's been working on transportation for more than half his life, but at the time, he was working at the state's energy office.

Brian Lagerberg (5:44)

And so I was asked to come in and look at reducing the demand for petroleum, which reduced the need for the crude.

Anjali Grover (5:52)

But Brian says it wasn't just an oil spill that the state was worried about.

Brian Lagerberg (5:55)

There's also an air quality aspect to it. One is just having clean air is important and people care about that. The other is back in 1990, 91, the federal clean air act directed that if we had areas that fail to achieve standards, then we had to implement federal programs for air quality. And then the final thing is traffic congestion.

Anjuli Grover (6:23)

So you have a few different factors that are contributing to the state's willingness to want to really get people to drive less. Is that where the commuter trip reduction program started?

Brian Lagerberg (6:33)

Yep. Basically, we're just trying to reduce the number of people that drive alone to work. So taking a bus, even teleworking, carpooling, walking, biking, all of those different strategies.

Anjali Grover (6:48)

So where did the idea to focus on commutes come from?

Brian Lagerberg (6:52)

Ruth Fisher, who was the chair of the House Transportation Committee, told me one time that employers create the problem. Employers should provide the solution because they ask their employees to get to work at 9 o' clock in the morning or 8 o' clock in that. In that time frame, the commute window. And all of them do that.

Anjali Grover (7:14)

That makes a ton of sense. So what did Ruth do?

Brian Lagerberg (7:16)

And so she was the lead sponsor for the commute trip production program, which said cities have to put in place requirements that major employers provide their employees options to getting to work and get them to be less dependent on driving alone. And she set targets. This was 1991. By 95, she wanted the driver loan rate, meaning the percentage of people that are driving themselves to work, to drop by 15%.

Anjuli Grover (7:49)

Wow.

Brian Lagerberg (7:50)

By 97, it would drop by 25%. In 1999, would drop by 35%. And I asked her one time, you expect people to meet them? She said, yes, because it's the law.

Anjali Grover (8:03)

Ruth said, employers create the problem, employers will solve it. What did we actually see come out of employers in terms of what strategies they took?

Brian Lagerberg (8:11)

Oh, we saw all sorts of strategies. I remember one, I think it was an IBM site in downtown Seattle. Early in, the program went 100% telework, and they eliminated their building.

Anjuli Grover (8:24)

Wow.

Anjali Grover (8:25)

And this was the 90s, too. So remote work Wasn't even a thing yet.

Brian Lagerberg (8:28)

Yeah, we had employers pay 100% of the bus passes, Vanpool passes, providing flexible work hours so people didn't have to show up at 6 to 9am they could show up later. They could show up four days a week instead of five. Mike Wash was an employer, worked to put in place a charter bus that picked up people in Tacoma. They got on in Tacoma and drove to the Everett site. That's a long trip. And Mike said we didn't have the ability to give people raises. And yet that was about the equivalent of a $12,000 raise for those employees.

Anjali Grover (9:08)

And was that made clear to employees at the time?

Brian Lagerberg (9:11)

Mike made that very clear. He said, we can't give you a raise. We can give you this.

Anjali Grover (9:16)

Was there any particular example that stood out to you in terms of its ingenuity?

Brian Lagerberg (9:22)

The director at Simpson, they are a mill. He focused on carpooling. He re striped the parking and put carpool spots right in front of the door. He bought cars, left the keys in them. So if you need to run errands during the day and you car pulled in and weren't driving, you had a car where you could go run errands.

Anjali Grover (9:46)

Oh, so basically car share before it got commercialized.

Brian Lagerberg (9:50)

Yeah, but really the most awesome thing was that he started carpooling. So here he is, the highest ranking person at the site and he carpooled 95% of the time. And he said it did two things. He said one, it made it so that he modeled good behavior because he had to leave at the same time. Then he. He couldn't stay late every night and work late. He said. The second thing was he never had a shortage of carpool partners because he gave them an opportunity to sit in the car with them and talk to him going to and from work every day.

Anjali Grover (10:26)

This is all sounding pretty idyllic. I have to ask, what was by and large, the employer reaction after the law was passed?

Brian Lagerberg (10:37)

I think there was skepticism. Some people were upset. All of a sudden the state is coming in and telling us that we can't do things that we've been doing. But I think that there were a variety of things that were put in place to help mitigate that.

Anjali Grover (10:52)

Can you tell me what those are?

Brian Lagerberg (10:53)

When the bill passed in the spring of 1991, it said, we will create a task force. And that task force was made up of transit agencies, made up of cities and county representatives, and then half of them were made up of owners of businesses in the state. Microsoft was there, Boeing was there. And it's, you know, and here's me. And so it was nerve wracking. It was a hard. It was a hard thing to do.

Anjali Grover (11:23)

Essentially, you're making sure that every stakeholder is in the room.

Brian Lagerberg (11:26)

Yeah. In fact, the employers put together a shadow task force. They worked on exactly the same issues that the formal task force worked on. And they were given the opportunity to come in and say, this is what we think. This is how we see it. And so it enabled the employer to participate in the process.

Anjali Grover (11:48)

You know, it sounds a little sketchy, but I really like the idea of a shadow task force. It feels so smart that employers would really take the time to think about how the program was going to work once it was implemented. So when the law started to be enforced, how did that show up in the data?

Brian Lagerberg (12:05)

Back in 1992, when the program was first being implemented, we started surveying and employees. And the first report, which was in 1995, its main key message was, we have participation. We started at a 73% drive alone rate. So three out of every four employees were driving alone to work. In 1997, that had dropped to 68%. So it's a 6.5% reduction in the percentage of people driving Owen to work.

Anjali Grover (12:42)

So the rest of the country is going one way, and you're starting to already see in that very short time period, a 6% drop in how many people are driving to work by themselves.

Brian Lagerberg (12:50)

Yep.

Anjali Grover (12:51)

And so how is this news received?

Brian Lagerberg (12:53)

We loved it. The task force loved it. We had a mini revolt, though. So we had a group of employers go in front of the legislature and say, we don't like this. We want to get rid of it.

Anjali Grover (13:08)

A revolt. Was this going to throw the whole program into jeopardy? Yeah. What happened then?

Brian Lagerberg (13:18)

I think Mary Margaret Haugen, I think it was in the Senate Transportation Committee, and I was there, and she said, all right, I'm not going to do anything right now. I want you all to work together and come back with a solution. And so I and my staff met with some big employers. And so it's a big. It's a big deal. So to me, it was a question, okay, what's the problem? What is it that's causing you not to support and engage in the program? And there were really two things at play. One was the statute said a. A city can come and mandate that employer implement a specific strategy. And not all employers like that. The other thing that they were really concerned about was the goals. They said, you know, we look at those goals and we think they're not achievable. And we work in an industry where goals are really important. And you achieve your goals and you go up in front of your CEO and you say, hey, here are my goals. Here's how I did. And we have to go up in front of the CEO and say we didn't come close. And that made sense. And so we drafted a bill. As long as the employer was making a good faith effort, they weren't just thumbing their nose at it, but they were actually trying to do things to affect the behavior of their employees, then they're good. The other thing that the bill did was it extended the program out to 2005.

Anjali Grover (15:01)

Can you tell me about any other times that the program was at risk of ending or ceasing to exist?

Brian Lagerberg (15:07)

Governor Locke submitted his budget, and in that budget he zeroed out funding for commute to production. And Aubrey Davis was the chair of the Transportation Commission. He looked at me and he said, hey, can you do a survey of employers and ask them how they would behave if the governor cut the funding for the program? And so we surveyed employers and we said, how do you behave if the program's zeroed out? The majority of the employers said, if you cut the funding, we cut our funding. And they said, if you keep the funding the way it is, then we will keep our funding. They said, if you increase the funding at the state, then we will increase our funding of the program. And the legislature put the funding back into the program because it was the leadership of the state is what the employers respond to. That was a fundamental shift.

Anjali Grover (16:17)

So in other words, big initiatives work when businesses and governments are aligned. So, Brian, how effective has the commute trip reduction law been in getting people to drive less?

Brian Lagerberg (16:28)

So it's hard. What we try to do is assume that the rest of the United States is a control group. It's giving us something we can look at and say, hey, are we making progress? And the answer is yes. And now we're looking at the non drive alone rate rather than the drive alone rate.

Anjali Grover (16:49)

Does non drive alone rate mean essentially carpooling?

Brian Lagerberg (16:53)

Carpooling, teleworking, riding the bus, walking, biking, all of that there most other than driving alone to work. And the non drive alone rate in our most recent survey was about 61%. Nationally, it's about 32%.

Anjuli Grover (17:13)

Wow, that's almost double the national average. Was that the end of the story as far as Washington improving the way its denizens got around, or was there more to the story?

Brian Lagerberg (17:24)

We've expanded public Transportations in a lot of ways, we expanded a vanpool program. We have one, I think that still have the largest public provided vanpool program in the country.

Anjali Grover (17:36)

What is a vanpool program for those of us who aren't familiar?

Brian Lagerberg (17:39)

Oh, it's so transit agency owns the van. You sign up to be a rider in that van, they figure out what the cost is for you to take the trips and then you fill the van up with people and you have one vehicle instead of 6, 7, 8, 9 hovering people in that vehicle.

Anjali Grover (18:02)

Tell me how this works. I mean, this sort of sounds like Uber. Share Before Uber existed pretty much for.

Brian Lagerberg (18:08)

Me, I lived in Seattle and I worked in Olympia and I would take a bus about a mile and then there was a group of vanpools that would meet. I wasn't a full time vanpool rider, so I paid per trip. They had a little coffee can that I put my dollar and I think it was a dollar a trip. So I'd go from Seattle to Olympia, which is like 60 miles.

Anjali Grover (18:30)

A dollar for 60 miles. That's a deal.

Brian Lagerberg (18:33)

What I really like about this story is that the vanpool program started with the Boeing Company during World War II. I've seen posters where to carpool because we needed the gasoline for the war effort. And so there was a push to carpool. And so the Boeing company bought a bunch of vans and van pooled. So after the war they gave the vans to King County Metro and that started the public vanpool program.

Anjali Grover (19:06)

That's pretty awesome about vanpool. And doesn't Seattle have a bunch of other transportation options too? Like I wrote this crazy stat about the buses which is that 70% of homes are within a 10 minute walk of a stop where buses come six times an hour. And on top of that I know that they also built a light rail. So how did that come to be? Where did the demand come from? And I got to imagine that it wasn't cheap.

Brian Lagerberg (19:28)

There was a lot of public support, people concerned about the environment, people concerned about sprawl, about farms, about maintaining ways of life and what our communities look like.

Anjali Grover (19:40)

How much do you think something like light rail should be part of the solution?

Brian Lagerberg (19:44)

Yeah, it was super important. I don't discount that at all. And it really makes this system work better in central Puget Sound where we have most of the people of the state. But it's just not an option for most places because it's so big and expensive and it is so far in the future in the state of Washington, it's not an option anywhere except where it is sound transit is like a silver bullet and what we need is silver buckshot.

Anjali Grover (20:13)

How has the past couple of decades changed how you think about your work, Brian?

Brian Lagerberg (20:17)

When you talk about impact on the transportation system, there's two ways to look at that. One is, what's the impact on a highway system? That's one way we look at it. To me, that's the way I used to look at it. Almost exclusively today I look at it as what's the impact on that person? Who is it that didn't have an opportunity, who now has an opportunity? That's a life changing thing. That's a huge impact.

Anjali Grover (20:44)

I totally agree. How do you measure something like that? I mean, that to me seems like the thing that sits maybe on top of everything we've talked about today, which is how have these changes affected people's day to day lives and how do you think about that?

Brian Lagerberg (20:58)

My belief is, you know, if you impact one person through an investment, there's probably a hundred times that many people out there in the same situation that could benefit from the same thing. I'll tell you one more anecdote because it's been so powerful. Early on in the program, I got a phone call at my desk and it was this guy and he said, hey, I work making jackets. And he said, my employer doesn't provide bus passes. Can you find me an employer that makes jackets that provides bus passes because I want to work there. And I thought, oh my goodness. He didn't ask about the money. He needs to be able to get to work. And he's struggling at doing that. And to me, that was like the light turning on, saying, this is how powerful it is. It has this big picture of the impact on the system, but it has a small, huge picture thing which is providing people access, which is giving people the opportunity to be part of community, to contribute to community.

Ryan Panchatseram (22:25)

Okay, Anjali, how effective was Washington's program at getting people to drive?

Anjali Grover (22:29)

Less so effective, Ryan. That employees in the program drove alone to work way less than people in the rest of the country. As of a few years ago, they drove 40% less.

Ryan Panchatseram (22:39)

It's pretty amazing. Washington has the carpooling state. So how do we copy and paste this idea?

Anjali Grover (22:44)

You know, the thing that I came away with is that as is so often the case in enacting positive change, bold change, it's clear that there is no single silver bullet. Instead, it's like all of these policies and initiatives piggyback on one another. So for example, the commuter law had.

Anjuli Grover (23:00)

A bigger impact because there were all.

Anjali Grover (23:01)

Of these other options, like Seattle's incredible light rail and that bus pass system we talked about.

Ryan Panchatseram (23:07)

Why do you think they were able to do it and not other cities?

Anjali Grover (23:10)

The biggest takeaway for me is how thoughtful the state of Washington was when they enacted this policy. They had looked across the country and they had seen other states that had attempted similar efforts. And what they did is they looked at California in particular, who had failed in certain regards, and they brought the people who had worked on that policy into the room in Washington. And then they brought in the CEOs and the heads of the organizations that would be needed to enact this program successfully. So it wasn't just this policy that was being done to employers. It was a policy that was crafted in part by employers.

Ryan Panchatseram (23:42)

So this isn't just about electric vehicles. You said that earlier. And with this multi prong approach of carpooling as well as buses and public transit, is Washington on target?

Anjali Grover (23:54)

They are. In 2008, the state really said, okay, by 2020, let's try to reduce the total miles that we drive by 18%. And they pulled it off.

Ryan Panchatseram (24:03)

That's incredible. I mean, they set the goal and they hit it.

Anjuli Grover (24:06)

The pandemic really helped further that cause. But nine counties were able to reach that goal before then in 2019. And the state also plans to cut miles driven in half by 2050.

Ryan Panchatseram (24:17)

That's ambitious. And are those realistic?

Anjuli Grover (24:20)

Well, if you look at a graph of what's happening now with the miles driven per person in the state, the line is relatively flat. But what's impressive is that it's staying flat even with a growing population. And all these programs have kept miles driven lower than they would have been otherwise.

Ryan Panchatseram (24:35)

So there is good news. Growing population, flat on miles driven. Those are good things. So how do we take the things that are working to other states?

Anjali Grover (24:45)

Basically, all the things that Washington did. Increase housing density, ask employers to change how their employees get to work, make people pay to park, pay people not to drive. And at the end of the day, other cities should be clamoring to get this stuff, because not only does it help the climate, it boosts everyone's quality of life. The air is cleaner. You don't have to deal with traffic. You don't have to be scared of crazy drivers. Seniors and others can get around more easily.

Ryan Panchatseram (25:09)

That's the dream. No traffic, fast commutes. What more could you ask for? I mean, I could do a little more work on the train.

Anjuli Grover (25:18)

Ryan, take it from a New Yorker, there's so many bonuses you can get exercise while walking to the bus stop or catch up on texting your friends or reading the news while you travel to your next destination.

Anjali Grover (25:29)

It just feels so much better to have choices for how to get around.

Anjuli Grover (25:33)

And the thing that Brian kept reminding me is that it's not just about efficiency, it's also about access. When we create more ways for people to get around, we're solving all the problems that we talked about before. But we're also changing people's lives. We're changing their options, we're changing the way they can experience the world. So it turns out good climate policy is good for everyone. Speed and Scale is a podcast from ted. It's hosted by me, Anjali Grover and Ryan Panchatseram. This episode was produced by Sarah Craig from Pushkin Industries, production support from Italy Yemlin. The show is edited by Ban Bang Chang and our fact checkers are Julia Dickerson and Jen Nam. The show is sound designed by mixed by Hanzel She Our executive producers are Daniela Balarezo and Consanza Gallardo. Special thanks to Jonathan Mallow and Roxanne Hilash.

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