Transcriber: Qirui Jiang Reviewer: Helen Chang
(Intro Music)
Throughout the human history, we‘ve invented
a fantastic set of technologies that helps us move from A to B,
and MIT contributes to many of these particular modes of travel.
However, has this technology translated into the improvement
of the mobility system as a whole?
How many of you have been to China before?
Many.
How many of you’ve been to China in the 1980s?
Maybe a few. One, two, a few.
Right. What do you see in this picture?
Bicycles, pedestrians, electric buses.
How do you call this picture today?
Low carbon travel. Active travel. Healthy travel. Sustainable travel.
This is the dreamland of today’s transportation planners.
And Beijing, in the last year,
strives itself to move away from this mobility paradigm.
Within the 30 years, we go back,
technology clearly improved.
But is transportation at a better place?
And you can ask the same question for Boston, right?
Transportation is the biggest CO2 emitter, and a much part of that are car travels.
And at MIT, we teach a class called “Decarbonize Urban Mobility.”
The current situation looks like the five blind men observing the elephant.
We see this as a bicycle problem.
We see this as an electric vehicle problem.
We see this urban development problem. We see the public transit problem.
There’re so many different aspects about decarbonizing urban mobility,
and today I want to drive your attention to the behavior change.
If I ask you, why do people buy cars?
We actually asked a question in the study in this particular way:
“I would like to own a car even if I do not need to travel.”
How much you would guess people would say “Yes”?
Before I ran this study, I thought maybe 10 percent, 5 percent.
But the results blow me away.
Half of the people said, “I want a car regardless.”
That means there must be something else beyond a travel instrument to have a car.
If you ask this more directly: “I feel proud of owning my car.”
A majority of people said “Yes.”
This notion of the social biases related to travel modes
is not unique to Chinese cities or any other big cities.
In fact, in 1986, there’s a quote misattributed to Lady Margaret Thatcher.
Yeah, a man over 35 who finds himself on the bus can call himself a failure.
Right. So if you are in London in the 1980s,
it doesn’t matter the travel time or cost,
your life is a failure if you’re on the bus.
How much powerful this would change people’s behavior?
So is travel a simple, mundane chore?
Or does it have a higher meaning attached to it?
In fact, if you look at different aspects of life—
food, clothing, housing, traveling—
all of them have an element of utility
and also have an element of vanity.
So we need to pay attention to these emotional travels
if we’re really serious about decarbonizing
the transportation sector.
We then compared it between the U.S. and China.
We looked for one city,
maybe with the lowest carbon footprint you can imagine, New York City, let’s say.
We found it is as high as in Shanghai where car is still developing.
And then further, we surveyed about 41 thousand people
across 50 countries to try to have a global comparison
about the car pride level.
To the right, here, if you look at the countries with the highest pride,
they are Kenya, India, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, etc.
To the left, are countries like
Japan, Switzerland, Denmark, France have the lowest car pride.
Overall, the dark dots represent the developed countries.
Developed countries, in general, have lower car-pride,
except the United States.
It sits right here. Yeah.
In the developing countries, though,
the desire is high, but income is low.
So their preferences are being compressed at the moment.
When income grows, the car ownership may explode.
If every one of the 7.7 billion human beings strive
to have a car as part of a satisfied life, no technology exists today
to satisfy the desire without destroying our planet.
But what can happen in thirty years?
Where’s the hope?
I mentioned in London, in the 1980s,
public transit was very bad and such dramatizing.
But after 30 years, when I was working in London
—MIT has been working with “Transport for London” for 15 years now—
I observed people, rich and poor, old and young, using public transit happily
without worrying about their social image
being disdained.
In fact, in 2008, the mayor of London sent the red bus to Beijing
to receive the Olympic flag.
Bus from being seen as a failure of life to the pride of the city.
So things can change. It takes about a generation to do so.
Here, more fundamentally, we’ve been working together to change
the social fundamental accounting system.
Just like time and money, we need to elevate carbon
to be one of the fundamental components.
Everyone of us thinks about it every minute, and then link
this national carbon reduction commitment
to the individual behavior in terms of de-carbon.
Observation 1: As of today, individuals and corporations
are under different social pressures.
The corporations are under a much higher pressure
through the ESG process to decarbonize.
And we need to channel this corporations’ carbon reduction commitment
to the individual to reward the behavior change by the individual.
Secondly, we want to engage everybody
in a fun, artistic, and privacy-preserving manner.
Today, so much brainpower is used to get us all addicted to social media,
to the games, and to the metaverse.
Can we utilize some of this supreme power to get us addicted to carbon reduction?
Finally, how to bring this behavioral thinking
and computational thinking together?
We can use the blockchain technology to record and verify
the specific carbon reduction behavior change.
While maintaining NFTs all the time for all these digital creations,
can we make an NFT for each of the decarbonizing travel trips?
And every trip could be a piece of art.
And every low-carbon trip could be a piece of beautiful art.
Lastly, I’ll leave with you this picture.
This is a sedan carried by 8 persons.
If you are in Ancient China,
probably you need to be a governor to have a sedan carried by 8 persons.
If you’re an emperor, you have a sedan carried by 16 persons.
If a mayor, a sedan carried by 4 persons.
If you’re a lay person, you walk.
What I’m saying is this association with travel mode to the social status
is long rooted in human culture.
But today, still taking pride in owning a car is old-fashioned.
The culture is powerful and the culture is sticky,
but the culture can also change.
In order to decarbonize urban mobility,
we need to understand the emotions of travel.
Thank you.
(Applause)