Making Transportation Systems Eco-friendly is a Solvable Problem

incandescent bulbs. For LEDs, choose a car that gets fifty mpg over forty mpg, you don't have to think about it as much. So like think about the big decisions that matter and like stop freaking out if you forget your cloth grocery bags. Once. As CEO of street Light Data, Shoel has the data to back this stuff up, but you won't find her postilytizing yet. I have a fundamental belief that informed decisions will arc towards changes that I

want to see in the world. But we, as data providers, we have to be neutral because we're a source of truth. Street Light Data is a transportation analytics company, and Laura Schuel thinks how we move can be changed for the better. My name is Laura Schuel. I'm the CEO of street Light Data. How to monitor and mold our transportation systems into smart and environmentally friendly systems is a solvable problem.

I recently watched Bishion Impossible three and Tom Cruise, who plays Ethan Hunt, is a part of the Impossible Mission force. In this one, he's actually getting married and as a result, his cover for working for the Impossible Bishion Force is that he works for the Bureau of Transportation. So he's at a party and he makes this cobbent where he goes. Yeah, traffic patterns are so crazy. It moves, it's like an organism. It's very interesting thing. And everyone kind of looks at

him like this guy's kind of boring. And so what I'm thinking about our listeners, I'm thinking about them and thinking about data could beat something that's like extremely boring to them. But give me a piece of data that's excites you the most and something that you think a listener, just a casual person would find interesting when it comes to talking about transportation data. Well, first of all, that movie sounds awesome, and my company is immediately going to

have a movie night about it. Second of all, he's not boring. He sounds like the most interesting person at the party. I love that. One of the things that I hope is coming with Secretary Budajes and President Biden is a demand that we calculate our transportation greenhouse gases, which we don't really do. We kind of swag it.

One of the concerns with that is that then it would be bad for rural places, because rural places, especially with highways, are places where you have a lot of miles driven that have nothing to do with that rural place. Right people are cutting through min DOT Minnesota DOOT used our data to do a version of greenhouse gas emission that attribute the miles driven to the destination of the

car in the truck. And what that does is it properly demands payment, so to speak, from the cities from the fact that they cause all this driving to and from them, and doesn't put disproportionate cost in carbon on the rural areas. That sort of data driven approach could reduce some of the future pushback we're going to see about carbon accounting from transportation. One interesting thing that I heard about you was that you started off as a

comparative literature major. So how did you end up going for comparative literature to data analytics. Ah, it is a classic story of a great professor. So I was in college and I was majoring in comparative literature, and I assumed I would be a literature professor. That just seems my destiny. And because of distribution requirements, you had to take one science class by the end of sophomore year. So I took Introduction to Environmental Engineering just because it

fit my schedule. And I came out of the final and I was like, Oh, climate change is the most important thing of my generation, and now no, I must spend my life working on this. So you founded a company called Streetlight. Tell me a little bit about what

it does. Street Light is a transportation analytics company. So from the perspective of somebody making transportation decisions, like a government or an engineering firm, or somebody starting like a delivery company before street Light, they're operating a world with little data. So you have to make a decision about like should I spend two billion dollars on this highway extension or a billion dollars on this new transit line.

But there was very little data to guide you. So what street Light does is we take advantage of the fact that everything that moves now is collecting data. Smartphones, connected cars, connected trucks, little scooters. There's data embedded in stoplights, everything, and we license it from all different types of places and a privacy appropriate manager and smush it together with a lot of p terry algorithms and machine learning so that you can look up a transportation fact as easily

as you might look up a fact in Wikipedia. So what would you say The benefit of this data is for whom our product is not for consumers like you or me. It's for transportation professionals, and that's usually someone in government, someone an engineering firm, or someone with their own private transportation company like Uber or a private tollway

or things like that. So the benefit is, instead of making decision based on somebody yelling at you and kind of your gut, you make a decision that is based on data and that is based on a real understanding of the context. That's the fundamental benefit. Now, then there's a bigger question, which is what is the benefit of making a good decision? And we are trying to push people towards decision that are less carbon intensive, so create

less climate emissions from transportation. Also better for expenditures of tax dollars being more wise, as well as improving safety outcomes in transportation. This all sounds very noble, and I'd be interested to know how you picked this specific lane. I would say, when well, I guess lane, we're talking about translation lane. How would you pick this specific lane when it comes to trying to solve for climate change? The climate community is paying less attention to transportation than

to other parts of the climate crisis. So really I could have chosen anything, because it's all worth a lifetime, But I was like, well, I got to pick something. Transportation I think has less people, so it deserves my attention. And also it's just interesting. I mean, where people go, how they think about the new round about in their city, how they think about their commute. I have. As soon as you say you're in transportation, your cocktail party conversations

are covered because everybody wants to talk about it. You're a for profit company, so how do you control or and how can you really give guidance the folks to make why is the cis when it comes to climate change? Rather than just using your data to maybe monetize or build more malls, just give more opportunities to sell things the people rather than actually doing the things that would improve the planet. That is a really good question. So before I started street Light, I had never worked at

a for profit company. I had worked for nonprofits, not for profits, and geo's. I'd worked for the government. I'd been an academia. I'd been getting my PhD. With all love and respect to my nonprofit friends and colleagues and my government friends and colleagues, I had felt a little bit frustrated by the scope you can get when you're

at a nonprofit and you're constantly scrambling for money. I had seen a lot of green tech companies that I thought were scaling their impact faster than I believed possible in the nonprofit sector. But there's a trade off there because we almost never tell our customer you should do this because it's greener, you should do this because it's better for asthma costing pollutants. If they ask us about that,

we'll all is given the answer. But as data providers, we have to be neutral because we're a source of truth. So I have a fundamental belief that informed decisions will arc towards changes that I want to see in the world. And one of the reason the transportation world is not headed in the direction that I like is because we don't use data. We base decisions on what we've done in the past or the more powerful lobby. So there is a faith jump in choosing to go that for

profit route. Do you think that's a little more optimistic than is necessary to actually solve the problem of climate change? Because I think that people, when they have more information make better decisions. I think that's true, but it also means that we have to trust the person making the decision that they'll make the right one. In general, I am skeptical about people just because they have better information

always making the right decision. But in transportation in particular, what we are dealing with is this immense inertia of building more highways to facilitate more cars going fast. Biking and walking are hugely important parts of solving transportation climate emissions. So, as one example, a lot of attention before COVID and during COVID has been drawn to the fact that bicycle and pedestrian deaths are on the up and if people

are dying and it's getting a lot of press. A. I do not want people to die, and B it's also a challenge for our bigger goal of a more climate friendly transportation world. One of the major issues that came up is nobody knows like bike bike deaths per what Like nobody knows how many bike trips there are in the US or in a neighborhood or in a city. And we had that data available and that has become one of our top use cases in under eighteen months.

I think many states and cities are make much more wise and informed decisions about bicycle and pedestrian safety, which a is good for humans and b is good for climate. As a data driven person, you're putting a lot of faith. Are you seeing more of people making good decisions based on this data than you are of them making profitable or capitalistic decisions based on this data. I don't know if I've ever calculated the ratio, but I always say streetlight is not a magic box that tells you what

to do. It's a tool to help smart people do what they want to do more effectively. Now, those smart people could want to be doing capitalistic things. But one thing that has been huge in my industry and transportation and urban planning is the people who are coming into the industry do not look like and are not motivated by the same things that the people who came in ten years ago or twenty years ago or fifty years ago,

many of whom are still just starting to retire. And this generation of people coming into it are very motivated by the right decisions, and we're trying to give them tools so they can get done what they want to get done. And I also will say with the government clients, most of them that I meet, even if they are very dedicated to say highway expansion, which is something that if I had to some arise my life goal, it would be to stop highway expansion in the United States.

That would be it. Even if they are they are motivated by something they perceive as good, like they perceive it as good for their community, and they perceive it as good for jobs in their community. People who go into government don't go into government to get rich, right, And I'm not talking about the electeds. I don't deal with electeds all that off, and I deal with staff. And even if I don't agree with their definition of good, we both agree we're trying to do something for our community.

So there's a commonplace to start talking. Tell me a little bit about where you get your data from. We use lots of different types of data. We're like a surfer and we're surfing the wave of data, and data is this always changing thing, and whatever data we use today, it'll be different six months from now, in a year from now. But right now, the main data we use

that's the most important is from smartphones. So we have an opt in process, which is a much more privacy pro privacy process where people can work with one of our four hundred and so AT partners and opt into deidentified locational tracking in the background. And what that means is we don't know you're Ronald. You have a hash to identifier, and so we never get any what's called personally identifiable information, and we don't know your name, your

phone number, anything like that. We also get data from connected cars that have GPS tooling in them, as well as fleet management systems, which are truck management systems. Trucks rip up the road and cause safety impacts in a very different way than cars, so it's important to study them separately. But the deep benefit of the phones is that they cover all the modes of transportation and one

of street lights core missions and sort of differentiators. One of the things we've done that's really new is we measure all the modes car, truck, bike, ped riding, a train, riding a bus, riding a ferry, eventually, jetpack whatever. And that is something that has never really been available before. And that's one of the reasons that cars keep getting this hegemony is because they're the only things that are

consistently measured. So we have all those breadcrumbs floating around, and then we mix it with data from embedded sensors in the roadways that help us calibrate. We mix it with bite counter data, padcounter data, data from bus ridership data that says, you know, low income people live here, high income people live here, this is a road with fifty mile per hour speed limit, this is the ocean, all sorts of contextual data to turn it into actionable

and aggregate analytics. One of the drawbacks to a data company like street Light is that you guys are selling your data to people that could pay. It's not something that's free to public, but it's information about public movements. Are you concerned to having to pay for this data hinders its ability to be truly useful. It's a great question,

so I am, of course somewhat concerned. Some of the mitigation steps we take are all academic researchers who are researching something within our mission, which is climate equity safety, get free access you just failed to form. And we have like seventy five universities that we're working with who are doing totally free research based on our data. And we also have fellowships where nonprofits can apply to get free research, and we also help promote their research. But

that is mitigation. That's not fixing the fundamental problem you've talked about. And I don't have a great fix. And we have a hundred staff, We spend a lot of money on the cloud, and what we do is expensive. We have to survive. And I think that in America we have consistently disinvested in government driven collection of data. But because we've made that decision that data is something that private markets are going to develop, we can't have

everything online. What issues are you eager to see solved in transportation in the next five years. There's a big conversation right now in the Senate about everybody's saying in the infrastructure bill. Oh yeah, we should measure equity in transportation, And they're like, how, no one knows, there's no way, Like I mean, there's forty five thousand ways, there's no agreement. So there's going to be a lot of quick work

on that. So I'm very interested in that. Street Light is working on a lot more direct carbon and equity measurements now that we have a Biden administration. That opens up the space where that could be used. So we are going to make a lot of tooling that's more mission direct in addition to our more neutral data collection efforts.

So that is starting now. We need to solve the question of what does it mean to have equitable transportation and how do you define it because there's no good there's no good definition right now, and we're collaborating with some nonprofits and some advocacy organizations to get explicit measurements about that. The fact that we can measure the income and racial distribution of where people move is a huge

leap forward and starting to measure transportation equity. I mean, it sounds like you're saying that transportation equity begins with data. I think everything begins with data. So take that with a grain of salt. I mean, transportation is in a bad way in America. It's dissequitable, it's destroying the climate. It kills forty three thousand people a year, and like our bridges are falling down, Like we're pretty bad. So we have to change. And to think of a massive

systemic change without data, I just think that's insane. But I agree it's not data alone. We are a tool for smart people motivated by the right things to do their job more easily. How do you motivate private companies to care about public issues like climate change? There are two ways you get corporations to care about climate change. One is you point out to them that it will have a huge impact on their bottom line either today or in ten years. And a lot of corporations are

there right, they get that. And the second way is their staff starts to throw a fit, so we help. We have helped some staff throw fits quietly. We don't do it that directly. That's what we do. Do you do you want us to include that? The main thing we point out is that staff. If all your staff have to drive their own cars fifty miles each way, like that will dwarf the climate impact of your office building within a couple of years. Gotcha, So we've we've

worked on that. Okay, I think that's a good strategy. How can our listeners help, Like, what could someone who wants to be like a more responsible and better city resident? How can they help right now? And what about people that don't live in like bustling cities, people that live in more rural areas. How can we all help make it make transportation better for everyone? Well, one thing that I think is fun is to track your own data

for a few days. One thing that I think sounds simple but nobody gets is that your short trips are less carbon emitting than your long trips. So I've had some friends, you know, lovely eco hippie friends who say do things to me like, well, you know, I take a bus every day to work. The only reason I have a car is for like, you know, we can advent to go hiking. And I'm like, well that is a hundred and ten mile drive. Like, I'd rather you drive to work every day and maybe car pool or

take the train for you to adventures. So really think it's the length of the drip that matters, So track your own data. I think it will surprise you, it might make you more open to an electric car, and it might help you think about which trips really matter. I also think that as a citizen, as a private individual, there are three personal infrastructure decisions you make in transportation. Where you live, which car you buy, if you buy a car, and where you spend most of your days,

which is usually where you work. And if you optimize those decisions a little, like if you move to an apartment that's closer to work, or choose a job that's a little closer, you've optimized your transportation footprint and you don't have to like agonize about it every day. So optimize those big You know, if you choose a car that gets fifty mpg over forty mpg, you don't have to think about it as much. So like think about the big decisions that matter, and like stop freaking out

if you forget your cloth grocery bags once. Those infrastructure decisions matter more where you live, where you work, the relationship between them, and what car you drive if you drive a car. As citizens, citizens have a lot of power about city level urban design decisions. If you show up, there's always feedback meetings, and if you show up, you will make a difference. And I think the other thing to remember is a lot of the people show up are people who have a very vested interest in things

being the same, which may be good. Sometimes it's not, or people who just assume the worst. And usually the staff at these meetings, again it's not elected, it's staff who've chosen this career. Usually they are trying really hard. And if someone calmly showed up and said, can you show me the data? Can you show me the alternatives, they would be so excited and that person would be so impactful. So showing up and showing up trying to work with the staff instead of assuming the worst of them,

I think is really powerful. You have any books or movies that you think you would recommend for people to learn more about transportation and transportation equity, Well, now I want everybody to watch Mission Impossible, Three Three Angels Protocol are the best ones. So okay, now I know I'll watch them. I'll watch them tonight. My favorite book about transportation is by John McPhee. It's called Uncommon Carriers, and it's a book about the people who do the work

of freight hauling. He just writes so beautifully and with such dignity about the people who do this work and the incredibleness of the machines that get our T shirts and our popcorn to our houses, like whether it's the freight boats with the giant containers or the long contructs. That book. It gave me a sense of awe and respect for the sort of societal achievement that is our transportation system. And I think that's healthy if you're thinking

about changing something. The Infrastructure Bill is not called the Infrastructure Bill, It's called the American Jobs Act. And I think it is very important, especially for technologists like me, that we don't just assume that our efficient approach and it is more efficient, is neutral like to society, and to think about these industries we're disrupting. Thank you so much for being with us, Laura, My pleasure. Laura Sewell

is the CEO of street Light Data. Will include linkster suggestions on ways to learn more about transportation and data analytics in our show notes. Next time on Solvable, we're talking about sugar, salt, fat, all the good stuff and how to solve food addiction. But before you turn away feeling annoyed and clinging to a bag of delicious cheese puffs. Here's a little preview. The solution is not all on you.

I hope you'll join us for that conversation. Solvable is produced by Joscelyn Frank, research by David Jack, booking by Lisa Dunn. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our executive producer is Mio Lobel. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening.