Out of concern for the public health and climate change impacts of drayage trucks, the mayors of Los Angeles and Long Beach set a joint goal to transition the ports’ drayage trucks– which move cargo to train yards, warehouses and distribution centers – to 100% zero-emission vehicles by 2035. But a new UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation (LCI) report advocates for “an accelerated transition starting in the 2020s” because it “could be both feasible and advantageous.”
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Increasing the number of electric vehicles is key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving air quality in L.A. and other cities. A recent paper published in Environmental Research Letter by Deepak Rajagopal (associate professor in the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at UCLA) and Amol Phadke (Energy Analysis and Environmental Impacts Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories) argues that policymakers could expand the climate benefits of electric vehicles by directing government subsidies toward the cars that spend the most time on the road – such as taxis, and vehicles used for Uber and Lyft.
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Yifang Zhu, a professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, was quoted in a Time Magazine article about avoiding dangerous levels of pollution while driving. To decrease pollution exposure during long commutes, Zhu recommends changing out a car’s cabin filter every six months to a year and switching on the A/C’s “air recirculation” function. “This shuts down the air exchange between the inside of the vehicle and the outside, and instead uses recirculated air,” she said.
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Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies in the Luskin School of Public Affairs, was quoted in a Los Angeles Times story about a North Carolina State University research project about the carbon footprint of electric scooters. The environmental cost of producing the scooters, their relatively short lifetimes, and the carbon generated while collecting the scooters for charging contribute to their surprisingly high carbon footprint, researchers found.
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The City of Los Angeles revealed bold new sustainability goals in its 2019 Sustainable City pLAn, released April 29, 2019. Branded “LA’s Green New Deal”, the plan is a four-year update to the City’s first-ever sustainability plan, released in 2015.
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