On September 2nd, 2019, I landed at Taiwan’s Taoyuan Airport for the next chapter in a long planned return to Taipei. After passing the 6 month mark since moving here, I thought it would be worthwhile to reflect on the transition and preparation leading up to the move. It’s truly been a wonderful time back in Taiwan and there’s a lot I’m looking forward to accomplishing in the year ahead. In these past few months I was able to get approved for Taiwan’s Gold Card Visa, build the Taipei Urbanism brand, complete several projects, and stay involved in working with local governments to promote sustainable transportation infrastructure. Before I dive into more details of what I want to accomplish together this year with my network on LinkedIn, I wanted to reflect on the past two years in San Francisco prior to the move.
From 2017-2019, I was working in various capacities to help expand bike share ten-fold from 700 bikes to 7,000 bikes in the San Francisco Bay Area. My last role working on the bike share expansion project was “Community Affairs Coordinator” at Lyft’s bike and scooters division. Going to meetings, knocking on doors, sending mailers, participating in street fairs, going to more meetings, and enduring the occasional shouting match at city hall public hearings, defined much of my routine during this period. The original plans for expansion were supposed to be done in a year, but it was very clear early on that this timeline woefully underestimated the complexity of Bay Area politics. Regardless, that led me to have a very fruitful and busy 24 months working to untangle daily political puzzles with my co-workers and partners in local government.
During my tenure working on bike share there were also larger forces at play. For instance, Lyft bought Motivate in December of 2018 and then Lyft IPO’d in March of 2019. During these transitions there would occasionally be staffing and leadership changes which of course were painful and took time to process and adjust. I can also hardly forget the passing away of former San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee in December of 2017 and the multiple political leadership shake ups that occurred on the board of supervisors and the mayor’s office in the following year. While the world around me kept changing, the work of expanding bike share had to keep humming along. For the next two years I would work on helping new bike share stations get through the perilous approval process.
Fittingly enough my path into bike share came from my exposure to it from my first stint living in Taiwan as a visiting student at National Taiwan University in 2016. It was only a few weeks after moving to Taipei that a local student was kind enough to show me how to sign up and use Taipei’s bike share system. It really didn’t take long for me to become hooked and take frequent short trips all around the city even though I also owned and used a personal bike to get to classes (one that four years later I still use today!). YouBike was the first time that I used bike share on a regular basis and not as a tourist in NYC or D.C. I remember marveling how convenient it was being able to do one way bike trips and how effortless it was to use my transit card to pay for extremely cheap 17 cent USD rides. Stations in every neighborhood made it a great 24/7 option that ran even after the last train or bus left at around 12:30AM. At the time there were nearly 300 bike share stations in Taipei (there are now over 400) and the program was already immensely popular with people of all ages, genders, and walks of life. After leaving Taipei for the first time, one of the things I instantly missed was using bike share and the diverse demographics of the bike riding community.
After moving back to San Francisco post-grad, I was really surprised at how few bike share stations there were for such a bike-able city with a mild climate. I was excited to be able to be a part of expanding this sort of system back to my home state knowing that it would eventually become a part of the urban fabric like it was in other cities around the world. I thought that since it was a proven system elsewhere, that there would be universal excitement over the expansion of bike share in the Bay Area. However, I was probably a bit too naive at the time to the enduring human nature of opposing change. I knew there would be opposition, but not at the intensity that I would frequently experience. Strangely, the program often faced the most fierce resistance from folks that claimed to care about environmentalism and progressive ideals, but not if it came at the cost of a few car parking spaces near their home or had a brand name they didn’t like. Complaints ranged from aesthetics, parking, perceived potential for crime, trash, and creative doomsday scenarios that are way too many and ridiculous to list.
Each bike share station would take months of process with some stations ending up in an infinite process loop as city transportation planners fretted on where to approve a station and local politicians often randomly jumped in and out of the planning process. To be fair, some local politicians took a balanced approach and as long as their whole process was followed we could get a station approved after a few months of faithfully following their process. Other politicians had a constantly changing rubric of what was required based on who was yelling loudest at them on any given day. Anyone that works on city projects knows this is fairly normal.
It was from working on this project that I truly grasped the power and importance of local government in improving (or hindering) transportation systems and meeting climate goals. For some leaders the general rule of thumb is that if it’s anything more than a toothless statement of “climate crisis” expect long never ending processes that would rather see the city underwater before any changes are made to transportation and housing. I desperately wish this weren’t true. However, there are many good folks fighting the good fight inside and outside government to change the conversation about climate and housing in cities across California. If you ever run into somebody that meets this description please thank them—they don’t hear it quite often enough and their work is crucial!
On August 8th, 2019, after a little over two years working on bike share, I had finally reached a point where I felt my preparations were enough to successfully make the jump. I was ready to start the next chapter of my career pursuing transportation research and consulting in Taipei. I spent two weeks of August in Spain visiting relatives and then one final week in San Francisco before boarding a Taipei bound flight at SFO on September 2nd of 2019.
From September to December of 2019 I spent time adjusting to life in Taiwan and working for local companies. I also began the process of laying the groundwork for a project called Taipei Urbanism. From January to March of 2020 I ramped up the time spent working on transportation research and expanding the reach of Taipei Urbanism’s content. The early results look promising with strong follower growth on Twitter, several project collaborations with city government, and completion of some of the first consulting projects under the Taipei Urbanism umbrella.
For many years I’ve felt that Taipei would be a great hub for transportation related companies due to it’s highly developed transportation infrastructure, great education and health care systems, and easy access to the rest of Taiwan, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. After ten years of studying Mandarin, five years researching and working on transportation, and of course lots of goal setting and learning from failures, I finally felt prepared. I’m now in a position to be able to fully utilize all the strengths of my current home base of Taipei to continue building a career that I hope to be proud of.
These next few months will be crucial as I complete projects that will set the stage up for future work opportunities. I’m a strong believer of the positive impact the transportation sector can play in reducing emissions and improving quality of life—I just hope we as an industry can move the needle fast enough to make a difference.
Some key focuses for 2020 will be continuing to network locally and in the region with other transportation and sustainability professionals and to keep reading books and research papers that help me better understand what we can be doing today to improve transportation outcomes. I look forward to crossing paths with all those reading this post and hope to have more good news to share 6 months from now.
If you are working directly in this space and are interested in chatting or collaborating don’t hesitate reaching out to me on LinkedIn or on Twitter @taipeiurbanism. I’m constantly inspired by the work folks in our field are doing and hope to keep improving my work as well.
Thanks for reading!
P.S
Below are some recent projects and presentations I’ve done recently that you may find interesting:
•Taipei City Government’s COVID-19 Message to International Residents
•Video about Taiwan’s GOLD Standard COVID-19 Response
•A Translated Summary of How Public Transit Agencies in Taiwan are Responding to COVID-19.
•Presentation at Taipei City Government’s “Global Taipei Dialogue” on Taipei’s Transportation System.
•Explainer Video on the Transit Accessibility of Taipei Arena.