Friday, April 21, 2023

Waterloo Innovation Summit: Rethinking Global Travel

Today, the University of Waterloo, in partnership with MaRS Discovery District, will bring together some of the world’s leading experts on sustainable aeronautics, electric and autonomous vehicles, clean energy and urban planning to reimagine the future of local and global transportation at the Waterloo Innovation Summit.

Event highlights will be shared on social media. Use #UWaterlooSummit to join the conversation.

Making public transportation more equitable and sustainable

By Stephanie Longeway.

Have you ever seen an empty bus drive by? It can be a common occurrence especially during off-peak hours or in less populated areas. Making transit equitable and convenient for everyone while balancing the needs to be efficient and sustainable can lead to difficult decisions for municipalities.

Pantonium Inc. is a Toronto-based company looking to solve this challenge with an on-demand transit solution that responds in real-time to meet changing passenger needs. Co-founder and Waterloo alumnus Remi Desa (BASc '02), is passionate about improving public transit which stems from his own life experience. Living in different countries has showed him how integral quality transportation is to lead a productive and satisfying life.

We caught up with Desa to hear how Pantonium is rethinking sustainable transportation.

What is the transportation challenge that Pantonium addressing?

Pantonium is focused on solving the challenge of empty buses driving around in circles. We all know that public transit works in big cities like New York and Toronto, but in low density areas, like suburbs and rural areas public transit is inefficient and inconvenient and we see that in the numbers.

Only five per cent of commuters in Canada use buses, while 84 per cent use cars. This creates a sustainability problem. 30 per cent of all emissions comes from transportation and most of that is created by passenger transport. To reduce our energy consumption and emissions, society needs a way to make transit more attractive to riders.

Policy and planning are important to implement innovative solutions like Pantonium. Has this been a challenge for your company?

I find innovation with municipalities challenging as they are inherently risk adverse. In our experience municipal procurement policies and planning are not designed to encourage innovation. We have overcome these challenges by looking for municipal partners who are forward thinking and willing to embrace innovation. In addition, we also share our deployment results with research intuitions, who can independently analyze and verify the results of our deployments and publish them. We also believe that the work we are doing will become mainstream as society moves to create more sustainable communities.

Can you tell us about one of your municipal partnerships that you’re excited about?

In 2021, Fort Erie transit were dealing with the COVID pandemic and struggling to provide a sustainable service. On average only five per cent of the city used transit which is typical for North America. We worked with them to put in our model of “On Demand Transit”, and by 2022, the mode share of transit had increased to 15 per cent.

People who never used transit before, because it was inconvenient for their schedule, started using it every day and were able to get anywhere in the city on one bus with no transfers. This project was so successful that the US Department of Energy performed a study on it and found we had decreased the average green-house gas emissions per trip by 60 per cent, decreased cost per ride by 29 per cent, while increasing customer satisfaction. They concluded that if this solution were deployed in 270 similar sized cities, we would avoid 3.8 million tons of CO2 emissions per year.

What is your vision for the future of transportation?

I think ultimately if we are to achieve the environmental, social and economic goals that have been set by society, we need to move to a world with limited use cases for personal cars and place a bigger focus on shared mobility.

Our vision for cities is a hybrid model which has a mix of efficient rail, fixed bus routes and on-demand routes that are all working together to provide a public transit service that people want to use. We believe that Pantonium’s technology can help cities immediately accelerate their energy transition and make our public transportation more equitable, sustainable and fun for everybody.

Meet Desa at the Waterloo Innovation Summit

On April 21, the University of Waterloo, in partnership with MaRS Discovery District, will host the Waterloo Innovation Summit: Rethinking global travel. As a featured speaker, Desa will share his passion for finding efficiencies as well as share his knowledge from more than 20 years of experience working in operations and logistics. 

Waterloo Staff Conference: 1,500 for the 15th anniversary

A message from Organizational and Human Development. 

This year, over 1,500 staff members came together for the 15^th anniversary of the Waterloo Staff Conference. The event couldn’t have been more of a success, and we owe it all to you.  

Director of Organizational and Human Development Melanie Will speaks at the Staff Conference.

The conference brought an amazing sense of community and engagement, and we were thrilled to see so many staff members take the opportunity to learn and connect with their colleagues. 

Although the conference has come to an end, there are still ways to engage with the content and continue learning. You can view session recordings on the OHD resource website. Simply log in with your WatIAM credentials to gain access. 

Staff Conference keynote speaker, author Neil Pasricha, speaks to the audience.

Please take a couple of minutes to share some feedback on your experience by completing this conference evaluation survey. Once completed, you will have the chance to win one of two $50 gift cards to the W Store or one of Neil Pasricha’s signed Our Book of Awesome. If you choose to enter the draw, your contest entry will not be connected to the feedback you provide so please keep this in mind when entering. 

Thank you to everyone who attended and helped make this event possible. We appreciate your support and hope to see you again next year. 

CEE teams tie for top Capstone sustainability award

Two teams from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) tied for the top spot for a faculty-wide sustainability prize for projects displayed during the recent Capstone Design symposia.

Maria Stakheiko (left to r)ight, Ayden Ryan, Mackenzie Lebrun and Jill Martin of The GreenStem Group.

The GreenStem Group, made up of graduating students from the architectural engineering program, and YESA Consulting, representing the environmental engineering program, shared the Sustainable Development Capstone Design Award.

More than a dozen teams, the winners for individual programs at Waterloo Engineering, were in the running for the award, which recognizes projects that address United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

GreenStem is made up of environmental engineering teammates Ayden Ryan, Jill Martin, Mackenzie Lebrun and Maria Stakheiko. The technical advisor was Dr. Daniel Lacroix.

Its project involved a proposal for the site of a former bus terminal in downtown Kitchener that would include affordable, market and accessible housing in two multi-use podium towers.

Andy Zhao (left to right), Sarah Paul, Ellie Kim and Yiming Li of YESA Consulting.

YESA is comprised of teammates Yiming Li, Ellie Kim, Sarah Paul and Andy Zhao. The technical advisor was Dr. Wayne Parker.

Its project focused on a citric acid manufacturing facility that treats its high-strength wastewater stream with an energy-intensive process. An upgrade of the treatment plant would recover valuable bioresources including biofuels and bioplastics.

During the annual showcase, about 1,500 final-year students from 14 programs presented more than 300 projects they had spent months designing and building.

A sidebar switcheroo and other notes

Perceptive Daily Bulletin readers might notice a slight difference in the sidebar of today's Daily Bulletin - we've flipped the "When and Where to Get Support" and "When and Where" content. Campus events will regain their prior place of prominence at the top of the sidebar, along with the Link of the Day and the biweekly Beyond the Bulletin Podcast blurb.

A bit of history: you'll recall that in March 2020, everything, well, changed on campus (and pretty much everywhere else) as the COVID-19 pandemic transitioned from far-flung curiosity to in-your-masked-face crisis, and one of the University's first responses was to suspend all in-person meetings, events, and other activities not related to its core academic mission. This left the Daily Bulletin's "When and Where" column, a calendar of on-campus events and a long-running feature of the publication, in a bit of a quandary. By March 19, 2020, events were being cancelled left and right, and virtual events were quickly becoming the new normal. What good was laying out the when and the where, when there was nothing happening anywhere? So, in a fit of cheek, the sidebar's name was temporarily changed to "When and Where It Isn't" to reflect the mostly virtual nature of the events it was chronicling. However, in the early days of the lockdown, even virtual events were few and far between, so substitute sidebar content was sorely sought after.

That's when we hit on the idea of including information about the present and emerging supports that students, faculty, and staff could access to make life and work during lockdown a little easier, and on March 27, 2020, the When and Where to get Support sidebar category was born. It started with the Keep Learning team's offerings as well as WUSA supports for undergraduate students, and soon expanded to cover other important areas of campus life and operations, for employees of all stripes and students both undergraduate and graduate. On the events side of things, the When and Where It Isn't sidebar eventually changed to "When and Where (But Mostly When)" as webinars, Zoom meetings, and Teams delivery continued to be the norm. It wasn't until October 12, 2022 when it reverted to its previous When and Where moniker as more and more in-person events returned to the campus calendar. And in the spring of 2023, there are more campus events than you can shake a stick at - the calendar has rebounded.

Through it all, the When and Where to Get Support sidebar has been updated, revised, and expanded, and is still a useful snapshot of resources for readers. However, things have returned to a certain sort of normal in 2023, and the sidebar, which finds itself repeated day in and day out on the web and e-newsletter version of the Daily Bulletin, no longer serves the same immediate info-to-hand function that it did in 2020 and 2021. So, for now, we're moving it down the sidebar in recognition of the buttress it served to the Daily Bulletin's visual and informational framework these past three years. Likely it will be transitioned to a permanent home in the Daily Bulletin's left-hand menu, and it will continue to see updates as the information changes or goes out of date.

To all of the faculties, academic support units, and student organizations who submitted content to the support sidebar, I give you my heartfelt thanks for the work you did that enabled the Daily Bulletin to remain relevant and provide needed information to the campus community during what was, let's face it, the most challenging period of change in the University's history. The Daily Bulletin's readers doubtlessly appreciated it.

And as the editor, I know I did. 

Today, the Sustainability Office and others from the University community will be participating in a campus clean-up of litter hotspots in advance of Earth Day tomorrow. Staff will be in the EV3 atrium from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. to distribute supplies and direct groups. There's still time to register to participate in the campus clean-up today.

In other news: this evening, Muslims in our campus community and around the world will begin celebrating Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and is celebrated with prayers, meals, gift exchanges, the wearing of new clothes, visits with friends and family, and respects paid at the graves of loved ones. The Waterloo Masjid has details on special prayer times and Eid events.