Infrastructure Technology Podcast: UCLA’s efforts towards zero-emission transportation

In episode nine, the Infrastructure Technology Podcast weaves together transportation tech, safety debate and Halloween fun. The hosts start by answering listener emails about electric scooters, e-bikes and other personal mobility devices—discussing how cities must adapt their infrastructure for a growing mix of vehicles. Brandon then interviews Dave Karwaski of UCLA Transportation, who outlines the university’s cutting-edge Sustainable Transportation Plan, including full bus fleet electrification, inductive charging technology and the integration of Waymo autonomous vehicles into campus life. The interview highlights UCLA’s leadership in reducing emissions, easing congestion and offering students safer, more sustainable ways to travel. Afterward, the hosts debate the future of AVs, touching on public trust and the balance between automation and human control. The episode closes with Ileana’s Bunny Man Bridge urban legend.

Here is a transcript from the episode:

GJ: And welcome to the Infrastructure Technology Podcast. I'm Gavin Jenkins, and with me, we have Ileana Garnand.

IG: Howdy, howdy.

GJ: And Brandon Lewis.

BL: How's it going people? It's episode nine, and it's a Tuesday, which means it's a podcast day.

GJ: There we go. It is Tuesday. It is a podcast day, and we are coming to you every week on Tuesday. Unlike last season, our first season, we began the year in January, kicking it off with every other week. We took the summer off and now we are back full force here in the fall, and we are just going strong nine weeks in a row. We're crushing it, right, Brandon?

BL: Absolutely.

GJ: Okay, Brandon, tell us, what do we have on the show today?

BL: So today I am interviewing the director of Mobility Planning and Traffic Systems at UCLA Transportation Dave Karwaski, and what we talk about is UCLA's efforts for students and people in the area to use public transportation, so we talk about the technology behind all this transportation stuff, including electric vehicles, AVs, the new Waymo system that's been taking place, obviously in some areas of California as well.

GJ: Okay. Alright, so yeah, I don't know that I personally would ever get into a Waymo, but the more we talk about it on this podcast, I feel myself loosening up to it.

IG: I agree. 

GJ: It’s the future.

IG: Listening to that interview, actually be a little preview for my thoughts afterwards, but it did actually open my mind a little bit on Waymo's.

GJ: Technology. Let me tell you something about technology. We have the ability, some people think to understand what dogs are saying with those buttons that you step on, you see the viral videos. I personally wish that I had some kind of device where I could tell what my dog is trying to tell me at all times. His name is Bob. He's an 8-year-old border colleague, and I've trained him to, well, not trained him, he's a fetch machine, and so if I sit on the couch to watch TV, he wants to play fetch, and he used to leave me alone when I was at this desk and now he sees me on a Teams call or a Zoom call, and he thinks that I'm on TV, I'm watching TV. And so now if you notice I have a ball in my hand, he constantly is jamming toys into my side whenever I'm on a call, so I really wish I could just be able to communicate with him someday. Technology can give us that.

BL: We all want to talk to our pets. It's like my number one thing in life.

GJ: It would be so great. I imagine that we'll probably talk to some kind of wild animal before dogs or cats. I remember there are scientists that are trying to decode the language of elephants in Africa. Fifteen years ago there was a 60 Minutes piece on it, and they had what they thought of as the letter A to their alphabet decoded that much.

BL: That's insane.

GJ: Yeah, well, I mean they can talk to each other from miles away as well.

IG: One of my favorite elephant facts is that they hold grudges, so I think that this went viral a couple years ago, but there was the elephants that stormed a funeral of someone. I think they were a poacher or maybe just a jerk, but they came and ruined the funeral, and I think that's really, really awesome.

GJ: Yeah, I love elephants. They hold grudges, they have memories and they can speak a language. I love them to death, but none of this has anything to do with what we were supposed to talk about. Off the top, we have listener email that we wanted to talk about, and if you like us talking about elephants or just technology, please email us at [email protected], but Ileana, tell us about the emails that we have received in the past couple of weeks.

IG: We have a question from Carol in Oklahoma that I wanted to bring up. We dived into our feelings on bike lanes over a multi-part episode discussion and so Carol was wondering what we thought about non bike, but also non-car vehicles on the road, so she's curious about electric scooters. Electric wheelchairs.

GJ: Segways?

IG: I've never seen a Segway on the road, but yeah, I mean I would love to hear if you've seen a Segway, but what are our thoughts on if you see it on the road?

GJ: I personally am a huge fan of the TV show Arrested Development, and my favorite character is Joe Russo, and he rides Segway, and I personally would love to ride a Segway, but I've never seen it.

IG: No, I've never seen one.

GJ: Looks dangerous actually.

IG: I would not like a Segway on the road with me when I'm in my car. The biggest thing I see is I live in a double college town and so we do have a lot of electric scooters. I think people are really, really good usually about being safe with it. They usually stick to sidewalks, or they usually stick to just the university campuses and I think that might be something that's built into the scooters technology. I think some of them you're not allowed to leave campus, which I think is great, but sometimes we do have, I think it's personal electric scooters. We have people riding them on the road and when there's not that protected bike lane in there, again like a bike, but even more so I get really nervous when I see a scooter sharing the road with me. I know you might not have any other options, but they don't go that fast. No one is ever wearing a helmet on those things.

GJ: Yeah. What do you think, Brandon?

BL: Yeah, so I'm going to lean a little bit towards what Ileana said, which is I think it depends on where you're at and if you go back to season one of the ITP in my interview with Bill Klein, we talked about the safety of electric bikes and electric scooters and how they're built and how they're designed and why you are able to take these things on the road, but Ileana, you also mentioned electric wheelchairs and as I've said multiple times on this podcast, as somebody who uses one, I try to stay on the sidewalk as much as possible. Sometimes due to either construction or the way a sidewalk is built or whatever the case may be, they’re times where I have to go in the street, and I personally am always a little bit nervous. It's not that I don't feel like the road is safe for the infrastructure; it's more so depending on what kind of car somebody else is in. If they're in a high SUV or a truck or whatever it may be, are they going to see me? Am I going to be in my right of way but also have a chance to be hit because just no one's able to see me?

GJ: Oh, that is so true. That is so true. I think they've done studies that people that are in SUVs or even those big trucks nowadays, they can't see things within a certain distance of their hood. They're driving around in tanks now. I don't judge anyone for driving big vehicles. They get around very easily in the snow. They're good for hauling and that sort of thing, but there's a risk in that, absolutely. I personally, with the scooters and the motorized vehicles and the bicycles and everything, after our discussion about it on the other show a couple of weeks ago, we're at a crossroads. Do we have to completely reshape the infrastructure or do we just tell the American driver that you got to be patient and kind and share the road, and it's really hard to be patient and kind and share the road because it's easy to say that and then the next thing you know, you're late to a social engagement or to something for work, and you see some bozo in a scooter in the middle of the road going 10 miles below the speed limit.

IG: I think it's the former, and that is way easier said than done, but we have all these different personal transportation devices now that are alternatives to cars, and I think we need to start adapting our infrastructure to it to where it's safer because not everyone can afford to drive a car. Not everyone can afford to learn how to drive. I have friends who would love to know how to drive a car, but they just never had anyone in their life who was able to give them the time or then the funds.

GJ: Have you ever seen those old, old video clips of a street in San Francisco in 1905 or something like that? 

BL: No, I have not. 

GJ: Oh, if you look, there's old footage, old reels of what streets in cities looked like at the turn of the 20th century or maybe like 1910, 1915, in that range. It was pure chaos. It was people in Model Ts who did not know how to drive. It was people with buggy, horse drawn buggies who they didn't really have rules of the road to a certain extent and then there's people on bicycles and then there's people just walking and just jaywalking nonstop, and I would love to know what their approach to it was, what their thoughts were, how we went from that chaos that you can see to just rules for jaywalking, cars dominating the road, and now we're at a point where we're trying to have as much diversity of transportation is possible but then the streets are still car dominated. It's been such a strange evolution of the car dominance in our infrastructure. That's why you need to have complete streets projects in your towns and in your cities, and it's why you need to be able to rehabilitate roads, and that's why funding infrastructure programs are so important. Because our government ignored infrastructure for so long. It's going to take two generations, it is going to take forever. When the robots take over, they'll get it done.

BL: Way past our lifetime.

GJ: Okay. Alright, are there any other emails that we can get into the dystopian future with?

IG: No, I say let's jump into that interview.

GJ: Alright, here is the interview and what is the name again? I'll butcher it. Brandon, you know.

BL: It is Dave Karwaski, and again, he is the director for mobility planning and traffic existence at UCLA Transportation. 

GJ: Alright, take it away. 

BL: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Infrastructure Technology Podcast. I am Brandon Lewis, the associate editor of Mass Transit magazine, and I am here today with the Director of Mobility Planning and Traffic Systems at UCLA Transportation Dave Karwaski. Dave, welcome to the ITP.

DK: Thank you. Good morning, Brandon.

BL: Good morning, Dave, and you authored UCLA’s Sustainable Transportation Plan and what we're going to be talking about today is what UCLA is doing to basically promote public transportation around the university. Can you tell us a little bit about what that plan, the Sustainability Transportation Plan entails?

DK: Sure, so UCLA, as you might imagine, is a busy place. There's a lot of activity, and we have a daily population of upwards of 90,000 people. Many of those commute to campus every day, and we're the third largest employer in LA County, so as you might suspect the neighbors. And from our perspective, our home grown relations is an important component of the university's activities and the University of California, we're looking to do research and education and discover new things and create patents and ways to help mankind, essentially, but a lot of that activity, because there's so much activity on campus, there are some negative externalities relating from that and really what we're looking at is mitigating those negative externalities from all the mobility, all the people moving to campus from campus and around the local area of the Westwood neighborhood in Los Angeles and one of the things that you'd like to do is to get people out of their single occupant vehicles. So one person driving alone in a several thousand pound steel vehicle is not ideal, not optimal, and particularly in a dense urban environment like West Los Angeles, so what we've done is we created a plan to sew together a lot of the efforts that were already underway at UCLA for decades, going all the way back to the Clean Air Act, the 1984 Olympics when we started our vanpool program. And then in 2000, when we started our subsidized transit pass program through the years, the LA area and the LA Air Basin has undergone some regulatory requirements from the California Air Resources Board, and then locally, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which lend themselves towards the university creating transportation demand management programs like the vanpool program, like the public transit pass, partial subsidies that we have. Our bicycle program, we're a gold level bicycle friendly university from the League of American bicyclists, so the plan seemed like a natural evolution of all of these disparate programs to sew them together in a way where you had this strategic forward-looking goals and programs and efforts all on the pathway towards a more sustainable mobility future, where the idea is to eliminate carbon from the energy used to move people around, and for UCLA, we have invested literally over the decades millions of dollars in that to help mitigate our negative externalities from mobility and that really includes vehicle traffic, and the Westwood area of Los Angeles is, there's so much traffic here. It reminds me of that old Yogi Yogi Bear quote where he said, ‘It's so busy, no one goes there anymore’. And Westwood is kind of like that, and people understand that you're going to face traffic congestion so anything the university can do to reduce congestion to reduce the number of cars coming to campus every day is a good thing.

BL: Now, you guys have one of the largest zero-emission bus usage of any college campus throughout the U.S. I know a lot of California-based agencies are in the middle of transitioning this year to zero-emission buses, but for you guys at UCLA, can you talk a little bit about that process and then also how many buses do you guys currently have right now?

DK: So at UCLA, we have a brewing bus, public transit service that provides essentially shuttle service around the campus and the Westwood neighborhood and Westwood Village in particular, and we have 15 buses in the small fleet. Eight of them right now are electric. We're getting seven more electric buses and a small electric mini bus, and we'll be a fully electrified bus fleet within several years. The idea long ago was to get off diesel for buses, and we had converted to compressed natural gas, as did essentially all public transit buses in the LA basin. If you're behind a bus in LA, it's not belching out diesel fumes; it's going to be compressed natural gas and a lot of them now are transitioning to electric buses, so this is where things are going. We're halfway there and looking forward to getting all the way there, but the electrification of the bus fleet, you really get into electricity and the utility industry and have to make quite an investment in that side too. It's not just the rolling stock, but it's actually making sure that you have the chargers and the underlying utility infrastructure to supply all the power to them.

BL: You mentioned the electric buses. Are they battery-electric? Do you have any fuel cell hydrogen? Are they a mix of both? Are they all the same?

DK: They're all battery-electric. There was a time where there was some thought about hydrogen fuel cells, but that appears to now be focused on the niche of drayage vehicles in ports and much heavier classes of vehicles than regular transit buses. I think that electricity is so ubiquitous. One of the things that UCLA, we recently received a state grant from CalSTA. It's for bus inductive charging. It's like how you put your phone on a charging pad, and it's wireless charging. We're doing the same thing with buses, and we'll be installing that over the next several years, where we're lighting up five bus stops on campus, and the bus will pull over into the bus bay in the bus parking space and the charging pad will communicate to the bus above it and feed in electricity completely wirelessly.

BL: Wow. I mean that is impressive. When you guys started this sort of zero-emission transition, what was the planning like in terms of route structure and things like that? Obviously making sure that you're on a campus friendly schedule because most of these are going to have to run day and night because students are taking classes. Like I said, day and night.

DK: The university has had a natural advantage because the BMT that the buses accrue on the routes is not nearly as much as you might on a full municipal transit agency line that's going many miles. The campus is 2/3 of a square mile. The Westwood neighborhood is not that large so that has really not been an issue for us. I think over time we will tweak the bus routes and optimize how they're being, the buses are charged and the timing and all those details but really the range and those factors because of the routes we run have not been an issue.

BL: Can you talk a little bit about the Waymo, the AV ride service?

DK: Sure. So Waymo arrived here I think last year, and Waymo has been relatively innocuous. It's not perfect, but it more or less has become another ride hailing option. You have Uber, you have Lyft and now you have Waymo and the way people at the university tend to operate is there's a price sensitivity. They take a look at their options; it's good to have the competition and this morning a woman who works in the office next to me, she took Waymo and on any given morning she might take Uber, she might take Lyft, so really we don't see it as that different than the existing ride hailing Uber and Lyft services. It has its quirks or vagaries, but nothing substantial, nothing that would encourage someone to not take them. I mean the vehicles go the speed limit, they follow the rules. It's pretty easy to do and particularly for women, and you think of young college women at night, there's some appeal to taking a driverless vehicle because then they don't have to worry about any sort of issues with the driver so the university was happy to have them come here and provide service, and as I said, it's good to have a competition and a third player in that market space.

BL: For Waymo, how does that technology work and how long did it sort of take to implement from the start to the beginning of service, which I know started around this time, summer of last year.

DK: Well, as I understand it, they do a lot of driving with human drivers and so they go out there and explore the network and get used to the layman's term, get the vehicle familiar with the campus roadways and what it's going to encounter, and they've really not been anything of substance, any particular issues that would cause me to have negative thoughts about Waymo. It's had some issues here and there where it has gotten confused but generally I would say probably no more than the average human driver, and I like it because managing the traffic system, the Waymo vehicles are going to follow the rules and do what they should do, so there's a higher degree of safety on average I think in a Waymo vehicle than a human driver.

BL: When you say got confused, are you talking about it was on its way to a route, and it didn't know which way it was going and maybe made a turn? Or how did it get confused?

DK: What happens is the vehicle and the system is trained by a human driver driving around the network on campus. If you make a change to that network, for example, if you close off a roadway and put in a roadblock and for whatever reason there's accesses not possible on any particular day, the Waymo vehicle's unaware of that and the Waymo vehicle would pull up to the roadblock, and it's used to that roadway being open and being able to continue onward, so the Waymo vehicle would put his flashers on, and it would momentarily get stuck, and I believe what Waymo does is they have a human service humans that would intervene and can take control of the vehicle and get it facing the other way. Whatever they have to do to get it out of that situation but the times when it gets confused are limited to when there have been changes in the road network from what it was expecting.

BL: Now, did you guys do any community feedback or anything like that regarding the AVs? Have you heard anything?

DK: Well, we've not done any surveys of that nature. I have had virtually no negative feedback at all. The only time I ever heard anything was for one of those issues where the vehicle didn't know what to do. Otherwise, they're essentially innocuous in just another player in ride hailing in the ride hailing space. And so far so good.

BL: Well just quickly about how important overall all of these buses, the AVs are important to transportation at UCLA. You mentioned in the beginning how it's such a big campus, and obviously the county is so congested with traffic. Just for the people that maybe aren't familiar with the area per say, is UCLA from building to building for classes? Is it sort of a walkable campus would you say? Or is public transit pretty necessary for most people to get to class?

DK: UCLA is a very walkable campus. It's fairly small, 419 acres or 2/3 of a square mile, so you have a lot of that, but you also have a lot of the students use. Scooters are prevalent on campus, both personal e-scooters and shared e-scooters, so you have a good amount of that. You have bicycling. We have a bicycle bike chair system on campus that Metro has been running and really the idea is most people are going to choose how they move around based on travel time, cost and convenience. How long will it take me? How much does it cost and how convenient is this? And then they look at the options they have so what our goal is with sustainable transportation planning with transportation demand management is to make an array of options available to our campus community, and they can choose what works best for them and ideally with a sustainability focus. This isn't a single occupant vehicle. You’re driving alone in your gas powered car to and from campus. The idea is let's make it palatable and even enticing for you to do something else. Get on the bus. You get recovered time. People drive an hour and a half or do you want to ride on the bus or ride on the train in the bus for an hour and a half? You can do emails, work, read, etc., and if you line these up correctly, people will choose what you want them to choose, the more sustainable options. So really the whole focus isn't about convincing people to do the right thing. It's really about giving them options, and they choose the best thing, which happens to be a sustainable mode.

BL: With the scooters, are those available on a person by person basis for students or how are students able to acquire one?

DK: Well, they’re two methods. We have two vendors on campus, Vo and Bird, and you can walk up to them, download their app, put in your credit card info and use it immediately, and you charge, I believe a dollar to start the ride and then a certain number of cents per minute. The last I checked was $0.49 per minute, and you could take a ride around, pick it up at one point, drop it off at the other point, etc., so it's very convenient. People find a lot of utility in not owning the vehicle and being able to park it and walk away. On the other hand, if you do the math, and you tend to ride an e-scooter relatively frequently, you're better off buying one, and you can buy one of these for $500 or so and now you own a scooter. It's electric. It's got a lithium ion battery. You plug it in, so it is a zero-emission vehicle so to speak and then that enables you to move around campus fairly conveniently and then you bring your U-lock, and we have a special scooter locks, scooter racks where you lock your scooter to them, and they were designed to hold the neck of the scooter and give you a convenient place to lock up.

BL: Dave Karwaski from UCLA Transportation. Dave, thank you so much today for joining me on this episode of the Infrastructure Technology Podcast.

DK: Happy to be here, Brandon. Thank you.

GJ: Alright, we are back. Brandon, that was an excellent interview. Tell me, what were your main takeaways?

BL: So my main takeaways versus the technology behind all of this transportation stuff, again, whether it's the electric vehicles or the buses or just the Waymo autonomous service, I think UCLA is doing a really good job, obviously in that current campus and the current state of California, of just making transportation sustainable and managing traffic and doing everything it can for students there to not only promote public transportation, but to use it to get to class on time, so it's a really great initiative and, I expect soon for the rest of the state to follow suit.

GJ: What about you, Ileana? What did you think?

IG: What stuck out most to me, I mentioned this at the top, but hearing Dave's take on Waymo's actually made me a little more comfortable with the idea of having them on the road with me or even having to use them. We talk about perception a lot on the podcast. We think all these cyclists are driving crazy but hear the stats, and they're actually pretty safe so to hear Dave's experience where he said Waymo's, he finds them more reliable than human drivers in terms of following traffic laws, following the rules. I never really thought of it that way. What I see is the viral videos of a Waymo doing something crazy, but if he's dealing with them in his daily life, and he finds them more reliable than a human behind the wheel, that makes me more comfortable.

GJ: Yeah, if you had statistics that showed that it was 100% foolproof and that it was a 100% safer, I would still want humans driving.

IG: Really?

GJ: Yeah. I mean, I don't want to live in that world.

BL: I think I would at least want a human in the car with me in case something were to happen. That's been always my biggest fear of like, and we talked about this a little bit a couple weeks ago when I interviewed Nat Ford from JTA and their AVS, and they had a personal attendant on board. I just think, again, the technology that's being built. It's helping so fast, and it's great and the evolution is incredible, but it's like what happens if/when there's a malfunction, we could be costing many people's lives that might be preventable.

IG: A human attendant is a great idea.

GJ: But then is that someone's job? Is that really what they're paid to just sit in a car and do nothing? I just don't want to give up the control and that power, and what if I'm accidentally locked in a car, if there's a malfunction? I don't want to be trapped in a car on a hot day. I don't want to have a computer dictating how I get to a certain place because what I like, if I'm seeing traffic, even if taking the long way takes five minutes longer, as long as I'm moving, I feel better about driving because I hate being stuck in traffic and is a robot going to do that? Is a robot going to be inside my head to make that split second decision? ‘Oh, I'm going to turn right here and go through to these back alleys to get to the same place’. I don't want to lose that power, that independence. That's the whole thing about driving and cars. It's American mobility, and I am not ready to give that up. I'll tell you what this interview did make me think of though is as we go down this path with automated vehicles, I think that the first thing that's going to happen once we get the robot, the actual humanoids, they're going to be delivering DoorDash. Is it in Los Angeles? Aren't there already little buggy little robots?

BL: Maybe I'm completely wrong, but I thought Domino's had some service they were advertising a couple years ago where some robot would deliver it right to your door and then either drive away or even fly away. I think at some point, I don't recall.

GJ: There is some that's already started in certain cities, but that's what's coming next. Yeah, for sure. There's robots. I googled it. DoorDash and Veil's delivery robot six days ago on Bloomberg technology.

BL: Honestly, no shot at delivery drivers. It might be more accurate to get your order correct than DoorDash drivers from my experience.

IG: But going back to AVs, I can't believe I'm on the clanker side of this, but comparing it, not when I'm driving, but if I'm in a rideshare, and I have a human driver. Gavin, you and I during that conference, we were in an Uber and our Uber driver was texting and driving. A robot's never going to do that. I've had Uber drivers speed. We've in and out of traffic and so this interview did make me think a little bit. ‘Okay, if this car is programmed to always follow the rules, it could be safer’.

GJ: I once had an Uber driver get onto Amazon and start buying things, and it was in San Diego, and I started yelling at him. I was like, ‘Uhuh, you are not. I was like, you are not on Amazon right now’, and he was like, ‘Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry’. I was like, ‘No, no, get off Amazon’.

BL: I mean, I think you have the right as a customer, passenger, however word you want to say it to be concerned.

GJ: Yeah, you could definitely turn into an, I don't want to say the K word, but you can turn into a Karen, snap of a finger when the phone comes out.

BL: Just channel your inner grandparents or at least mine and be a backseat driver.

GJ: Yeah, I mean it's coming. The robot DoorDashes are already here. The Waymo's are getting more popular. It's coming. The clankers are going to take over. Alright, so with that, let's move on. Ileana, you have something for us to discuss next?

IG: You know what else is almost here? Halloween. It is my favorite holiday. I think it's so fun and so I have found a little bridge related spooky story for you guys. Have either of you heard of The Bunny Man?

GJ: I have not. No. Who's The Bunny Man?

IG: The Bunny Man is an urban legend centered in the D.C., Virginia and Maryland area, and it is connected specifically to Colchester overpass, which is a southern railway overpass on Colchester Road near Clifton, Virginia, and people now call it Bunny Man Bridge. What I think is so fascinating about this story is it starts out in truth at least. So in the 1970s, there were two actual recorded reported to the police and reported on by the local newspaper. There were two incidents with a man in a bunny costume wielding a hatchet. The first incident there was a couple in a car. They were parked in a field, I think near this overpass, and they saw a man in a bunny suit running outside their car. He smashed their window and then yelled to them saying, ‘You're trespassing’, and he threw his hatchet into their car. No one was hurt. It just fell on the floor. So then, 10 days later, a construction security guard notices a man standing on a porch of an unfinished home near that same overpass, and the guard notices this guy is wearing a bunny costume.

GJ: Oh my goodness.

IG: The man has an ax. I guess he got another one, and he's chopping at a porch post on this unfinished home, and again, he says, ‘You're trespassing. You're trespassing’.

BL: He's telling the guard this, that he's trespassing?

IG: Yes, he's telling the guard, ‘You're trespassing, and he has his hatchet, and it seems like that guard was like, ‘I don't get paid enough for this’, and he left, so he also was unharmed, which is good. Those are the two real incidents that this urban legend is linked to. But then, of course, over the last couple of decades, it has ballooned in this area. People go to Bunny Man Bridge on Halloween. They do seances. All these stories about an asylum or a serial killer have been thrown around, but that is the story of The Bunny Man. Would either of you go to this tunnel?

GJ: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

BL: Now that I’ve heard that story, 100%. Yeah. I love it. I actually want to book a flight to Virginia right now and go there.

GJ: Where In Virginia is this again?

IG: It is in the DC Metro area, so it's in Fairfax.

GJ: Okay. Oh, okay. 

IG: When I was living there, I totally forgot about the Bunny Man Bridge, so I never went but my first experience with The Bunny Man was when I was younger. There's a bunch of fan made horror videos on YouTube and people do some really cool stuff. I remember watching a little short film that was about The Bunny Man. They had a dude in the bunny costume in the hatchet. I'm not sure if it was actually filmed at that bridge, but they did it under an overpass, and it was pretty neat. Kind of freaky.

GJ: That is great. I love stories like this. Absolutely love. Whenever I was a little kid, it was the last day of second grade and my entire elementary school had the end of the year talent show, and it was in the morning and then we were being excused from school as soon as it was over and as it was wrapping up, the principal grabbed the microphone, was saying his goodbyes to everyone for us to leave, and right before he said goodbye, he said, ‘Oh, one more thing. Look out for the fourth street clown. Don't get attacked this summer. Have a good summer. See you guys in the fall’, and it ended the school year and everyone's like, ‘Who's the fourth street clown?’ But apparently there was a clown and the fourth street was like two blocks away, and there were woods on fourth Street, two blocks from the elementary school, St. Joseph's Elementary School in Verona, Pa., and there was a clown in the woods. This guy that was dressed up as a clown, the fourth street clown.

BL: Wow.

GJ: Yeah.

BL: Now clowns, I never want to interact with. If you want to say I have a phobia, I am scared to death of clowns. They creep me out, man. I have no more explanation besides that.

GJ: But bunnies with hatchets aokay. 

BL: For some reason. Yeah, I feel like I, deep down, I know they're not real or for some reason my brain says this clown could attack me.

IG: The Bunny Man was real though, Brandon.

BL: Yeah, but for some reason, I feel like there's a good human inside. He trusted a bunny. I feel like a bad human would never trust a bunny.

IG: I don't know. He's throwing hatches at people, man. He's saying, ‘You're trespassing. I'm going to get you with my hatchet’. I would go with you to that bridge during the day, maybe even just because at night, sometimes people are weird. We have a haunted bridge, and people, they'll get drunk basically. They'll get drunk and be crazy at this bridge. 

GJ: Yeah, I love spooky stories like that. That's great. That's great and perfect since Halloween is just a couple of days away. Perfect story to wrap up this excellent episode. Brandon, thank you so much for such a wonderful interview. Ileana, thank you so much for reading the viewer email and bringing us that spooky story and thank you to the listeners for tuning in. Please don't forget to write us at [email protected]. We'd also like to thank our bosses here at our company at Endeavor B2B, a great company with lots of wonderful trade magazines and next week we'll be back with another wonderful episode. Please tune in then and until next Tuesday, I'm Gavin Jenkins.

IG: I'm Ileana Garnand.

BL: I'm Brandon Lewis.

GJ: And we are saying, goodbye.