Flip-charts and easels and a lecturer armed with marker pens and laser pointers. Darkened rooms and PowerPoint presentations.
Yawn. Doesn’t sound like the stuff of a spirited political campaign, does it?
Any candidate wanting to give such a talk will want to find some whiz-bang way to make it more exciting, but the hard facts of such a presentation are precisely what Honolulu needs from anyone hoping to lead the charge for the city against its transportation problems.
And since it’s mayoral front-runner Ben Cayetano who wants to unplug Hono-lulu’s hard-won advances toward a fixed-rail solution, he is the one who needs to deliver the goods. Professor Cayetano, take the podium and enlighten us.
To date, neither the former governor nor other opponents of the rail project have made a compelling case that they have found a solution, least of all during Wednesday’s televised debate among the mayoral candidates.
In response to pointed questions about his proposed substitute project — bus rapid transit, patterned after the proposal the city explored during the Jeremy Harris administration — Cayetano had few specifics to offer. His initial program of traffic relief would involve better traffic synchronization and an increased usage of express buses, before moving to BRT as a second phase.
The estimated cost, he said, is $1 billion, adding vaguely that "I don’t envision it costing that much." It would involve dedicated lanes, Cayetano added, with no indication of where they might go or any design details.
Cayetano referenced a 2003 environmental impact statement, but even that document makes it clear that BRT presents hurdles that are not easily surmountable.
In examining technologies for the project, the EIS lists 10 criteria drawn from community input and technical evaluation. No. 1 on the list is that the system selected "must not require a new dedicated right-of-way or grade separation because urban Honolulu has insufficient space for a new dedicated right-of-way, and a grade-separated system was previously proposed but did not obtain the required City Council support.
"Suitable technologies must be able to operate at-grade on existing streets and highways," the nearly decade-old EIS continues. "While vehicles may operate in exclusive lanes, the technology must permit at-grade cross traffic and pedestrian crossings."
Exactly how this is supposed to increase the convenience, efficiency and capacity of any route — the primary concerns of a transit system — is anyone’s guess.
A full-scale version of Harris’ BRT plan never really got off the ground, but a minimal deployment was rolled out, with four express routes in service by November 2004; only one route had a non-stop express segment of about 17.5 miles, using the H-1. But soon thereafter, former Mayor Mufi Hannemann was sworn in, and he began his pursuit of a rail system.
Regardless, the Federal Transit Administration issued an evaluation report of BRT in 2006. Not surprisingly, the limited effort "had mixed performance in terms of efficiency and reliability" when compared to local bus routes, according to that report.
"One of the biggest challenges facing the deployment of BRT in Honolulu was the absence of roadway space that could be used as a dedicated transit running way," the report consultants concluded. "Plans to investigate dedicated transit lanes … were scrapped in response to public concerns about the impacts on traffic congestion and vehicular mobility."
The pertinent question today is the same: How would the BRT of Cayetano’s vision get around these limitations?
All three candidates — Cayetano, Mayor Peter Carlisle and the city’s former managing director, Kirk Caldwell — skirted other issues, including the selection of the next landfill site and the growing homeless problem. But on a week when a new study showed Honolulu ranked worst for time spent in traffic, the lack of real discussion on transit, from Cayetano in particular, was the most obvious shortcoming in the debate.
The voters have the right to expect better in the coming weeks, or having these public presentations will really become a pointless exercise.
