Anti-Rail Leader Accuses City of Lying about Rail’s Traffic Impact as He Misleads Public on Benefits, Plus: First Column Is Opponents’ Worst Nightmare

“Hoist with One’s Own Petard” – Meaning: “injured by the device that you intended to use to injure others."

Today’s post is linked from our “aggregation site” under the heading Mr. Cliff Slater (and Friends) and provides more evidence of Mr. Slater’s chief anti-rail tactic – the use of misleading information.

He does it each time he says “traffic congestion will be worse in the future with rail than it is today” – a factual statement that implies rail will be a failure if it can’t reduce congestion. That’s Mr. Slater’s primary goal – to make automobile travel easier.

What he doesn’t tell audiences: (1) Congestion inevitably worsens as the population increases; (2) Not even adding more highway lanes lessens congestion, and (3) Rail is the only way to travel through the city that’s guaranteed to be congestion- and delay-free.

Here’s where the phrase “hoist with one’s own petard” comes in. In his website’s June 7 post headlined Another Lie of Omission (highlighted at Hawaii Free Press), Mr. Slater accused the city of deliberately misleading the public on the rail system’s future impact on reducing traffic congestion.

He reproduced Table 3-12 from the Final Environmental Impact Statement (at right) showing a reduction of only 1.7 percent in daily vehicle trips with rail in place in 2030 compared the no-build option. But these are island-wide daily trips that include all vehicle trips anywhere on the island – East Honolulu, the Windward Side, the Waianae Coast, North Shore, in town, etc.

In other words, it’s a meaningless comparison, since the only legitimate measure of rail’s impact on congestion is in the urban core through which the line will run – and where congestion occurs.

Table 3-14 shows rail’s anticipated reduction in Vehicle Hours of Delay – a measure of congestion. With rail, VHD will be reduced by 18 percent, which you’d expect most people outside the rock-ribbed anti-rail contingent to recognize as a significant improvement on congestion in the east-west urban corridor.

Mr. Slater ends his June 7 post with a dictionary definition of a lie – "something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression.”  That's Mr. Slater’s standard operating procedure in his decades-long opposition to mass transit projects here. That’s why we’re linking this Yes2Rail post at the “aggregation site.”

Column #1

This is one sweet sight for proponents of the Honolulu rail project – column #1 of the 700 similar structures that will support the line’s 20-mile elevated guideway between East Kapolei and Ala Moana Center.

Because it will be elevated, the system will carry passengers above all surface congestion. Commuters and others who choose rail will make the trip between those two end points in 42 minutes each time they ride, no matter how bad traffic or the weather conditions might be.

The column stands 23 feet 9 inches near Farrington Highway in East Kapolei; additional columns are scheduled to be poured this week. Saturday’s media tour included Mayor Peter Carlisle and Dan Grabauskas, executive director of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation. 

For more photographs and video coverage, visit the HART and KHON2 websites.