What a Shame: Civil Beat Earns Itself a ‘False’ by Missing the Point on Why Rail Is Better than BRT

Today’s Civil Beat Fact Check on the rail opponents’ statements in their August 21st newspaper commentary is frankly a big disappointment. We had been cheering on the online news source for its independent assessments of the Cliff Slater-led quartet of opponents.

However, today’s CB assessment focused on semantics rather than whether two different styles of transit systems are equal, and that makes this particular Fact Check odd at its core. Here’s today’s Fact Check headline:

“FACT CHECK – Rail Opponents: Bus/Rapid Transit Would Accomplish Same as Rail, Cheaper”

Compare that to the final sentence – the “bottom line” – of today’s check: “The rail opponents’ claim that Parsons Brinckerhoff said (emphasis added) that BRT would accomplish virtually all of the objectives of rail at substantially less cost is true.”

The headline and the bottom line do not say the same thing! All this Fact Check appears to be is a check on who said what – and that’s not the same thing as checking whether BRT would accomplish the same things as rail.

Rail vs. Bus

Words like “substantially” and “virtually” often show up when someone is walking a fine line to make a case, and we avoid them (most of the time). Civil Beat used those words today, and that explains how it tripped itself up on this particular Fact Check.

In comparing BRT and rail, CB wrote “the two projects had substantially similar goals and objectives.” In its “bottom line,” CB said “…BRT could accomplish virtually all of the objectives of rail at substantially less cost….”

The use of those wiggle words cannot be ignored because they mask why BRT was rejected as an option: First, dedicating the curb lane to BRT vehicles and not allowing cars and trucks into that lane would be a non-starter. That’s one of the reasons why rail opponent Cliff Slater attacked BRT so strenuously and why BRT failed as a concept during the Harris Administration. Robbing Peter to pay Paul – reducing streets’ car-carrying capacity in favor of buses – didn’t fly years ago and wouldn't fly now.

Second, whether in their own lanes or sharing them with other vehicles, BRT buses cannot satisfy rail’s goal to “improve corridor travel reliability.” Quoting from rail’s FEIS:

“As roadways become more congested, they become more susceptible to substantial delays caused by such incidents as traffic accidents or heavy rail…. Because of the operating conditions in the study corridor, current travel times are not reliable for either transit or automobile trips….”

You can read rail’s goals in chapter one, paragraph 1.8 “Need for Transit Improvements” at the project’s website, and we summarized them here at Yes2Rail in early January. Bottom line, the BRT and rail goals are not the same! Fast, frequent, reliable and safe transit is what rail will deliver. BRT can’t possibly match up, and applying a little common sense rather than focusing on semantics would have made that clear to Civil Beat.

Bottom Line:  FALSE! 

That’s the judgment we gave the opponents’ claims about Bus Rapid Transit back on August 29th when we examined the differences between rail and BRT, not just who said what. We wrote then and stand by it now:

“For starters, BRT and Honolulu rail are entirely different projects with different objectives in different time frames and circumstances. Rail will commence full operations in 2019; BRT was conceived two decades earlier. Rail’s four goals boil down to providing fast, frequent, reliable and safe travel and doing it equitably. It’s impossible to apply those same attributes to the once-planned BRT system, with vehicles operating at ground level in the mix of other vehicles, stop-and-go traffic, stoplights and cross traffic.”

Had Civil Beat lifted its eyes off the page and thought about the stark and obvious differences between the two approaches to transit, we’re confident it would have reached the same conclusion: Bus/Rapid Transit Would NOT Accomplish Same as Rail.

Lincoln had it right: You can’t please (he said "fool") all the people, all the time. Keep at it, Civil Beat; we like your product. Just be sure your eye is on the donut, not the hole.

What Exactly Do the Four Rail Opponents Want? Their Essays Give Us Nothing Except ‘Not This’

A few things we’re sure about regarding the Cliff Slater-led last-ditch PR campaign against Honolulu rail by the quartet of “leading” opponents:

First, their attack strategy to bring down Honolulu rail doesn’t have any room in it for better ideas or alternatives to this infrastructure project; second, they do know how to fill space with endless defenses of their viewpoints without telling us what they want, and third, the sole contribution by Messrs. Heen, Cayetano and Roth to the effort is their rubber-stamped names. Let’s start with the last one.

Does anyone really believe retired Judge Walter Heen, former Governor Ben Cayetano and current UH law professor Randall Roth are qualified to write the thousands of words we’ve seen recently from them on transportation issues? The three attorneys appear to have been recruited by Mr. Slater to “contribute” their names to his worn-down anti-rail campaigning that stretches back more than two decades. Mr. Slater already has lost the public on rail, as revealed in the three independent scientific opinion surveys we mention here so often.

Using the football metaphor, he’s facing fourth and long deep in the 4th quarter and hopes a “gadget play” using three big-name but untested rookies as wide-outs will reverse the score that’s already posted on rail.

A Reasonable Question

What do they want, these four rail opponents? Although he’s studiously avoided mentioning his preference lately, Mr. Slater is an advocate of HOT lanes – high-occupancy toll roads that only those who can afford to pay the tolls can use, as discussed here yesterday. What about the other three?

Mr. Cayetano told an audience in June that he thinks at-grade rail transit is better for Honolulu than elevated rail. His ideal system would of course be affected by traffic and intersections, would require drivers, would not be as frequent or as safe as elevated rail and therefore could not provide what’s needed here – a fast, frequent, reliable and safe transit alternative to driving one’s own car.

Far as we can tell, Messrs. Heen and Roth have never put in writing what they want instead of Honolulu elevated rail – just what they don’t want. Maybe they’re hoping the public won’t ask or simply won’t see them standing out there next to the sidelines and will leave them uncovered. No chance.

Filling Space

The four contributors’ piece in Civil Beat today is nearly 1,300 words long and amounts to a drawn-out complaint about the grade Civil Beat gave their views on the rail project’s job count. “We think Civil Beat’s analysis amounts to quibbling over the placement of the knives, forks and spoons at a table on which sits an elephant nearly the size of an aircraft carrier,” they wrote.

There’s that aircraft carrier analogy again (which already received a  FALSE  judgment from CB), and in it we see more evidence of Mr. Slater’s thinking and none by the other three. And talk about quibbling; the four contributors appear to be arranging the deck chairs while their PR ship sinks by focusing so much on jobs.

That brings us to the fourth thing we’re sure about after reading the quartet’s latest words:

As meaningful as new employment will be, Honolulu rail is not a JOBS project. It’s a MOBILITY project. Mr. Slater thinks he’s found the project’s Achilles Heel, but what he’s done by being fixated on attacking the jobs numbers and other secondary issues is reveal his own weakness – the lack of a workable, meaningful, doable alternative to elevated rail.

Mr. Slater doesn’t have a transportation plan to simultaneously slow the growth of traffic congestion, provide an option to sitting in it, shorten the time necessary to move east-west through the urban corridor and provide an orderly way to channel the island’s inevitable growth. Neither do Messrs. Cayetano, Heen and Roth. The city does. Game over.

Letter: ‘What’s Not To Like about HOT Lanes?’ Answer: Just about Everything, Especially Tolls

The last-ditch campaign launched by rail opponents in August to reverse the public’s support for rail continues in dribs and drabs and undoubtedly will be with us for years.

Rail doomsayers – we defined them as doomrailers in July – will be there to remind us of their “better” ideas long after Honolulu rail is successful. One of their “solutions” is HOT lanes.

A letter in the Star-Advertiser today (subscription) complains that “we hear very little about HOT lanes…” and enthusiastically praises them without mentioning three significant drawbacks.

T Is for Tolls

Only drivers who pay a fee are able to use high-occupancy toll roads. As HOT lane proponent Panos Prevedouros famously wrote last year, “Higher tolls are necessary to discourage overloading.” In other words, tolls are set at a level that discourages too much usage and thereby keeps traffic flowing for those who can afford to pay.

If you can’t afford the toll, you’ll have no alternative but to sit in the traffic congestion that the well-to-do avoid. As the community's “solution” to ever-increasing congestion, HOT lanes would be a total failure, and that brings us to drawback number two.

E Is for Equity

One of the rail project’s key goals is to provide transportation equity for Oahu residents: “Equity is about the fair distribution of resources so that no group carries an unfair burden of the negative environmental, social, or economic impacts or receives an unfair share of benefits.”

HOT lanes benefit car drivers and owners while denying access to those without the means to pay the tolls or even own a car. Proponents will argue that buses also can use the lanes, but since access is usually limited to the beginning of the elevated highway, bus riders along the route would receive no benefit whatsoever and would sit in traffic along with the rest of us.

O Is for Over

As the letter writer noted, Honolulu’s HOT lanes would be “built right over the present freeway corridors.” They’d be elevated, just like Honolulu’s rail project that opponents criticize for its potential to impact view planes, but to this writer, elevated HOT lanes are “beautiful.”

Our last word on this letter is that its writer completely misunderstands Honolulu rail. The system will not be the “solution” to ever-worsening traffic congestion; it will be the commuter's alternative to that congestion and the key component of a system that includes the efficient integration of TheBus. And as even Cliff Slater admits, rail will have the positive effect of reducing congestion from what it would grow to if rail were not built.

The experience of other rail systems around the country is that people choose to stop driving and start riding trains for two reasons – cost and convenience. By predicting few will ride Honolulu rail even as traffic congestion worsens and the cost of driving increases, the writer missed the very reasons Honolulu rail will be a success.

Saturday Review: Opponents on Defensive after Fact Check Reveals Extent of Quartet's Spinning

Trade winds have been light over Oahu this week, and the wind decidedly has gone out of the rail opponents’ sails, leaving them dead in the water after Civil Beat’s latest beat-down of their August 21st newspaper commentary.

Civil Beat’s editorial board devoted more than 3,500 words yesterday to an extensive analysis of a key assertion by Cliff Slater, Ben Cayetano, Walter Heen and Randall Roth, the op-ed’s authors and plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit intended to kill rail.

CB looked for evidence that the city has misled the public about rail’s impact on future traffic congestion, one of the opponents’ key arguments, and found none.

The board’s conclusion, plus Civil Beat’s previous judgments about the quartet’s   FALSE   statements in their commentary, are making the city’s case that the Slater-led anti-rail effort is itself misleading the public on this important infrastructure project.

Today’s Star-Advertiser op-ed by HART interim executive director Toru Hamayasu is yet another direct response to the quartet’s misinformation campaign. You’ll have to read it in the print version, though; an online link can’t be found as of this writing.

Civil Beat Defends City against Anti-Railers’ Allegation that It Has Misled the Public, Says Opponents Are the Ones Who Have Deceived

It was bound to happen once an independent, non-partisan media outlet examined what four leading rail opponents are saying about the Honolulu rail project.

Civil Beat, which prides itself on being “the largest news organization dedicated exclusively to civic affairs journalism in Hawaii,” has concluded that Cliff Slater, Ben Cayetano, Walter Heen and Randall Roth themselves were guilty of deceiving the public in their August 21st Star-Advertiser commentary (linked from Yes2Rail).

Civil Beat’s focus was the quartet’s allegation – we’ve called them the Gang of Four for the way they’ve bullied the truth – that the city for years has deceived the public by suggesting the Honolulu rail project would reduce traffic congestion from current levels.

After examining the city’s statements on rail’s anticipated impact going back years, Civil Beat says the opponents’ charge is untrue:

“In this analysis, Civil Beat finds itself in the unusual position of defending the city against its detractors. We are accustomed to asking tough questions of government officials and holding them to account. Private citizens with concerns about government policies, like this group of opponents, add important voices to the public discourse. We value their engagement, and know it can come with a price. In this case that includes that by following the facts where they led, as the opponents requested, Civil Beat has found the opponents' rhetoric wanting.”

What Goes Around….

Civil Beat might have cut to the quick a lot sooner. The mother lode of anti-rail deception was right there in the interview Civil Beat conducted with Mr. Slater, the quartet’s leader, in July 2010.

We’ve been directing Yes2Rail visitors to that interview since the day Civil Beat posted it as the prime example of why Mr. Slater’s anti-rail campaign is built on sand, not rock. Messrs. Cayetano, Heen and Roth are learning that fact in an embarrassingly transparent way.

Our July 12, 2010 post was headlined “Cliff Slater’s ‘Ace Card’ Turns Out To Be a Joker” and summarized the deception he proudly if unknowingly articulated. In his own words, Mr. Slater said he tells his audiences two things when he starts his anti-rail presentations – first the project’s cost and then that traffic will be worse after rail is built than it is today.

As City Transportation Services Director Wayne Yoshioka famously said later the same month at a City Council meeting:

“No kidding, in the future, traffic congestion will be greater than it is today….(and) without rail in the future, traffic congestion will be much worse than with the rail, and I think that’s the whole point of the discussion….“

We decided to quote the first 30 seconds of Mr. Slater’s interview in a different post under the headline “A Close Look at Cliff Slater’s ‘Whole Argument’”:

“In talking to groups about rail, I tell them that there’s really two things you need to know about it. Number one, it’s gonna cost five and one-half billion dollars before cost overruns, and the second thing is that traffic congestion with rail in the future will be worse than it is today. And then I ask them if they have any questions, and that kinda sums up the whole argument."

A Weak ‘Whole Argument’

Civil Beat now concludes, as it might have in July of last year, that Mr. Slater’s rhetoric and that of his anti-rail compatriots is itself misleading. CB’s editorial board writes today:

“…the opponents’ longstanding focus on alleged congestion makes them seen unreasonable. They appear to be grasping for any fragment they can find to bolster their effort to stop the project, not to encourage a thoughtful, measured debate of the real issues before the public today.”

Civil Beat examined statements by former Mayor Mufi Hannemann, current Mayor Peter Carlisle, various pieces of literature and other public statements by the city and found truthful representations of rail’s impact on future traffic congestion – that congestion will be less with rail than without it.

The city has always been truthful about congestion’s growth in the years ahead. Population growth is bound to increase traffic congestion on the existing road network, but with rail in place, there will be less of it than if we did nothing at all, as Mr. Slater himself was forced to admit at that same City Council meeting. With rail, commuters and others will have an alternative to sitting in that congestion, which is the same alternative enjoyed by residents in rail-equipped cities around the world.

When the city states the truth about traffic growth, Mr. Slater treats it as some kind of embarrassing admission, as he did before the City Council, prompting Mr. Yoshioka’s “no kidding” response.

By “grasping” for this particular fragment of an argument, Mr. Slater and his three friends have been shown to be hanging out on a limb – a weak one that simply can’t support their assertions. Mr. Slater’s entire campaign might be compared to an unsuccessful evolutionary line that eventually withers and dies on the tree of life. Civil Beat’s exposé of their tactics shows where that leads.

The city’s rail project is the solid trunk of that tree, rooted in facts and a core adherence to telling the truth and avoiding deception. It’s good to see that rewarded by an independent news organization.

Fact Check Finds Truth in Rail Supporters’ Claim That Honolulu’s Traffic Problem Is Horrendous

We’ll go out on a limb here and predict that when Civil Beat has finished fact checking the newspaper commentaries of both rail opponents and supporters, the latter will be shown to be the truth-tellers.

The supporting evidence is sparse, but Civil Beat – an independent investigative online news site – has found that the only statement by rail supporters it has checked so far is  MOSTLY TRUE .

CB already has judged two anti-rail statements in their August 21st commentary as  FALSE , and it will be hard for the detractors to recover from those harsh indictments, with perhaps others to come. The city simply cannot be as loose with the truth as this quartet of rail opponents, whose leader has a record of misleading his audiences about rail’s positive impact on traffic congestion and other issues.

Traffic Truth

The supporters’ had written in their August 28th op-ed that a “Travel Time Tax study ranks Honolulu as the second-most congested city in the United States. Only Los Angeles fared worse.”

That in fact was a true statement, so we have to quibble with Civil Beat’s assessment that it merited only a “mostly true” grade and a slightly lighter shade of green than flat-out TRUE.

Civil Beat explains its grade today, and it boils down to the existence of a second study that ranks Honolulu 37th in the nation in the total amount of congestion on Honolulu’s roads. Larger metropolitan areas rank higher than Honolulu in this matrix simply because their volume is greater.

INRIX, the company that does the rankings, said Honolulu’s #2 ranking in the Travel Time Tax study is the better assessment because it describes traffic’s impact on the individual commuter. An INRIX spokesman said the Travel Time Tax “…is a reflection of what (drivers) feel every day when they’re out on the roads.”

As we see it, a second study that evaluates traffic congestion differently does not negate the truth of what supporters wrote in their commentary. INRIX did in fact find that Honolulu commuters rank behind only Los Angeles drivers in the additional amount of time they must spend on the road here due to localized congestion.

Oahu commuters know that bitter truth too well. By offering a congestion-free commuting option that completely avoids traffic, Honolulu rail will help remove its sting.

Is it OK To Question Four Rail Critics’ Expertise? Guess Not if They’re ‘Distinguished Citizens’

Here’s what we think Mayor Peter Carlisle’s takeaway is from the Star-Advertiser’s regular Wednesday columnist today (subscription): Unless you want to be accused of “bullying,” do not vigorously defend the Honolulu rail project.

Be deferential to the four “distinguished citizens” leading the anti-rail effort, and do not question their expertise in transportation issues, even though the quartet wants to kill off a transit project that’s been endorsed over and over again by Oahu’s citizens.

Do not describe these four as the “Gang of Four,” as that might imply unsavory connections and criticism of their tactics and statements, even though independent investigative journalists have concluded some of their assertions are not true.

And above all, do not be consistent in representing what your administration believes to be the facts about Honolulu rail, lest you be accused of “lazily mouthing” Mayor Hannemann’s “old tunes” – which just happen to be the facts.

Tripping Over Themselves

What’s with this fawning adulation some local journalists are heaping on the Cliff Slater, Ben Cayetano, Walter Heen and Randall Roth four-some? Who knew local scribes could be so deferential and easily impressed? Since when has the attorney class been this praiseworthy – with reputations so far “above reproach”?

Do these journalists believe any of the three penned a single word of their August 21st op-ed piece? It had the tone and depth of Cliff Slater’s decades-long anti-rail disinformation campaign throughout. Civil Beat’s Fact Check process already has graded two of its major assertions  FALSE  and one only HALF-TRUE. Should these critics be associated with anything but the truth? Heaven forbid that they'd be forcefully questioned about their campaign to kill rail or subject to criticism over their  attempt to swing public opinion away from supporting rail.

Wednesday's columnist has been fighting the rail project for years and doesn’t spare those tasked with defending the project from the inaccuracies of its detractors. He’ll have many more weekly opportunities to disparage the administration, the project and its supporters before the quartet’s lawsuit to block rail is concluded.

Just once we’d like to see him cast a critical eye at Mr. Slater’s disinformation campaign. We’ll make it easy for him; he can start by clicking this link to a Yes2Rail post on Mr. Slater’s implication that Honolulu’s future train will make the Kapolei-Honolulu trip slower than TheBus.

Another Grade, yet Another Reason To Question What Critics Are Saying about Honolulu Rail

Here’s what the Slater-Cayetano-Heen-Roth Gang of Four said in their August 21st attack on the Honolulu rail project: “The city initially claimed that rail would create 17,000 new jobs during the construction phase, but later lowered its estimate to 10,166, without explanation.”

Here’s what online investigative news site Civil Beat published today about that statement: “The opponents provide no evidence that the city lowered its estimate, nor could Civil Beat find any. The 17,000 figure has been used as a peak figure, while the 10,000 figure has been used as an average.”

There’s a lot more in Civil Beat’s Fact Check today on the imprecise nature of using economic modeling to forecast job creation for mega-projects like Honolulu rail and on the difficulty of ever identifying exactly which new jobs are created and where those people are working.

But when all’s said and done, CB’s judgment is that the Gang could not back up its allegations of fictional job creation or numbers slashing.

The Bottom Line

“The opponents have some basis for saying the job creation estimates are exaggerated,” says Civil Beat. “They are correct that specific jobs haven’t been identified, but that’s an unrealistic expectation. The rest of their claims are not supported by facts (emphasis added). That is why our grade in this case is half-true.”

To put it in plainer terms, claims that are not supported by facts are often called   FALSE  !! What else could they be? If statements about the biggest project in the state’s history cannot be substantiated by facts, they are falsehoods.

Shouldn’t these particular critics use the truth and nothing but the truth in commenting on the project? The former governor is an attorney, another is a retired judge and yet another is a University of Hawaii law professor.

Since the fourth member of this group is anti-rail-forever Cliff Slater, the truth of this commentary is undoubtedly that he wrote it and the others signed on to add the appearance of weight and credibility. So much for that hope; Civil Beat is making mincemeat of their criticism.

Report Card

Of the four grades bestowed so far, CB said one is   TRUE  , two of them are   FALSE   and one is   HALF-TRUE   (aka HALF-FALSE) – in other words, one A, one C and two F’s. And we’re supposed to believe what this Gang is saying about rail?

We’re sticking to our original assessment – that Mr. Slater’s anti-rail campaign has failed to win over the public on rail, as three principled opinion surveys have shown. His recent commentary, which contained virtually nothing new and absolutely no suggested alternatives to rail, is a fourth-quarter Hail Mary bomb thrown in desperation with the hope of building public support for the lawsuit the same four individuals have filed to stop the project.

As the editorials always say, the outcome of this case remains to be seen, but if their arguments in court are as wobbly as what they've put in the newspaper, the project is looking good.

They're Not THE Reason To Build Honolulu Rail, but Jobs Are Worth Mentioning on this Holiday

Let’s talk jobs on Labor Day. Building Honolulu rail will produce employment for thousands, but the jobs angle isn’t what we usually bring up first when discussing the reasons to build the project.

There are even bigger and longer-lasting reasons, such as restoring the mobility we’ve lost by providing a completely traffic-free option for traveling through Oahu’s southern corridor. Rail also will be the catalyst for sustainable development for decades ahead.

Emphasize the jobs argument too much and it’ll be targeted by some rail critics whose chief motivation are their anti-union convictions, but it’s worth the aggravation anyway.

As noted in the Star-Advertiser’s editorial yesterday, 17,000 people will be working to build rail in the peak employment year. The average annual jobs count will be 10,000 once construction begins and extends through this decade.

There’s no denying that the additional employment created by the rail project will come at an opportune time for Oahu and all of Hawaii. It’s a good topic in any season – and an especially good one on the first Monday in September. Happy Labor Day!

Editorial Reaffirms Support for Honolulu Rail after Opponents’ Failure To Make a Convincing Case

The latest major exchange of fire over the Honolulu rail project began two weeks ago today with a quartet of critics blasting away in a Honolulu Star-Advertiser commentary with mostly old, decaying ammunition. The city’s response a week later was equal in length but had better aim in describing exactly why elevated rail offers the best option to Oahu’s growing traffic congestion problem.

Two weeks of dueling op-ed pieces and editorial board meetings were capped off today with the newspaper’s editorial reaffirming its long-standing support for rail (subscription).

There’s nothing new in that support; both the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser, which themselves dueled for generations until the Advertiser was bought out last year, had backed the city’s various rail projects over the decades.

The newspaper’s editorial staff assessed both sides of the debate and concluded critics did not make a convincing case against elevated rail. It’s the project's elevated feature that seems most upsetting to Cliff Slater, Ben Cayetano, Walter Heen and Randall Roth.

Choosing a Legacy

Former Governor Cayetano reacted to the   FALSE  grades given the quartet’s op-ed piece by Civil Beat by sending an “open letter” to Mayor Peter Carlisle via Civil Beat with anecdotes characteristic of most anti-rail commentaries. Referring to the elevated guideway and its stations, he asked, “is this the legacy you want to leave to your children, your grandchildren and future generations?”

We haven’t seen a response from the mayor, but we can paraphrase what he’s already said about legacies – that bequeathing generations of our offspring a legacy of gridlock, frustration, lost time and stagnation would be much worse than the guideway’s visual impacts.

Traffic congestion on Oahu severely impacts a significant population segment on this land-scarce island each day. Elevated rail transit will give its riders a daily guarantee that they’ll be completely untouched by that traffic. That will be especially true for residents living and working close enough to rail stations in future transit-oriented developments to walk to and from the rail line.

At-grade transit, which the former governor prefers, simply could not provide the fast, frequent, reliable and safe transportation this and future generations will require. The photographs in the right-hand column of this blog are there for a reason; they show what happens over and over again in cities that have built ground-level rail transit.

The Star-Advertiser’s editorial worded its rejection of grade-level transit this way:

“An at-grade rail system would not be a better alternative but would require more land excavation, cost more, and be prey to traffic delays and accidents.”

Critics would do well to recognize at-grade’s deficiencies and give it up as their preferred alternative. It wouldn’t work here, and the suggestions advanced by the architectural organization Mr. Cayetano references were totally unworkable, as we’ve pointed out repeatedly – here and here and elsewhere and so on.

Embracing Change

We do have to quibble with the newspaper over its assertion that “the critics did score some hits, of course. For instance, the city could indeed do more to provide parking at more of the 21 stations to encourage ridership.”

The four critics continue to value car dependence for commuting more than 21st-century reasoning suggests. Some unintentional humor crept into their August 21st commentary in their plaintive question: “Where will commuters park their cars?”

Those among us who’ve relied on their cars for nearly every single trip they’ve made from home to work, to shopping and to everywhere else can’t imagine a future when public transit will be a better option for scores of thousands of Oahu residents. As Yes2Rail noted the day after the quartet’s commentary: “Rail will be part of a public transit system, with buses providing a convenient and inexpensive option to driving and giving commuters access to and from the rail spine.”

The critics just don’t get it, but the younger generation does. The dominant newspaper on this island gets it, too, and has again endorsed rail as planned.

“…on the whole,” it says, “the city makes a still-credible case that the elevated rail project, as proposed, would best meet Honolulu’s need for a reliable transit alternative to overcrowded freeways – and as important, boost construction and mitigate and direct Oahu’s expected population growth.”

Honolulu rail -- “keeping the country country.”

Saturday Review: Quartet Gets Defensive after Critics Find Too Many False Notes in Material

It was obvious from the Gang of Four’s first words in their “Fight to the Death Tour” that critics would pan this latest boxed set of anti-rail standards.

The quartet’s packaging is catchy enough. Big headlines, big graphics and 1800-word essays occupy lots of newspaper space, and the easily impressed might fall for it, but what stands out in the quartet’s material is that it’s lifted almost unchanged from the ‘90s.

The Gang band’s makeup explains it. Vocalist Cliff Slater has been crooning the same tunes for decades and still fronts the group, but he’s backed this time by different musicians working hard to follow his lead – Ben Cayetano on rhythm guitar, Walter Heen on a quiet electric bass and Randall Roth on a muted drum set.

The Gang’s repertoire is still bombastic as ever, but playing it with ear-splitting shrillness can’t mask the lack of depth. Civil Beat was quick to bestow two  FALSE   Hammys in early reviews, and more from Civil Beat is highly anticipated.

Mayor Peter Carlisle weighed in soon after and blasted the group for its misleading lyrics and general performance. One Gang member defensively decried the mayor’s criticism, saying the two once had  performed on the same stage, as if that should matter. The guitarist even suggested the mayor and others who appreciate the predictable, steady and safe rhythm of elevated rail transit music would not dare to perform head-to-head with highway-loving Slater.

History shows otherwise: Rail conductor Wayne Yoshioka and Mr. Slater have indeed been paired in front of the same audience – most memorably at the City Council in July 2010 (you can see photographic evidence at this link). Mr. Yoshioka more than held his own and even managed to force Mr. Slater into playing a true and clear note for a change – his remarkable admission that Honolulu rail will help reduce future congestion.

Some critics say the tour’s running engagement really should be named the “We’ve Lost the War Tour” since the public already has soured on the Gang's music and supported rail in three scientific opinion surveys. Like other musicians with bad reviews, though, this band plays on and on and on, no matter how tired their tune.

Mayor Blasts Anti-Railers for ‘Misleading’ Public; Critic Calls Civil Beat’s Fact Check a ‘Hatchet Job’

Rail opponents who’ve become used to being offensive are suddenly forced to play defense, knocked back on their heels over the   FALSE   grades their newspaper commentary has received from Civil Beat, the investigative online news organization.

Anti-railer Cliff Slater accused Civil Beat yesterday of a “hatchet job” for issuing two harsh judgments about the truth of the commentary. Later in the day, Mayor Peter Carlisle as good as called the critics’ op-ed a hack job for being the foundation of an ongoing campaign to mislead and misinform the public about what lies ahead for Honolulu rail (photo by Civil Beat).

“We’re taking about a pattern here," he told Civil Beat, adding that leaders of the anti-rail effort “are trying to mislead people… Their use of terms like ‘fake groundbreaking’ and ‘aircraft carriers in the sky’ and those types of things is absolutely, unequivocally misleading and done deliberately to frighten people about what’s going to be happening.”

Mr. Slater and fellow authors Ben Cayetano, Walter Heen and Randall Roth – we’re calling them the Gang of Four – are not accustomed to strenuous criticism, especially from a source like Civil Beat and its staff of independent journalists who have been fact-checking the anti-railers’ public statements.

Judging the Quotes

Using the Gang’s exact words, Civil Beat has concluded that their statements were  FALSE  on two issues so far. One relatively minor issue received a  TRUE  because a state official did in fact make an inaccurate statement about the rail project, as the Gang had written. Five more statements are under review.

Judged not true were assertions that “virtually all environmental groups” oppose Honolulu rail and that “some of the stations would be 10 stories high” and resemble “aircraft carriers in the sky.”

Civil Beat’s fact checks don’t sit well with Mr. Slater. His two-part 1,500-word "hatchet job" response amounts to back peddling, justifying, explaining and defending what he and his co-authors wrote.

Mr. Slater has opposed rail and supported high-occupancy toll roads over the past two decades, but neither he nor his co-authors have professional transportation expertise, and their newspaper essay offered no alternatives to rail. Nevertheless, they’ve used the piece over the past two weeks as the springboard for their new public and media relations campaign.

What Goes Around…

Now they’re finding that if you write misleading or false statements in the high-intensity media age we’re in, somebody will call you on it. Unfortunately for them, the most aggressive investigative media team in town is doing the calling.

Civil Beat’s website was recently judged Hawaii’s Best Overall News Site. As you might expect, its reporters examined the Gang’s statements more vigorously than Pacific Business News’s editors. PBN’s editorial that flip-flopped the weekly’s position on rail seemed more influenced by the Gang’s reputations than the depth and quality of their anti-rail arguments.

Online sites friendly to Mr. Slater and his dogged anti-rail campaign publish anything he writes. HawaiiReporter.com posted yet another of his obfuscating pieces this week. As we wrote yesterday, it was “classic Slater” by confusing the issues and reaching false conclusions, hoping some of them will stick. It only strengthened the Mayor’s argument that the anti-rail campaign misleads the public – deliberately as well as through inattention to detail.

Public Opinion: Lost

As we’ve noted several times since the op-ed was published, the Gang is working its campaign feverishly while offering nothing new because they undoubtedly know they've lost the fight for public opinion on rail. Three scientific public opinion polls by two respected professional survey companies here found support for rail averaging 58.6 percent going back to 2008 and as recently as this past May.

Desperate people with reputations on the line are liable to say almost anything to reverse a trend that’s running against them. Anticipate more Gang of Four aggression against a project that most Oahu residents know we need and want built.

More Anti-Railer Obfuscation on TheBus vs Train; Where’s Credibility after the Misrepresentations?

Civil Beat’s fact checking of the Cliff Slater-Ben Cayetano et al "Gang of Four" op-ed piece in the Star-Advertiser is validating something Yes2Rail has been saying for years: Honolulu’s leading anti-rail activist bends facts, shades the truth and generally has been conducting a disinformation campaign.

CB is progressing through the August 21 commentary and already has concluded that two major claims are  FALSE , and it’s working on others; the one  TRUE  judgment was nothing more than validation of a state official's verbal mistake.

While we await CB’s conclusions on other issues (we’ve already projected another  FALSE ), let’s look at what Mr. Slater has posted at his website and at HawaiiReporter.com – a suggestion (with a question mark behind it) that TheBus will travel from Kapolei to Ala Moana Center faster than Honolulu’s future train.

This is classic Slater – right up there with his assertion that Honolulu rail will be a failure if traffic on Oahu continues to grow even after rail is in service. What he doesn’t say, of course, is that traffic naturally will grow with the addition of hundreds of thousands of new residents – and that congestion would be worse without rail than with it. He only acknowledges that under duress, as he was forced to admit at a City Council hearing last year.

Mixing It Up

Mr. Slater takes issue with rail’s Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) and implies the train’s travel time from East Kapolei to Ala Moana will be 55 minutes, not 42. To back it up, he quotes the FEIS: “…the travel time, including access to station (emphasis added by Yes2Rail) and waiting time for rail between East Kapolei and Downtown Honolulu will be 55 minutes with the (rail) project…. The 55 minutes travel time is a little more believable (than 42 minutes).”

Notice how Mr. Slater confuses the reader – deliberately, we suspect – by equating “travel time” with “transit time.” Travel time includes all time a commuter spends traveling from home to the final destination. It involves going to the nearest station by walking, riding a bike, taking TheBus, driving, being dropped off, roller skating, skateboarding or whatever – and traveling from the arrival station to the final destination. Transit time is how many minutes it takes for a train to go between stations – e.g., 42 minutes between East Kapolei to Ala Moana.

He also misleads by mixing up destinations in his HawaiiReporter piece – first by noting the transit time from East Kapolei all the way to the end of the line, then switching to travel time to reach the Downtown station from the East Kapolei neighborhood.

Consistency would have required Mr. Slater to say the train’s transit time will be only 37-38 minutes to the Downtown station from East Kapolei. The total travel time for someone living quite near the East Kapolei station conceivably could be only about 40 minutes.

The one true statement in Mr. Slater's piece is that more than 6 minutes is required to travel between the Iwilei and Ala Moana stations. The actual time of just under 8 minutes is possible because the train will average 25 mph between the stations, much faster than TheBus can drive between those stations. (Rounded transit times between five stations produced the difference.)

Murkier by the Minute

Confusion reigns at this point in Mr. Slater’s commentary, and that’s consistent with his anti-rail tactics. But there's more: He slides right by the fundamental difference between express buses and Honolulu’s future rail system:

The train from Kapolei into town will accomplish what it’s designed to do and TheBus can't – serve the entire population along its route by picking up and dropping off passengers 16 times before it arrives downtown. Even with those stops, the train will average 30 mph while being a fast, frequent, reliable and safe travel option for its passengers by avoiding all surface congestion.

An express bus traveling in the Zip lane on the H-1 freeway stops for nobody. It’s designed for one reason  – to move people from one end to the other, with little ability to serve the thousands of residents living and working in between. Route C's map shows no stops to serve Waipahu, Pearl City, the airport area, large sections of Kalihi and other communities.  Rail will be the essential component and heart of Honolulu’s future multi-modal transportation system to achieve its four goals. TheBus can’t compete in that arena.

When someone sews confusion so consistently, before long his entire line of reasoning is suspect, and that’s what has happened with Mr. Slater’s decades-long anti-rail campaign.

Those paying attention over the years have known it for a long time, and now independent fact checker Civil Beat is discovering it, too. So much for the radio host's joyful statement that "this particular piece is going to be at the heart of how the general public forms its opinions about the rail project."

Bombardier Reacts

Losing bidder Bombardier has written to the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation to unilaterally extend its offer, as the city asked another losing bidder Sumitomo to do, while winner Ansaldo’s finances are examined. Civil Beat has the story and has posted the Bombardier letter.

Anti-Railers Down To Throwing Hail Mary Bombs; Civil Beat Intercepts another One, Calls It ‘False’

The Slater-Cayetano-Heen-Roth anti-rail campaign continues at fever pitch, and we put our finger on why last week. This “Gang of Four” launched its nothing-new but splashy last-ditch effort with a Star-Advertiser commentary on August 21 because they know they've lost the public opinion fight on Honolulu rail.

The danger of throwing these desperation Hail Mary passes is that once they're launched, they hang out there for everyone to see, intercept and judge against the truth.

Civil Beat, the online news service, this morning has determined that another of the Gang of Four’s statements in the commentary column is   FALSE  . Slater and friends had written “…virtually every environmental group in Hawai`i opposes (Honolulu) rail….”

It’s not true, says Civil Beat, and found that out of 11 groups it contacted, 2 oppose, 1 supports and 8 have taken no position. As we noted last week, the Oahu Chapter of the Sierra Club, perhaps the nation’s most influential environmental organization, strongly supports rail transit with a statement on its website.

Campaign of Falsehoods

Cliff Slater, Ben Cayetano, Walter Heen and Randall Roth play fast and loose with the facts in their desperation to scare Oahu residents away from the support they have shown over recent years for rail. An average of 58.6 percent support was found in three high-quality opinion surveys conducted by respected local firms OmniTrak and QMark.

Their Star-Advertiser commentary included visions of rail stations that look like “aircraft carriers in the sky” ( FALSE ), widespread opposition by environmental groups ( FALSE ), allegations that the city’s population estimates were wrong (we’ve called it  FALSE  and await Civil Beat’s verdict), suggestions of incompetence and inappropriate behavior by the city, dumbed-down arguments about traffic and more.

The four are working the media and hoping to make a connection anywhere it can. Amazingly, it worked on Pacific Business News, which last Friday published one of the most embarrassingly gullible editorials in its history.

PBN was snowed by “four influential leaders” whose “reputations are beyond reproach.” Unfortunately, PBN’s editors didn’t ask the Gang a question that would have occurred to high school journalists: “What are your ideas to address Oahu’s growing traffic congestion problem other than elevated Honolulu rail?”

PBN didn’t ask, and Mr. Slater’s group didn’t say, preferring to use innuendo and obfuscation to confuse the issues and conceal the emptiness of their effort.

The Gang of Four has no suggestions to address Oahu’s traffic congestion problem. In football parlance, their ground game is weak, and their passing attack is being picked off --- pass after pass, statement after statement. They’ve lost the public and are mired deep in their own territory, 4th and 40. They’ve stopped the clock by filing a federal lawsuit to kill rail and in the timeout are trying to rally the crowd.

It's not working, and the press box is seeing        .

Civil Beat Fact Check: Slater Wrong on Stations; Gang of 4’s Ridership Claim Is Ripe for a ‘False’

Civil Beat is progressing with its Fact Check of the Cliff Slater-inspired commentary in the August 21st Star-Advertiser. The process involves sending inquiries to Mr. Slater and asking for documentation to back up what he and his co-authors wrote.

The tally is in on only two of seven issues; one is  TRUE , bestowed yesterday on a relatively minor matter, and the one found to be  FALSE  was announced today. We predicted the latest score in our own tally yesterday; Slater and his three co-authors did not tell the truth about the size of rail stations in their commentary, and Civil Beat has called them on it.

The issue we’re tackling today is whether, as the Gang of Four asserted, the city used a dated forecast for 2030’s population to predict future ridership. We won’t know for sure about its accuracy for decades, of course, but we can examine which side – the city or Slater – seems more likely to have made the better prediction of population and therefore of ridership.

Civil Beat asked Mr. Slater for documentation to support this statement in the op-ed:

“The city has also cherry-picked data. It relies upon a 2004 30-year population forecast even though the 2008 30-year population forecast indicates 100,000 fewer people in 2030 than was previously forecasted.”

Mr. Slater’s response referred CB to the state Department of Business Economic Development and Tourism’s “Population and Economic Projection for the State of Hawaii to 2035.” It’s dated July 2009.

Mr. Slater obviously believes this document was a better predictor of Oahu’s population decades from now. We wonder if he knows how wrong it was in predicting the population only one year later.

Way Off

The DBEDT forecast said Honolulu County’s 2010 population would be 911,800. According to the U.S. Census, the island’s actual 2010 population was 953,207. DBEDT had predicted 4.2-percent growth during the decade. As Civil Beat’s chart noted earlier this year, the actual rate was more than twice that – 8.8 percent.

Since the population forecast Mr. Slater relied on was far below what the count turned out to be less than 18 months later, it’s reasonable to conclude that it similarly has under-estimated what the US Census will certify in 2030.

The project’s Final Environmental Impact Statement’s 2030 population prediction is 1,117,200. DBEDT’s prediction is 1,017,600. There’s the 100,000 difference Mr. Slater and his co-authors wrote about.

We’ll have to wait on Civil Beat’s Fact Check to see its grade for Mr. Slater’s claim that the city used a dated population forecast. It might be  BARELY TRUE  and worthy of orange-trending-to-red based on its date alone, but as for Mr. Slater's assertion that the city erred in using it to predict future rail ridership, it deserves a  FALSE .

You wonder if the Gang of Four's other members are regretting going "all in" on Mr. Slater’s say-so!

(This post has been added to our "aggregation site" under Cliff Slater.)

Fact Check Begins on Gang of 4’s Anti-Rail Piece

A feature within online Civil Beat is the Fact Check it conducts on what newsmakers say and write, something no other local news organization does routinely or ever. (CB is a subscription service but allows free occasional access, so try it and see how far you can get into the site.)

CB has begun its fact checking of the August 21st Star-Advertiser commentary (subscription, but you may be able to see it) by four plaintiffs in a lawsuit intended to block construction of the Honolulu rail project. Our own checking began that day and continued all last week.

CB is checking seven statements or allegations contained in the piece authored by Cliff Slater, Ben Cayetano, Walter Heen and Randall Roth – collectively called the Gang of Four here at Ye2Rail. Long-time anti-railer Slater presumably authored the entire piece; it has his look about it.

Civil Beat asked him to support the statements with documentation and has posted interim “In Progress” reports on six of the seven (more on the completed one below).

Blaming a Typo

The commentary prominently positioned its claim that “some of the rail stations would be 10 stories high” in the second paragraph, only 30 words into the 1800-word piece. Civil Beat asked for documentation of that statement.

Slater’s response is empty of substance, relying as it does on off-hand remarks quoted second- or third-hand by others in the chain of custody: “The ‘aircraft carriers in the sky’ bit is from (a newspaper reporter) and (a local blogger)…” In other words, there’s nothing fact-based in that description, just grousing by rail opponents.

Slater then drops the bombshell:

“The ‘ten’ stories high is a typo that crept in somehow and I missed it.”

“Crept in somehow”? Unseen in the second paragraph of the anti-railers' biggest salvo of the year!? And he wants Oahu residents to believe what he says about Honolulu rail? It's simply incredible. With a record based on hearsay reporting and inaccuracies, we doubt Mr. Slater could be hired at Civil Beat or even the Star-Advertiser. We trust CB will bestow a  FALSE  on this item.

BRT and Rail

Mr. Slater’s tactic over the years in fighting rail has been to lift quotes from this or that document and use them as cudgels devoid of any context. (This post describes one of his most egregious.) Civil Beat asked him for backup to this statement in the newspaper commentary:

“When Jeremy Harris was mayor, Parsons Brinckerhoff said Bus/Rapid Transit (BRT) could accomplish virtually all of the objectives of rail at substantially less cost.”

Slater’s response said in part, “Given that the Final EIS for the BRT program forecast more transit riders than they are currently forecasting for the current rail project, that would seem to be a good judgment.”

Only in Cliff Slater’s world is that good judgment. For starters, BRT and Honolulu rail are entirely different projects with different objectives in different time frames and circumstances. Rail will commence full operations in 2019; BRT was conceived two decades earlier. Rail’s four goals boil down to providing fast, frequent, reliable and safe travel and doing it equitably. It’s impossible to apply those same attributes to the once-planned BRT system, with vehicles operating at ground level in the mix of other vehicles, stop-and-go traffic, stoplights and cross traffic.

Mr. Slater’s selective quoting tactic is further revealed by what he did not quote in the BRT document. The very next sentence after the one he lifted notes the rejection of his favorite alternative to rail – toll roads and reversible lanes: “In addition, highway alternatives to the Regional and In-Town BRT and LRT systems were identified and subsequently eliminated from further consideration as alternatives.” (Section 2.6, Primary Corridor Transportation Project)

Mr. Slater’s claim that BRT would accomplish the same goals as rail was and is bogus. We give him another  FALSE .

More Checking

Civil Beat has brief descriptions of its progress to date on all seven issues, including the only one accorded a grade so far. CB gave a  TRUE  in checking that a "DLNR Statement on Burials ‘Patently False.’"

CB had previously determined that Department of Land and Natural Resources Director William Aila misspoke when he said the Federal Transit Administration requires phasing of the rail project. It doesn’t, but it does allow phasing.

So what’s true is that Mr. Aila erred when he said phasing is required, and it’s also true that Honolulu rail’s phased approach is authorized but not mandated by the FTA. The project itself suffers no sting.

So one fact check is down, and we await Civil Beat’s judgment on the other six. We anticipate seeing         from here on.

(This post has been added to our "aggregation site" under Cliff Slater.)

Op-Ed Continues Fight on Rail Project; Supporters’ Response to ‘Gang of Four’ Could Sink the Critics' New Media-Driven Anti-Rail PR Campaign

Here’s our theory on where the public stands on Honolulu rail: They’ve had enough, heard enough and read enough on rail and are crying, “Enough already! We want it!”

You can imagine that outburst in homes across Oahu this morning as Star-Advertiser subscribers find yet another op-ed commentary on rail dominating the editorial section.

The public’s preference for rail was confirmed by three scientific opinion surveys conducted since 2008 that averaged 58.6 percent support for rail, the last one this past May.

Those results explain why the opponents have been everywhere with their anti-rail campaign in the past week, starting with their Sunday commentary. Their PR campaign continued with an impressionable journalist’s column on Thursday and on Friday in Honolulu’s business weekly, thanks to the remarkable naiveté of its editorial staff.

Last Sunday’s piece by Cliff Slater and his “prominent quartet” insisted the city had misled the public on rail. This week's piece arguing that rail is Oahu's future is by “the mayor and five community leaders (who) extol the necessity to stay on track on mass transit.”

Substantially Different

There’s really no competition anymore now that the opposing sides have taken their best shots. The city’s piece is fact-filled and weighty, with a strong case for grade-separated transit. The critics’ effort was an embarrassing lightweight job relying on silly complaints about public relations, imagined wrongdoing by the contractor and baseless exaggerations. Most damaging of all, it was silent on options to rail that would address Oahu’s intolerable traffic congestion.

It would be challenging to find a different conclusion in a side-by-side comparison. That’s not easy for most residents now that the Star-Advertiser limits access to online content to print subscribers, but our post last Sunday was a point-by-point answer to much of what was in the anti-rail broadside by Cliff Slater, Ben Cayetano, Walter Heen and Randall Roth.

This quartet and others are plaintiffs in a lawsuit that wants to kill a project most Oahu residents support. The lawsuit’s drama will play out beginning later this year; the city and federal defendants have responded to the suit, saying it has no merit.

Continuing our theorizing, Mr. Slater and friends are firing their PR ammunition at rail knowing they’ll need something on their side if the lawsuit fails. They’re hoping that something will be public opinion, and they’re trying to reverse it with their op-eds and by evoking friendly editorials and columns by cooperative journalists who betray their misunderstanding of the rail project in what they write.

The opponents know anti-rail sentiment never rose above 40 percent in the three opinion surveys that can be accessed at our aggregation site. Their latest attacks therefore are emotional, accusatory and intellectually dishonest -- most obviously in their assertion that rail will be a failure if traffic decades from now is worse than it is today.

Of course traffic will be worse than today decades from now; Oahu will have 200,000 more residents in 2030 than it did in 2005. What the critics don't readily admit unless forced to do so is that it will be much worse if no rail option exists to avoid it.

Expect to see more from the Gang of Four in the weeks and months ahead, since they’ve put their reputations on the line and want the public to believe they know best. They don’t, and the public already has made their preference for rail clear.

PBN’s Understanding of Honolulu Rail: 0

Pacific Business News came out today with an editorial against building Honolulu rail as it is planned – proof positive that public relations works!

Cliff Slater and his Gang of Four have been working their PR campaign at fever pitch this week, starting with a Sunday commentary in the Star-Advertiser (subscription) that had as much substance as a donut hole. We’ve been writing about it all week starting Sunday, and a Star-Advertiser columnist channeled it yesterday.

The Gang has lost the public opinion war – as verified in three scientific polls – and is flying around like a magician’s assistant on the stage. “Look over here at my distractions," they’re saying, “not over there at the evidence of our failure."

One wonders what PBN’s editors think of those results, if they think about them at all. Dismissing them as biased would be charging local polling firms QMark and OmniTrak with dishonesty and a willingness to sacrifice their credibility by slanting poll results to favor rail.

No, Oahu residents have clearly listened to everything that’s been said for and against the project over the past five years and concluded they do want rail, by an average majority in those three polls of 58.6 percent.

Elevated Gullibility

What is frankly amazing to us is PBN’s apparent willingness to go weak in the knees over the Gang of Four’s members, described in the editorial as “four influential leaders” whose “reputations are beyond reproach.” Nevertheless, their actual transit expertise is zero.

We’ve never assailed their reputations, because they are what they are, including leader Cliff Slater, who we’ve been calling “ABC” Cliff – Always By Car – for more than a decade. He never saw a taxpayer-subsidized highway he didn’t like, and his favorite kind is HOT Lanes, the anti-equity subsidized mode that favors the wealthy and, of course, car owners.

Here’s a good example in PBN’s editorial of its swooning over businessman Slater’s views – the first of several points in the Gang’s commentary that PBN says “cannot be summarily dismissed:"

“Wayne Yoshioka, recruited from rail consultant Parsons Brinckerhoff to head the city’s Department of Transportation Services, says ‘traffic congestion will be worse in the future with rail than what it is today without rail.’ In other words, he’s saying rail is going to fall well short of solving our traffic congestion problem.”

Wrong, PBN

Nowhere in the project’s Final Environmental Impact Statement or any other document does it say the rail system is supposed to “solve our traffic congestion problem.” PBN's editors would know the true goals if they had read the FEIS, but they obviously are familiar only with the Gang’s commentary and its made-up goal for the project.

"ABC" Cliff has been peddling this intellectually manipulative, misleading and embarrassingly dishonest argument for years, as he made clear in his interview with Civil Beat in July 2010. He said then – and we’ve called attention to it at least a dozen times since – that he starts his presentations by noting the project’s cost, then says traffic will be worse after rail’s built than it is today, then asks for questions – as if that neatly sums up the anti-rail argument.

Sorry for shouting (can PBN hear this?), but Of course traffic will be worse in 2030 than it is today!!! What else could it be, PBN, with 200,000 more people on the island in 2030 than 2005?

The Gang has convinced PBN that rail’s goal is to reduce traffic congestion decades into the future – forever maybe? – when that is not one of the goals. They aren’t hard to find in the FEIS; we started the year by listing them. THOSE are the goals, not the straw-man-of-a-goal "ABC" Cliff has propped up and then helped PBN in all its gullibility knock down.

Elevated rail will be the only way, PBN, for commuters in this and future generations to travel through an increasingly crowded urban core with an ever-increasing number of vehicles in it and completely avoid all traffic congestion. Is that a goal worth pursuing? And oh yes, because residents will come to realize that, an estimated 40,000 former drivers will be riding the train by 2030, reducing congestion by about 18 percent in the urban core from what it would otherwise be without rail.

Fast, frequent, reliable and safe transportation that’s equitable for all people and rationally guides future development on Oahu – that’s a recap of the project’s goals.

One wonders what the Gang of Four told PBN about their own preferences – what plans they have as an alternative to rail. We think they had nothing, because if they had them, they’d have said so, and there's nothing in the commentary about the Gang's preferences.

The Meaningless Lawsuit

PBN has decided it can’t wait for federal court to pass judgment on the Gang’s lawsuit, which has been filed with the clear intent of killing rail. The court proceeding could and likely will find for the defendants for all we know, but that possibility apparently doesn’t register or matter to the business weekly.

The plaintiffs, after all, are honorable men, and PBN is here to praise them. We're left to wonder what George Mason, PBN's late and great publisher and editor, would think of his baby today.

Question for Rail Critics: ‘Where’s the Beef?’ Without Thoughtful Options to Traffic, Spare Us

The 1800-word opinion piece by the Gang of Four – Cliff Slater, Ben Cayetano, Walter Heen and Randall Roth – in the Sunday Star-Advertiser (subscription) was published with a remarkably uncritical eye by the newspaper. We just read it again to see if there’s something digestible in there.

Maybe these four gentlemen aren’t actually members of a “gang,” but the word feels right. Their group is directing a campaign to bash, trample, maim and leave crippled one of the most important infrastructure projects in Oahu’s history – as important to daily commuters in the east-west urban corridor as Honolulu International Airport has been to the tourism industry. (The S-A opinion writer with a column in today’s paper doesn’t get it either; more on that below.)

As we noted in our initial critique of the Gang’s commentary, there’s absolutely nothing new in it that hasn’t been paraded before the public by gang leader Cliff Slater dozens, hundreds, billions of times already. After all his rail bashing going back to 1990 or even earlier, research shows that opponents haven’t won over the public, whose support for rail averaged 58.6 percent in three scientific surveys on the project since 2008. (BTW, had Frank Fasi's rail project not foundered after Mr. Slater's '90s campaign against it, we'd have had a rail line linking Leeward Community College and UH Manoa and points between since 2003.)

So the Gang is dredging it all up again and in the process is looking pretty silly sad, even if a columnist here or there succumbs to it. Take this excerpt: “Imagine the sound of each 72,000-pound, steel-on-steel elevated rail car as it accelerates to 60 miles per hour and then decelerates to a stop between each of 21 stations, every three minutes in each direction.”

Fantasy Island

The Gang imagines (for you) a gear-grinding, wheel-chattering, air-piercing, bone-shuddering, steel-screeching mournful cacophony of sound coming from some kind of behemoth train chewing its way through the city every three minutes. Just imagine it, they say, but do they tell you what it will really be like? Of course not. They leave that to your stoked-up imagination. Left unsaid is the truth; Honolulu’s trains will accelerate and stop quieter than much of the surrounding urban environment. You may not even be aware of it. (Anecdote: While visiting a city with an elevated rail system in 1991, Mayor Fasi asked when the next train was due. The question came immediately after he didn't hear one pass overhead.)

Or take this: The Gang uses about one-sixth of the entire commentary to suggest corruption and unsavory goings on with the city’s consultants on the project. They say PB Americas worked on this or that project here or in some city thousands of miles away that kicked up controversy (don’t they all?), and on top of that, they scowl, the city’s top transportation guy used to work at PB and his wife still does!

Truly, one would expect more from a former governor, a former judge and a current law professor, but there it is.

The Gang relies heavily on your imagination elsewhere in the commentary by suggesting a vision of rail stations that will be “aircraft carriers in the sky." Living here in Hawaii, most of us have seen or even been on an aircraft carrier, so the image that pops up with the Gang's encouragement is alarming.

Wait one: That aircraft carrier comparison was a tad off. Nimitz Class carriers are 1092 feet long and the longest rail station 240. Carriers are 134 feet wide, stations a fraction of that. Looks again like the Gang’s imaginations are on runaway mode.

So Where’s the Beef?

Turns out, there’s very little digestible meat to the Gang’s commentary. There’s not even a hint of relish in this anti-rail sandwich on what the Gang wants to build instead of an elevated system that will allow Oahu commuters to completely avoid traffic congestion and the digestion of what little free time you have left in your daily commute.

The Gang is silent on a plan, strategy, concept or workable alternative to Oahu's intolerable traffic that’s been called the nation’s worst congestion by one institute or another at one time or another. We’re famous for it!! But don’t ask the commentary’s authors for a better idea. All they have is a self-congratulatory ending:

“We have nothing to gain financially by stopping the current rail project other than benefits that would flow to other local citizens. We believe our lawsuit will lead to an affordable traffic solution that protects the environment and preserves the qualities that make Hawaii special.”

Really? What is that solution, Gang of Four? Judge Heen, do you have a better solution? How about you, Professor Roth? We already know the other two authors’ preferences. Cliff Slater wants High-Occupancy Toll Roads that would be used only by the well-to-do (Panos Prevedouros has explained how this works). Ben Cayetano thinks at-grade transit would be swell even at this late date. He seems as oblivious as his successor to at-grade's embarrassingly obvious shortcomings; the photos at right are evidence of one.

Where has this Gang been, and where exactly is their BEEF!?

We’d ask the same of the S-A columnist who wrongly concludes her piece today (subscription) by alleging the city did not examine other alternatives in planning Honolulu rail. After all the meetings, workshops, debates, media coverage, the Alternatives Analysis itself and publication of the Final Environmental Impact Statement, how could she write that?

Oh, right. The Gang of Four.

(This post has been added to our "aggregation site" in its Cliff Slater section.)

Sumitomo Won’t Sue, Prefers the Waiting Game; Desperate Rail Opponents Toss In Kitchen Sink

The last time Honolulu published a request for proposals for a grade-separated transit system, five companies responded. Only one of the four losers sued in circuit court in 1991 when the decision didn’t go its way.

This time there were only three responders, which may have had something to do with consolidation in the industry. Ansaldo of Italy won the new competition but now is facing an allegation that it wasn’t a fully licensed contractor in time to submit a qualified bid.

After losing bidder Bombardier failed in both of its appeals, first to the city and then to the state’s Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, it filed a lawsuit to overturn its disqualification by the city. Sumitomo filed similar appeals that also were denied.

Observers have been expecting the company to take its complaint to court, too, but Sumitomo has announced it’ll take a pass.

Now the speculation is on why Sumitomo is stepping aside with more than a billion dollars in contracts at stake. Pacific Business News reporter Curtis Lum suggests the company wants to stay on the city’s good side, just in case Ansaldo is disqualified and Bombardier loses its lawsuit.

The company said as much in a press release that quotes Vice President Gino Antoniello:

“As much as we still strongly disagree with the rulings that have been made so far, we felt it was time to step back and let the City go it course. As we stated from the beginning of our protest, it has never been our intention to hurt this project or stand in the way of it being built.

“As the only qualified offeror, (Sumitomo’s) decision not to appeal should in no way be interpreted as loss of interest. To the contrary, (Sumitomo) will remain ready to fulfill its commitments should the City not be able to proceed with Ansaldo due to any problems that might prevent them from fulfilling their offer.”

Still Complaining

The potential delay in resolving Bombardier’s and Ansaldo’s issues undoubtedly pleases the plaintiffs on a lawsuit that aims to stop the rail project in its tracks. They were at it again yesterday – this time alleging conflicts of interest and impropriety in the award of a contract to PB Americas, Inc. to provide general engineering and other services for the rail project.

Anti-rail leader Cliff Slater also complained about the cost of moving the route near the Honolulu airport one block mauka near Lagoon Drive to avoid going through an FAA-designated control zone. According to the Star-Advertiser (subscription), Slater said using the project’s contingency fund to cover the $29 million increase in costs “is no comfort.” The paper quotes him: “When the issue was raised, I didn’t hear anybody question who was paying for it.”

Funny, we don’t remember Slater complaining about it when the issue was raised either, which makes this look like just another desperate diversionary gambit by Slater and the Gang of Four in their campaign to reverse the community’s long-standing support for rail.

Mayor Peter Carlyle rejected the complainers’ allegations.

“It is incorrect and inflammatory to label the increase as ‘negligence’ or a ‘mistake’ when the purpose of the preliminary engineering phase was to identify this type of issue,” he said in a statement.

Who’s Deceiving Whom? Rail Critic’s Illogical Conclusions Undermine His Familiar Refrain

A misinformation campaign is rolling along out there about Honolulu rail, and it's not being run by rail supporters. Faced with evidence their anti-rail efforts have failed to push opposition above 40 percent as revealed in three scientific opinion surveys, opponents have launched a new round of misinformation, innuendo and misstatement.

Civil Beat, the online subscription news service, observed yesterday that Sunday’s Star-Advertiser commentary submitted by plaintiffs in a lawsuit intended to stop the project – we’re calling them the Gang of Four – “is ripe for fact-checking. You’ll see the results of those investigations on the site in coming days.”

That’s a welcome development, inasmuch a morning radio host, who channels Gang of Four leader Cliff Slater, has said the commentary will be the centerpiece of how the general public understands the rail project. Civil Beat’s investigation will make a contribution to the public’s understanding of just what is what.

Maybe the website can prime its fact-checking pump with our own observations in Yes2Rail’s Sunday and yesterday posts about the commentary’s numerous misleading statements. And while they’re at it, CB might check the latest anti-rail piece by Dr. Panos Prevedouros, published yesterday at HawaiiReporter.com

Greece = Oahu?

The term that popped up as we read Dr. Prevedouros’s commentary, based on a vague recollection of its meaning, was non sequitur – “an inference or a conclusion that does not follow from the premises.”

His latest premise is that if freight trains have failed in Greece, Honolulu’s urban passenger train will fail, too. More precisely, he says trains killed Greek’s economy and we can expect the same result here.

We don’t know much about Greece’s economy beyond what we read in the media, and it does look like a mess. But Dr. Prevedouros’s assertion that trains killed Greece would seem to be a stretch; Greece’s generous social benefits network that allows public workers to retire while still relatively young is often reported as the culprit.

As for his opinion that rail will do the same to Hawaii (the non sequitur part), that’s just what it is – the opinion of a man whose career is mostly about highways and why communities should build more of them, a civil engineer whose own biographical website doesn’t even mention the word “transit.”

Dr. Prevedouros is a highwayman, through and through, and to better understand where he’s coming from, you need to appreciate the meaning of his preferred alternative to Honolulu rail – “managed lanes,” a concept he and Mr. Slater advocate.

A Preference for Tolls

The theory behind managed lanes – let’s call them what they are, toll roads – is that traffic flows faster on managed toll roads, which allow their users to avoid gridlock congestion, the bane of drive-time commuting. The theory may actually work in practice in some places. Here’s how:

According to Dr. Prevedouros’s HawaiiReporter.com commentary last October, managed lanes keep traffic flowing by managing down the number of vehicles on the lanes. As he put it, “Higher tolls are necessary to discourage overloading.”

In plain language, it means only those who can afford to pay tolls that are automatically increased in real time derive any benefit from managed lanes (the highway sign in the photo shows an  access charge). Without an affordable alternative, everybody else has to slog along in highway congestion. As we wrote back in October:

“Who doesn’t benefit includes everybody without the resources or physical ability to drive, own a car or afford toll roads. Broadly speaking, large numbers of Honolulu’s elderly and low-income residents would be excluded from (high-occupancy) lane use.”

Dr. Prevedouros’s Monday commentary includes this: “Trains went obsolete for a reason. You can’t solve 21st century mobility problems with 19th century technology.” Does he think Oahu residents are that gullible? Trains are not obsolete; thousands of them move freight and passengers all over the world every day. Perhaps less relevant for moving people in 21st century urban environments is another 19th century invention – the one-passenger automobile!

Finally, both the Gang of Four and Dr. Prevedouros blame Honolulu rail’s public information effort for convincing the community to support the project. Maybe that’s a back-handed compliment, but it looks more like the last refuge for the anti-rail camp to further obfuscate their own inability to persuade.

They've failed to convince Oahu residents to oppose rail after campaigning against grade-separated transit for literally decades in Mr. Slater’s case. They’ll keep trying, and the public had best be prepared for more of what they’re dishing.

(This post has been added to our "aggregation site" in its Dr. Panos Prevedouros section.)