BRT Info Apparently Missing at Candidate’s Event; Highway Expert Floats ‘Magical’ 1-into-4 Concept

The anti-rail mayoral candidate who vows to kill the project if elected to lead the City and County of Honolulu held a campaign rally in Mililani last night. We didn’t even try to attend, since the event’s publicity flyer said proof of Mililani residency would have to be shown at the door.

Far as we can tell, the media didn’t attend either, having sensed maybe that they’ve heard it all before. There’s no indication Ben Cayetano revealed any details of his bus rapid transit substitute for rail. Since he told Civil Beat he’d unveil his plan in mid-April, our guess is it’ll be in an op-ed commentary in Sunday’s newspaper.

What we do know about last night came from University of Hawaii highway expert Panos Prevedouros, who attended the event and called a morning talk show host today. Professor Prevedouros opposes rail and was soundly defeated in his bid for mayor in 2008 when he vowed to “kill rail in its tracks.”

HOT Lanes & Congestion

The radio host “teased” Dr. Prevedouros’ phone call by saying there had been some good questions Thursday evening, including one about how congestion could be relieved if a car express lane were built into downtown Honolulu instead of rail. Wouldn’t congestion be a problem on the surface streets at the end of the lanes, the questioner asked?

Rail’s Final Environmental Impact Statement comments in Chapter 2 on that congestion issue, not only at the end of the lanes when traffic would be dumped back to surface roads but also at the entrance to the express lanes. We were eager to hear the highway expert’s response, so we recorded some of  the host’s discussion with the professor:

Host: "If in fact we were to have, let’s say a HOT Lanes system that would ultimately terminate on Nimitz, say near Hilo Hattie, as an example, … how would there be a disbursement if in fact, one, there would be a net increase in the number of vehicles, or two, even if there’s a static number of cars, how do we disburse throughout downtown?"

Prevedouros: "Yeah, that’s a helluva good question, because there will be more cars because – actually, let me backtrack. Basically, there’s gonna be the same number of cars that go on a typical morning because just by building the road you don’t generate more traffic. It’s gonna be the same people going to the same jobs."

OK, stop right there. This piece of Prevedouros wisdom is contradicted by numerous studies, including the two we linked to just a few days ago. “Induced” and “generated” traffic are the phenomena that occur when more lanes are made available to people who drive cars. Dr. Prevedouros is suggesting that for every driver with enough financial resources to pay the toll required on HOT lanes (the T stands for Toll), one car would be removed from the H-1 freeway, Farrington Highway, Kamehameha Highway and other surface roads. Those studies and many others refute that notion. And, since the population and number of vehicles will increase over the years and decades, congestion will increase, too. Congestion never stays the same.

Dr. Prevedouros continuing: But, because you now have relieved a bottleneck (it’s questionable whether the H-1/H-2 merge bottleneck would be relieved by HOT Lanes), (cars) arrive sooner in town, so you will have of what is called “peaking,” so more people in half an hour will arrive. So as you say, we really need to address that problem.

He says a “solution” to the downtown congestion buildup has been on the back burner for several years.

“It has to do with the left turns at (from Ala Moana Boulevard) at Alakea…and also the left turn on Halekauwila… The amount of green time they get is very very short, so even at the present time we have a backlog of traffic, because people cannot make left turns to get to downtown.

"What’s the solution? Well, you backtrack a couple of blocks, and there is quite a substantial width on Nimitz Highway where you can have…a tunnel. This is not a “bore” tunnel. It’s a cut-and-cover tunnel. So those left turns basically magically disappear from the surface street. They go one level below and they go underneath Nimitz Highway and turn immediately into Alakea. And actually, in order to go to Halekauwila, it’s a straight shot. And this works magnificently.

"You don’t need anything more than one lane because right now, for every 100 seconds of time, only 25 seconds are left-turn time for them. With one underground lane, you have 100-percent green time all the time. So it’s a win-win situation….because essentially it provides you four new lanes. From one lane you go to four. That’s a gain, because before you had only one-quarter of the time available. Now you have 100 percent of the time, so magically you gain four lanes without really investing in more than one underground lane…."

New Math: 1 = 4

One lane magically becomes four? That sounds like engineer-speak to us. Maybe that’s how highway experts talk to one another, but we lay people have to wonder not only about the one-becomes-four thinking but also about what happens to the traffic after cars make the left turn into Alakea.

How far mauka would the tunnel run – as far as Queen Street one block mauka from Ala Moana? There’s a stoplight there. Would Alakea return to surface level one short block further mauka at the light-controlled intersection with Merchant, or would it stay underground all the way to King, where there’s another stoplight? And because cars necessarily would have to stop on Alakea for cross traffic at those intersections, what would happen to the cars in the tunnel around to Nimitz? There’d be a backup, wouldn’t there?

Halekauwila intersects with Punchbowl Street a long block diamondhead of where Dr. Prevedouros’ tunnel would depart from Ala Moana Boulevard. There’s a stoplight there and another one a block further east at South Street. Since Halekauwila traffic would stop for those lights, wouldn’t there be a backup onto Nimitz, along with the Alakea backup?

Dr. Prevedouros is throwing around these simple “win-win” solutions as if there were no downsides whatsoever. He expects his audience to accept it at face value because – well, because he’s allegedly an expert in his field.

Propose It

If it’s highway improvements Dr. Prevedouros wants (he claimed some credit on the radio show for the State’s new proposal to re-stripe H-1 lanes through town to narrow the lanes), let him stick to highways. He and his fellow highway advocates (Cliff Slater and Mr. Cayetano among them) could come up with proposals to improve highway flow and reduce congestion. They could then submit them to the Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization, the State Department of Transportation and other agencies, run it up the proverbial flagpole and see who salutes.

If their ideas have merit, OMPO and others might just endorse them, but none of the ideas he and Mr. Cayetano have provided so far can duplicate the rail project’s benefits for patrons, including freeing them from traffic congestion completely in their east-west travel, reducing their reliance on every-costlier automobiles, improving their travel times and providing residential and commercial opportunities around rail stations.

There’s nothing magical about rail's goals and what the system will do for Oahu residents. Dr. Prevedouros can suggest all the cut-and-cover tunnels and one-into-four left-turn lanes he wants, but they can’t come close to meeting the transportation requirements of this and future generations throughout the 21st century.

Rail isn’t for everyone, but it will deliver benefits to a far greater number of people than a couple of tunnels in downtown Honolulu ever could.

12 Weeks and Counting: Candidate’s BRT Plan Is Still a Secret as Anti-Rail Campaign Visits Mililani

Despite efforts to make his mayoral candidacy seem like a multi-issue effort, Ben Cayetano’s platform has one principal plank – to kill the Honolulu rail project. That was obvious when he officially launched his campaign 84 days ago on January 19th.

One would have thought he’d have unveiled details of his bus rapid transit plan in 12 days, let alone 12 weeks, due to the magnitude of his proposal to kill rail. Yet we’re still waiting to learn how a plan written 12 years ago during the Harris Administration could out-perform rail and accomplish the project's goals of restoring mobility, reducing travel times, guiding future development and ensuring transportation equity for all economic categories.

All we can presume for sure is that it would be cheaper than building an elevated rail guideway that will avoid all surface traffic, but as most consumers knows from personal experience, cheaper is hardly ever better. You can still buy one-time-use cameras in drugstores, but for a host of reasons, they can’t compete with costlier cameras that deliver years of satisfaction.

That’s how we’re imagining Mr. Cayetano’s BRT plan – an off-the-shelf and discredited concept that he’s plucked out of obscurity because he needs something to offer the public if he intends to kill rail.

Mr. Cayetano’s campaign will roll into Mililani Uka Elementary School this evening, and we’re guessing BRT details aren’t on the agenda. But based on his earlier comments, Mililani residents are likely to hear about studies that also are 12 years old suggesting BRT could do the same job as rail.

BRT Questions

Both Mr. Cayetano and Cliff Slater, the candidate’s advisor and long-time transit opponent, repeatedly point to a study conducted for the Harris BRT plan that concluded BRT could transport as many people as a rail system. But in 2012, most serious transportation thinkers know that a numbers comparison is no longer the primary consideration, if it ever was.

Other factors are part of the process today, and Mililani residents might well ask about them. For example, has Mr. Cayetano read Chapter 2 of the rail project’s Final Environmental Impact Statement? It evaluated a Transit System Management Alternative (TSM) that conceivably would be implemented without constructing a new transit fixed guideway.

Since Mr. Cayetano seems to object most strenuously to the expense and appearance of an elevated guideway, TSM seems closest to what Mr. Cayetano wants to implement. Here are just a few observations from that chapter on the TSM alternative:

• TSM would have led to a slightly larger number of daily transit trips than the No Build Alternative.

• TSM would have generated fewer hours of transit-user benefits than either the Managed Land or Fixed Guideway Alternative.

• Since most buses would still operate in mixed traffic, TSM would have done little to improve corridor mobility and travel reliability.

• Road congestion also would not have been alleviated.

• Because of the dispersed nature of transit service, slow bus speeds and unreliable service, TSM would not have supported the City’s goals of concentrating growth within the corridor and reducing development pressures in rural areas.

• TSM would have generated fewer physical impacts than the Managed Land and Fixed Guideway Alternatives. However, it would have required more transportation system energy and generated more air pollutant emissions and water pollution than the Fixed Guideway Alternative.

The biggest take-away from the FEIS’s discussion on all the alternatives is that the Fixed Guideway Alternative “performed better at meeting the Project’s Purpose and Need than any of the other alternatives evaluated in the Alternatives Analysis.” It would improve transit performance and reliability, be more cost-effective and substantially reduce vehicle hours of delay for all travelers, not just transit users.

The City Council selected the elevated guideway alternative five years ago after all the alternatives were extensively studied. Mr. Cayetano now wants Oahu residents to believe BRT is a better way to go – and he still hasn’t told us how or why.

If this brief Yes2Rail post doesn’t suggest what Mililani residents might ask the candidate tonight, we’re at a loss to know what would.

We’ll Believe a Media-Sponsored Public Opinion Rail Survey When They Do One that’s Believable

It’s not uncommon for news reporters, once they leave journalism, to train business executives and managers on how to give effective news interviews. An aid we used with clients was a 10-point “Journalism in the 21st Century” handout. Points 6 through 8 were as follows:

6. The media are quick to judge and slow to change. Do not let the media cast you as the “bad guy.”
7. Many in the media believe the “infallibility” myth. Some reporters are exceptionally thin-skinned and resent having their mistakes identified.
8. The media can be manipulated. If your “adversary” does the manipulating, you’re at a tremendous disadvantage.

We’re seeing evidence of these (and the other seven) points in media coverage of the Honolulu rail project – especially on the public opinion surveys that have been completed on the project this year.

We’ve commented as recently as yesterday on what we think are obvious problems with the Star-Advertiser/Hawaii News Now January poll and Civil Beat’s more recent telephone survey.

The S-A/HNN poll was conducted immediately after Ben Cayetano announced his candidacy in this year’s mayoral election during the 10-day period when the news media were filled with his anti-rail campaign rhetoric. Civil Beat chose not to survey non-voters, the half of the population that’s more dependent on and more likely to ride public transit. Both these issues were to us, at least, significant problems at the very heart of those surveys.

Point #6 in our list is obvious in how the Honolulu media continue to play the results of those polls: They keep repeating the alleged slippage in public support for rail.

Two days ago, Civil Beat wrote “…two Hawaii polls showed the public opinion has turned against the controversial Honolulu rail project….” Star-Advertiser columnist David Shapiro continues his opposition to rail as we predicted he would all year back in January. He ends his column today by noting “public opinion polls show support for rail shrinking and former Gov. Ben Cayetano gaining steam in his mayoral campaign to kill the controversial project.” (“Controversial’ seemingly must be included in each rail story.)

The snapshot in time Mr. Shapiro references on both rail’s and Mr. Cayetano’s popularity obviously was influenced by the survey’s timing, which even sponsor Hawaii News Now says “could have skewed results against the project.”

Repetition’s the Thing

These polls’ results are repeated as often as possible by anti-rail HawaiiReporter.com, rail opposition leader Cliff Slater’s site, bloggers, news aggregators and other locations without questioning their validity. We’ll have to wait for results of other scientific opinion surveys without the obvious timing and content flaws to see if they’ve found the same level of support rail previously enjoyed in three scientific surveys with no obvious weaknesses.

But even if a new poll commissioned by the rail project had results similar to the earlier ones, we already know how the media would play it. That poll would be derisively dismissed for two reasons – because the project sponsored it (implying apparently that the project can’t be trusted to be honest) and because it would differ from the other results that already are part of nearly every media story on rail.

Everything we see in rail’s coverage leads us to believe points 6, 7 and 8 in our observations about journalism in the 21st century are as valid this year as they ever were. For the record, here’s point #1 in our list:

If the media can get some of your story wrong, they probably will. That's not a knock on reporters. It’s hard to get all the facts straight, and that's why it’s important to help reporters get it right.

We're still waiting for the media to get it right on rail's continuing support in this community.

FTA Approves City’s Site for Rail Pre-Cast Facility; Candidate May Face Tough Questions Thursday, Plus: Where Does Public REALLY Stand on Rail?

Oahu residents are being treated to a daily display of contrasts regarding the Honolulu rail project. The city continues to announce new Federal Transit Administration approvals that allow the project to move forward, and mayoral candidate Ben Cayetano continues to suggest reasons rail shouldn’t be built.

The newest FTA approval allows the city to begin construction on the project’s precast facility. The 34-acre site within Campbell Industrial Park is described in today's Star-Advertiser’s story (subscription) and quotes Toru Hamayasu, acting executive director of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.

“This latest federal approval keeps the project moving forward so that we can deliver a safe, reliable and efficient transit system that will provide residents with an alternative to sitting in traffic congestion.”

Meanwhile...

Anti-rail Mr. Cayetano is inviting Mililani residents to attend his Thursday evening “Do the real facts matter?” free chili & rice dinner at Mililani Uka Elementary School. The flyer delivered to Mililani homes over the weekend names members of his “Truth Squad” (one worked for rail-killing Mayor Eileen Anderson in the early 1980s) and lists a number of topics the candidate says he’ll tackle.

Come and learn “why the city’s claim that rail will create 10,000 new jobs every year is fantasy….” and how he will “develop a comprehensive bus rapid transit system that will be one-fifth the cost of rail, provide faster service and serve more people from more parts of Oahu than rail.”

Here are a couple things the candidate may not know but might hear about on Thursday if anyone but his supporters are allowed entry (his publicity flyer asks attendees to bring proof of Mililani residency).

The project’s estimate of 10,000 jobs per year is a conservative estimate. Most projects on this order suggest multiples of that number per $1 billion expended. Honolulu rail chose to be conservative at 10K, and for good reason. Based on what anti-railers say about the jobs issue, can you imagine the howls of incredulity if a bigger number had been used?

Jobs already are being generated by the project for local firms, including engineers, architects and others. What we’d really like to know is how many jobs would make Mr. Cayetano happy.

We figure no number would be satisfactory, so we’re left with the candidate’s upset that thousands of jobs will in fact be created for Oahu residents. An out-of-work Mililani construction worker might ask about that Thursday.

The Fantastic BRT

Questions might be directed at Mr. Cayetano about his unequivocal support for bus travel, especially his fantastical notion that bus rapid transit can outperform rail. Panos Prevedouros and Cliff Slater have inspired Mr. Cayetano to embrace this nonsensical assessment, which not insignificantly already has been assessed and dismissed in the rail project’s alternatives analysis.

Managed lanes on highways and bus-only lanes on city streets can’t possibly reduce congestion and improve mobility for all citizens, which is one of rail’s goals. We wonder if Mr. Cayetano realizes that the last time BRT was proposed, Mr. Slater described Mayor Harris’ plan as a “farce.”

By requiring a large number of buses that service neighborhoods to funnel onto the H-1 freeway’s bus express lanes, Mr. Cayetano might be able to claim that the system would serve people “from more parts of Oahu than rail.” But that would be making this issue a number’s game, when the rail alternative is about efficiency, avoiding congestion completely and saving time.

Unless they can fly, buses on any kind of lanes and streets eventually must be thrown back into the same traffic jams that rail will bypass.

Finally, Public Opinion

The two public opinion surveys on rail this year had flaws that we’ve taken pains to publicize repeatedly, yet the media continue to report that rail has lost favor with the public. Here’s how Civil Beat’s Michael Levine wrote yesterday about those polls and their impact:

“In the weeks since two Hawaii polls showed the public opinion has turned against the controversial Honolulu rail project, (City) council members – particularly those on the ballot this year – have asked sharper questions and expressed doubts about the future for rail transit.”

If Council members are pulling back from supporting rail, we think they’re badly misinformed. Here’s our comment at Civil Beat:

“Civil Beat's continued assertion that ‘public opinion has turned against’ the rail project ignores two facts about those polls: (1) Civil Beat didn't even ask non-voters what they feel about rail, thereby selecting out the half of the population that's more likely than the other half to use public transit. It also discounted government's responsibility to provide for its citizens regardless of their voting pattern. Polling only the likely voters may help learn which candidate is leading the horse race, but office-holders can't ignore half the population, and neither should have Civil Beat.

“(2), even Hawaii News Now, a sponsor of January poll along with the Star-Advertiser, said last week that the poll began "right after transit foe Ben Cayetano, the former governor, announced his campaign for mayor, SO THAT COULD HAVE SKEWED RESULTS AGAINST THE PROJECT" (emphasis added). Yet you ignore those factors as you declare something as fact that was both problematic and transitory in light of the absence of campaigning by the two major pro-rail candidates. One would hope Civil Beat would have greater sensitivity to what some of us believe is a gross mischaracterization of public opinion on rail.”

We suspect that a poll taken independent of any candidate’s heavy publicity for or against rail and one that’s based on a scientific sampling of all citizens regardless of their voting behavior would mirror the previous polls with those guidelines that averaged 57 percent support for rail.

The sooner policymakers and media opinion leaders see those results, the better.

This post has been added to our "aggregate site" under two headings: Mr. Cliff Slater (and Friends) and Public Opinion.

Pattern Evident in Anti-Rail Candidate’s Efforts: Repeat Talking Points, Ignore the Inconvenient; Both Await Mililani Residents (Only) on Thursday

Mililani Town residents learned over the weekend they’ll be treated to anti-rail mayoral candidate Ben Cayetano’s version of transportation truth this Thursday evening. All other Oahu residents learned we’re not invited to the party.

Yes2Rail’s Easter Sunday post examined one of the candidate’s announced talking points – “why rail will not reduce traffic congestion” – and provided some answers Mililani residents aren’t likely to hear.

Oahu’s population will grow by 200,000 in the 25-year span beginning 2005, so that’s the principal reason rail won’t reduce congestion. Studies and the experience of cities around the country show that building more highways, let alone rail, won’t reduce it.

Mr. Cayetano undoubtedly will spin the future-congestion talking point Thursday night without providing the context that’s required for an honest discourse. In that respect, he’s following Cliff Slater’s pattern of insinuating rail will fail because of congestion’s continued growth – a canard that reveals more about the candidate and his campaign that he may care to admit.

Inflating the Cost

Mr. Cayetano also intends to discuss “why the $5.17 billion rail project will cost $7 billion or more.” The answer to that one seems to be simply that Governor Linda Lingle’s state-financed study of the rail project’s finances says it will.

Anti-rail Lingle’s $300,000 IMG study was a dubious effort from the start, since it was written in part by noted rail opponent Tom Rubin. Here’s how the City’s Department of Transportation Services rebutted the study:

“A review of IMG’s methods show that important and more relevant data was not recognized or considered and the report’s authors used incorrect figures and assumptions that allowed them to reach unsupported conclusions.”

Mr. Cayetano evidently is relying on the IMG report and Mr. Slater’s personal opinions for his forecast of a $7 billion rail project. The DTS’s rebuttal continued:

“…the (Federal Transit Administration) has already reviewed the City’s Financial Plan and found the project to be financially sound and allowed it to move forward. The FTA also continually reviews the project’s Financial Plan and will do so again as the project enters its next phase of Final Design.”

That phase began early this year with the FTA’s authorization to proceed that was followed in February by the FTA’s issuance of a Letter of No Prejudice that cleared the way for construction to begin.

The candidate will inflate the cost of the rail project Thursday evening, so discerning Mililani residents will want to know precisely why he makes the prediction. Then again, since the event shapes up more like a political event than a forum for truth, maybe room will be lacking for discerning residents.

Attention, Mililani Residents: Candidate Gives You Opportunity To Quiz Him on Traffic Congestion. Ask Him How BRT Would End it. Answer: It Can’t

One of the issues mayoral candidate Ben Cayetano says he’ll discuss in Mililani on Thursday is this one: “Why rail will not reduce traffic congestion.”

That’s one way to set up the traffic congestion issue, and Mr. Cayetano intends to do just that – “set up” rail as a future failure if it can’t reduce congestion.

Cliff Slater has been positioning the project that way for years (see our “aggregation” site). By following Mr. Slater’s lead, candidate Cayetano is being every bit as disingenuous and flat-out dishonest with the facts as his mentor.

Here’s why rail won’t reduce future traffic congestion: Nothing will. Congestion increases when the population increases, as Oahu’s population will for the foreseeable future. The project expects 200,000 more Oahu residents by 2030 compared to 2005. With that kind of growth, nothing will reduce congestion – not more highways, and certainly not a new rail line.

We wrote about this two days ago and included links to studies that detail how even building new highway lanes induces and generates more traffic. By suggesting rail should be able to reduce future traffic congestion, Mr. Cayetano is either revealing a remarkable misunderstanding of congestion issues as detailed in those and many other studies or is deliberately misleading his audiences.

Ask Him This

Mr. Cayetano is inviting Mililani residents to his “Truth Squad” session in Mililani Uka Elementary School Thursday evening. Only Mililani residents will be allowed inside; his campaign will require attendees to bring proof of their Mililani residency.

Once inside, certified Mililani residents might well ask the candidate how his proposed bus rapid transit system would reduce traffic congestion. Holding BRT to the same standard as Mr. Cayetano wants to hold rail would be equitable, so that’s a must-ask on Thursday.

Ask him this as well: Will BRT patrons completely avoid congestion as rail riders will? Will BRT vehicles end up in traffic once they leave their exclusive highway lanes? What about congestion build-up as those vehicles approach the lanes’ entrance? And what is the basis for Mr. Cayetano’s assertion that BRT “will provide faster service” than rail?

Thursday night could be fun for Oahu residents lucky enough to live in Mililani. The rest of us aren’t invited.

Land Use Commission Testimony Offers Insight on Why Traffic Congestion Simply Won’t Go Away; It Also Amounts to Rebuke of Anti-Railers’ Rhetoric

Professor Peter Flachshart of the University of Hawaii’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning testified at the Land Use Commission yesterday on the proposed designation of Koa Ridge for urban use. His testimony was relevant to the debate on Honolulu rail.

According to the Star-Advertiser’s story (subscription), Dr. Flachshart said “…the commission shouldn’t count on reduced congestion even with major road improvements…” and that “added capacity will entice more freeway use by people who avoid peak congestion in ways that include driving to work at 4:30 a.m.”

In other words, the new lanes and temporarily reduced congestion would entice today’s early risers to adjust their start time and restore congestion to previous levels. “If you double-deck H-1, you simply allow people to sleep in later,” he said. "The traffic will return.”

Relevance to Rail

If you’ve been paying attention to the rail debate over the years, you’ve read and heard a stream of rhetoric from anti-railer-in-chief Cliff Slater and his followers, including a certain mayoral candidate, that goes like this:

“Traffic congestion with rail in the future will be worse than it is today.” That’s a quote from his July 2010 Civil Beat interview, and he’s used virtually the exact same words before the City Council and in his many public speeches, including the Rotary Club of Honolulu.

It’s clear from his repeated use of this phrase that he believes it’s a “gotcha” accusation against rail that works in his favor. But it works only if his audiences – including the media – are unaware of what many transportation and urban planners call “the fundamental law of road congestion.”

In plain terms, congestion will be worse in the future no matter what, as Dr. Flachshart testified. Build rail or don’t build it; build more highways or don’t build them. Numerous studies add up to the came conclusion: Traffic will continue to grow along with the population, and no matter how many more highway lanes are built, congestion will get worse.

It’s the Law

One of those studies is in fact titled “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities” by the University of Toronto. The study found that the number of vehicle miles (kilometers) traveled increases with the increase in highway capacity.

Adding those extra lanes results in increased driving by current residents and new residents who add to the traffic over time. One of the studies cited by the Toronto team concluded:“…without congestion pricing (tolls), increasing road or public transit supply is unlikely to relieve congestion….”

Another study – “Generated Traffic and Induced Travel; Implications for Transport Planning” – reached a similar conclusion:

“Traffic congestion tends to maintain equilibrium. Congestion reaches a point at which it constrains further growth in peak-period trips. If road capacity increases, the number of peak-period trips also increases until congestion again limits future traffic growth…. Research indicates that (additional travel) often fills a significant portion of capacity added to congested urban road(s).”

Need To Know

Reading two lengthy reports isn’t how most of us want to spend our weekend, but this information is critical to an understanding of the issues surrounding the Honolulu rail project. That’s especially true since Mr. Slater and other anti-railers resort so often to what we’re calling dumbed-down anti-rail rhetoric that implies rail shouldn’t be built.

Blaming rail for not accomplishing the impossible says something about the opposition: They’re either ignorant about congestion issues or they’re deliberately misleading the public.

Since Mr. Slater claims to possess a fair amount of expertise on transportation issues, we’re left to conclude he's being less than forthright with Oahu residents.

And that says a lot.

This post has been added to our "aggregation site" under the Mr. Cliff Slater (and Friends) heading.

77 Days and Counting: How Much Longer Must We Wait for Details of Candidate’s New/Old Bus Plan?

When former governor anti-rail Ben Cayetano announced his candidacy for mayor on January 19, August’s primary election was 196 days away. As of today, Mr. Cayetano has let nearly 40 percent of that time go by without providing any details on what he’d implement instead of the Honolulu rail project, which he vows to kill.

We’ve only heard dribs and drabs of a bus plan, the specifics of which are still absent but which Mr. Cayetano says “are in a plan approved in the year 2000…” during the Harris Administration. Mr. Cayetano’s continued silence on his plan’s details amounts to a remarkable lack of transparency. Rail has been planned for  years (some would say decades) and would inject $1.55 billion in federal funds into a struggling economy while creating thousands of jobs.

Rail would be the relatively quick travel alternative that would allow commuters to avoid traffic congestion – an option completely missing today – and provide transit-oriented development around stations for future housing and commercial needs. Yet we’re still waiting for Mr. Cayetano’s recycled bus rapid transit plan.

Flip It

Imagine just the opposite set-up. What if the city had not started planning rail seven years ago and a mayoral candidate were entering the 2012 race to propose building such a project as a response to Oahu’s growing traffic congestion.

Would that candidate have waited 77 days to tell the public details of that plan? Of course not. A candidate committed to transparency and respectful of the electorate would have announced those details on Day 1 of the campaign or surely within a couple weeks.

He or she wouldn’t wait three months to roll out the plan, yet that’s what Mr. Cayetano is doing while his team tries to make the case that adding more buses to already crowded streets and highways will actually improve conditions for traffic-weary commuters.

No wonder it’s taking so long. That’s a tough sell, one made even tougher by the years of criticism Cliff Slater, now a member of the Cayetano team, threw at BRT. The Internet Age makes it easy to find those criticisms – including Mr. Slater’s "farce" description of the Harris BRT scheme.

Keep It Hidden

The thinking inside Mr. Cayetano’s campaign may be to continue launching broadsides against the rail project without providing any details of what he’d do instead.

Continue claiming a rail line 30 feet above surface traffic will destroy the city’s character while ignoring the current and planned skyrises 10 times or more taller.

Continue asserting will divert resources away from the city’s emergency services, a claim disputed by those providers.

In other words, continue the magician’s trick of distracting the audience with flourishes over here while setting up the trick over there.

Seventy-seven days into his campaign, Mr. Cayetano’s bus plan fits the description folks once used for Oakland, CA: “There’s no there there.”

People are starting to talk about what the Star-Advertiser called Mr. Cayetano’s “disservice” to the community by sewing “seeds of doubt rather than informing people responsibly. Honolulu residents, and voters in the mayoral election, deserve better.”

Keeping the public in the dark about his new/old bus plan is a pattern they definitely do not deserve.

Anti-Rail Columnist Pushes It to Anti-Taste, too; Is Building Rail Really Akin to USA in Afghanistan?

We took a shot yesterday at anti-rail Richard Borreca’s Star-Advertiser column (subscription) for (1) being inaccurate and (2) just another in a string of opinion pieces that knock Honolulu rail.

Our January prediction about the paper’s three regular columnists still stands: They won’t write a single paragraph of positive content about the project in 2012. Flailing away at rail as they do and describing it as if it were the worse thing ever proposed by the city reflects a knee-jerk reaction to big government projects that leaves no room for study and understanding of what rail will accomplish.

But Civil Beat’s Michael Levine (the online news site's rail reporter) focused on something else in Mr. Borreca’s column – the comparison of the rail project to America’s experience in Afghanistan.

“Honolulu’s battle for rail is becoming the Afghanistan moment for local Democrats,” Mr. Borreca’s column began. “The once politically popular incursion into Afghanistan is now a questionable invasion. The decade-long American war is seen as a bad decision.”

Mr. Borreca wrote that rail’s declining poll numbers are ‘like our quagmire overseas.’ And that’s where Mr. Levine takes exception to the comparison, and rightly so.

“Maybe they’ve both taken too long and maybe they’ve both too costly,” Mr. Levine wrote. “But there’s at least one significant difference that Borreca and the newspaper’s editors seem to have overlooked. Rail does not kill people.” The emphasis was in the original.

The comparison was “offensive” and unnecessary to make the political thrust of the column work, he said. “Even if you oppose Honolulu’s project, likening it to war seems like a stretch.”

Goals Matter

It was a stretch with insight into the mindset of a journalist who never passes up an opportunity to attack a project that will improve Oahu residents’ mobility, reduce travel times through the urban core, provide a rational pattern for housing and commercial development around rail stations for decades to come and ensure transportation equity for all income levels of our population.

It's doubtful the columnists would recognize those outcomes as rail’s four primary goals.

We do take issue with Mr. Levine’s characterization of rail as “too costly.” It’s certainly expensive – the costliest ever in Hawaii – but a project this ambitious with such important outcomes for future generations can’t be done on the cheap. Simply adding more bus routes as some propose as an alternative to rail would be doing it on the cheap – and ineffectively, too.

Mr. Borreca ended his column: “It remains to be seen whether rail leaves Kapolei before the U.S. is out of Kabul.”

The three columnists’ anti-rail convictions don’t remain to be seen. They’re visible each time they turn to this subject – a classic case of near-sightedness that relishes and can’t see beyond the controversy in front of them today.

Anti-Rail Leader Works on His Confusion Game, Compares Reduced Town Traffic to All-Oahu Trips; ‘Go Rail Go’ Says H-1 Accident Showed Rail Need, Plus: Still Waiting for a Believable Opinion Survey

Here are two things you need to know about Cliff Slater, leader of the opposition to every mass transit project proposed by the City and County of Honolulu for at least two decades:

(1) Mr. Slater deliberately misstates the facts about Honolulu rail and related issues to mislead and confuse the public, and (2) he can’t be trusted to tell the truth unless he’s cornered.

Here are two truths Mr. Slater avoids: (1) Commuters who ride the train will avoid all congestion, and (2) Traffic congestion will be worse without rail than with it.

The latest example Mr. Slater’s practice of spreading confusion in his anti-rail campaign was posted on his website on April Fool’s Day, which seems appropriate. He made fun of the number of vehicles that will be taken off the roads by Honolulu rail:

“…if the City’s forecasts are right, rail transit will reduce car trips by 40,000 daily – actually 48,000 if I may correct the Mayor. It is 24,000 round trips. That sounds like a huge amount but it only reduces the number of cars on the road in the rush hour period by 1.7 percent from what it would be if we did nothing, and no one is suggesting doing nothing.”

Note that Mr. Slater first mentions the number of vehicle trips that will be reduced by rail. He doesn’t say where those trips won’t happen, but logically, they’ll be subtracted from the urban core served by the rail line.

But then he compares that number to the total number of trips throughout Oahu. That makes no sense whatsoever because it includes trips between Kahuku and Haleiwa, Kailua and Kaneohe, Hawaii Kai and Kahala, Waianae and Maili and a million or more daily trips outside the urban core.

A meaningful comparison would be rail’s impact on reducing traffic on the H-1 freeway where it passes through Pearl City. About 230,000 vehicle trips are made each day on that segment, and it’s reasonable to conclude that many of the projected 40,000 fewer trips thanks to rail would be on that segment.

Using Mr. Slater’s math, if 48,000 trips are 1.7 percent of the total, that would make the total 2,822,400 – a figure that must necessarily be the all-Oahu number of trips. But when you compare those reduced trips to traffic on H-1 through Pearl City, the percentage is much higher than Mr. Slater’s 1.7.

Even if only half of the city’s 40,000 figure in the environmental studies is used, that would be a traffic reduction of nearly 9 percent on the H-1. The rail project’s prediction of trip reduction in the core is actually 18 percent, a significant improvement in reducing congestion.

As for Mr. Slater’s penchant for avoiding meaningful comparisons and telling the truth only when cornered, here’s what he told the City Council in July 2010 when he found himself boxed in: “We don’t disagree at all that rail will have an effect on reducing traffic congestion from what it might be if we did nothing at all….”

Isn’t that's the critical piece of information about rail – that congestion will be better with rail than without it? Not if you’re an “ABC” guy – Always By Car – like Mr. Slater. We can expect to see more of his deliberately misleading tactics as long as he continues to lead the opposition.

Yesterday on the H-1

No elaboration is needed on the GO RAIL GO group’s statement issued yesterday afternoon:

“Today’s asphalt truck turnover that shut down H-1, Moanalua and H-3 freeways provides yet more evidence why we need rail transit. If the rail transit project was already completed, everybody who lives west of Aiea could bypass the congestion completely and arrive home quickly. Travelling to and from the communities on the rail route will be fast, convenient and affordable every day, regardless or traffic or weather. Let’s get this project finished!”

Poll Problems

There’s nothing to be learned from public opinion surveys on the rail project that are bogus from the start. All those online click-in polls that pop up on websites are obviously bogus, since there’s nothing scientific about the sampling. Savvy computer users can vote repeatedly if they know how to clear their cache and/or sign in with multiple IDs.

The results of polls take without regard to unusual spikes in media coverage on rail, either positive and negative, also are less than believable. We criticized the Star-Advertiser/Hawaii News Now survey two months ago because it launched one week after Ben Cayetano officially announced his candidacy for mayor.

Hawaii News Now apparently has doubts now about that survey based on a story it aired last night on a new survey by the Sierra Club (questionable because it's a mail-in poll) and another by Pacific Resource Partnership:  

“That poll and Hawaii News Now's poll with similar findings were in the field in late January, right after transit foe Ben Cayetano, the former governor, announced his campaign for mayor, so that could have skewed results against the project.” 

 How ‘bout that? Even one of the sponsors doubts the poll’s validity!

NEW RULE: No public opinion survey on rail shall begin during periods of atypical media coverage on the project, one way or the other.

Then there’s Star-Advertiser columnist Richard Borreca, one of the paper’s three columnists who we’ve predicted won’t write a single paragraph of positive comment about rail in 2012.

In today’s column (subscription) on the impact Mr. Cayetano’s fellow Filipino-Americans will have on the mayoral race, Mr. Borreca says this about the S-A/HNN survey:

“The Hawaii Poll, taken in February, showed that 62 percent of Filipino voters support Cayetano’s campaign and want to see him as mayor. It was the highest level of support from any ethnic group.”

Anti-rail Mr. Cayetano announced his candidacy on January 19. The poll began one week later and continued through February 5, which means it was in the field for six days in January and five in February. Yet Mr. Borreca says it was a February poll – a dubious assertion on its face that distances the survey from Mr. Cayetano’s announcement.

Not to be forgotten is Civil Beat’s survey on rail that excluded non-voters from the sampled population – a decision that ignored the views of nearly half of Oahu’s potential rail riders.

And so it goes with the recent polls on rail. Isn’t our community entitled to at least one survey so science-based, timed and well-constructed that it’s above reproach?

This post has been added to our "aggregation site" under the Public Opinion and Mr. Cliff Slater (and Friends) headings.

Are Critics Right? Is Starting Rail Ahead of FFGA ‘Reckless’? Civil Beat Finds Many USA Projects Began before Federal Funds Were Certain, Plus: You Really Must Read Energy ‘Outlook’ for 2020

We begin by referencing yesterday’s Yes2Rail post and a report titled Outlook for Liquid Fuels, 2010-2020 with unsettling predictions of a severe shortfall in supply to meet escalating demand in the years ahead. If you haven’t read it, set aside a few minutes for a skim.

Here’s a taste – the report’s seven predictions:
• Liquid fuels and energy in general will be more expensive. (No serious study has concluded otherwise.)
• Less fuel will be available to use. (Demand will outstrip supply.)
• We will have begun to stay closer to home. (For many Oahu residents, home will be near a rail station thanks to transit-oriented development.)
• Supply chains will have begun to contract. (This is especially worrisome for Hawaii, the world’s most geographically isolated society.)
• Food (as a percentage of income) will be increasingly expensive. (Producing and transporting food over long distances uses great amounts of more expensive fuel.)
• We may begin to see occasional interruptions in some services – electricity, water, sewer, internet, etc. (With no national grid as a backup, our electric utilities require an uninterrupted supply of fuel.)
• Rationing of fuel and perhaps even food is possible by the end of the decade. (If it happened in 1974 during the OPEC oil embargo, it could happen again.)

If those predictions have become fact by 2020, Honolulu’s decision early in the century to build a rail system will be seen as prescient. Lowering our dependence on liquid fuels for personal mobility is a smart option, especially here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Start Building or Wait?

Civil Beat shows once again today why an Internet-based news outlet with no space restrictions has a place in the media mix. We may not agree with some of its reporting (see Saturday’s post on Civil Beat’s public opinion poll on rail), but there’s no denying CB’s contribution to understanding complex issues.

Civil Beat’s lead story focuses on a major criticism by rail opponents, including mayoral candidate Ben Cayetano, that beginning construction on Honolulu rail before the Federal Transit Administration issues a Full Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA) is “reckless.”

To examine whether that’s true, Civil Beat asked the FTA for examples of other projects around the country that began construction before the FFGA was signed, sealed and delivered. There are many examples, including projects in New York City, San Francisco, Portland, Houston, St. Paul-Minneapolis, Denver and elsewhere.

It’s a good read for rail supporters but not so much for opponents Walter Heen, Randall Roth, Cliff "ABC" (Always-By-Car) Slater and Mr. Cayetano. Civil Beat no doubt will receive another we-tolerate-no-criticism response from the Gang of Four.

$11,573 and Rising – Annual Savings for Honolulu Drivers Who Park a Car and Start Taking TheBus; Hawaii Gas Prices at Record Level, Going Higher; 2020 Energy Forecast Is Especially Sobering Here

Mike Luckovich's 2007 cartoon in The Atlanta Journal Constitution hits home today.

The ever-higher cost of driving one’s own car is a leading reason why drivers become transit riders. Another is convenience. This powerful combination plays out everywhere rail systems are built, and it’ll happen here, too.

The cost of driving a car in Honolulu is near record levels this April Fool’s weekend, and that’s no laughing matter. Today’s average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gas is $4.469, up a tenth of a penny from yesterday. The all-time record price of $4.483 was set May 8, 2011 and could be eclipsed early this week.

Statewide, the average reached a record price of $4.597 yesterday and dipped a tenth of a penny today, according to the AAA Fuel Gauge Report. As usual, Hawaii leads the nation; Alaska ($4.354) falls short by nearly a quarter-dollar, followed by California ($4.311). The closest any California metro area comes to Honolulu’s price is Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Lompoc ($4.391).

Transit Savings Add Up

The American Public Transit Association (APTA) keeps close watch on how much an individual can save by choosing to ride public transit instead of driving a car. A two-person Honolulu household that gets by with one less car and uses a monthly pass for TheBus instead can save $11,573 annually based on the local gas price and the cost of an unreserved parking space downtown.

That figure was calculated on the March 26th gas price, which was nearly a nickel less than its current price, so annual savings recalculated today would be even higher.

These calculations are relevant to future Honolulu rail ridership for obvious reasons. By the end of this decade when the project is fully operational along its 20-mile length between East Kapolei and Ala Moana Center, the cost of operating a private car almost certainly will be considerably higher than today.

Energy's Future

The global demand for oil and its products is increasing at a rate that surely will exceed the supply by 2020, a scenario that’s been studied closely for years by institutions big and small, obvious and not so obvious.

One of the latter is Tompkins County, New York, whose county seat is Ithica. A group called TCLocal has undertaken the massive task of anticipating what it calls “energy descent – a radical reduction in our use of energy” – and what it will mean to their community.

One of TCLocal’s reports is exceptionally relevant to the City and County of Honolulu and its citizens, since we’re already paying the highest gas prices and electricity rates in the country. Spikes in future energy prices could severely impact us and our tourism industry, the engine of the islands’ economy.

A TCLocal publication titled Outlook for Liquid Fuels, 2010-2020 is recommended reading here in Honolulu. One of its references is a Kuwait University report with this prediction: “World oil reserves are being depleted at an annual rate of 2.1%.... World production is estimated to peak in 2014.”

The Outlook notes that the United States Joint Command (military) included a similar prediction in its Joint Operating Environment 2010 report: “By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, this shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD (million barrels per day).”

Click for larger view.

Sobering Up

The author ends his long and detailed Outlook report with three observations:

• The first half of the decade (2010-2015) looks better than the second half (2016-2020). If you have any major projects in mind, this might be a good time to get going. In particular, this would be a good time to make infrastructure improvements, establish a graden, and move closer to work (or arrange to work closer to home).

• The developments listed above (in the TCLocal report) as possible by 2020 are virtually certain by 2030. The descent doesn’t stop until we’ve achieved a state of equilibrium with a much lower level of resource exploitation. That transition can be easier or harder depending on how we approach it. Hawaii’s “green revolution” in renewable energy development is reducing our dependency on imported fuel.

• A lot of these developments can be prepared for. And that is the purpose of TCLocal: to begin to plan for the future looming on the near horizon.

Need we say it? Development of the Honolulu rail project throughout this decade anticipates what our long-distance neighbors in Tompkins County, NY are calling the global energy descent. Energy prices in Hawaii that already are the highest in the country will continue to lead them for the foreseeable future. That’s one of the downsides of Hawaii’s geographical isolation.

Public transit reduces energy consumption for the population as a whole and transportation expenses individually. Honolulu rail transit will provide fast, frequent, reliable and safe transportation through our city and also will be the logical choice of scores of thousands of Honolulu residents as they confront energy’s descent.

March Review: The Madness Included Rail Poll that Questioned Only Voters, Ignored the Rest; Anti-Rail Candidate’s Bus Plan Is Still a Secret

Civil Beat, the online subscription news site, posts a recurring feature each Saturday called ’10 Must Read Stories” from the week that’s winding down. It’s an innovation that only a news outlet with no space or time limitations can afford.

We’re following Civil Beat’s example today by reviewing some of March’s significant rail-related developments. One that deserves a second look was Civil Beat’s public opinion poll on the Honolulu rail project that we still believe was seriously flawed.

Civil Beat led its March 5th rail coverage with this headline: Civil Beat Poll – Honolulu Voters Oppose Rail Project. But then came this opening paragraph: “The tide of public opinion is running strongly against Honolulu’s proposed rail project, according to a new Civil Beat poll.”

That was something of a shock to rail supporters in light of three previous scientific surveys that averaged 57 percent support for rail, so we wondered how the poll could come to its ebbing-tide conclusion. We found an answer in the poll’s methodology and posted about it the same day.   

The survey sampled opinion only among likely voters on Oahu; non-voters' views weren't solicited. That approach may have been valid in learning which of the three major candidates was leading the race at the time, but rail will serve everyone, including the approximately one-half of the population that doesn’t regularly vote.

Non-voters’ opinions are every bit as valid on rail as voters’ opinions, especially since non-voters are statistically more likely to be dependent on transit than the more engaged, higher-educated and higher-income residents who regularly vote. And isn't government charged with serving all residents regardless of their voting patterns?

Excluding non-voters from the survey produced a result that by definition was not reflective of the population as a whole, and that’s the problem. Civil Beat Editor John Temple, who has just been named managing editor of The Washington Post, took strong exception to our view in an email exchange in which he defended his survey.

“We didn’t ‘exclude’ voters,” he said in one message, presumably meaning non-voters. “We sampled the population that will vote.” Another message said: “I wouldn’t have done (the) poll this way if I didn’t believe it would produce the most accurate reflection of what would happen at the polls if the election were held today.”

Ironically, one of the justifications to create the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (63-percent approval by the voters in 2010) was to remove the rail project from politics and the election cycle. Civil Beat’s poll did just the opposite and produced a result that clearly did not reflect the breadth of public opinion on the project.

Sampling both voters and non-voters might have produced a story with this headline: Rail’s loss of favor among voters doesn’t reflect attitudes of entire population. We just don’t know because of the poll’s methodology, but based on past polls, we think it highly unlikely rail is going out with the tide.

March’s Biggest Non-story

Civil Beat also figures in trying to discern how Mr. Cayetano, the presumed leader in the mayoral race, would address Oahu’s east-west traffic congestion if he were elected on his anti-rail platform. We had been frankly amazed at the media’s lack of push for those details, and Civil Beat was the first to step up and ask.

The candidate told Mr. Temple in an email that his plan will build on the Harris Administration’s Bus Rapid Transit plan that was developed in 2000 – a concept that was thoroughly trashed by transit critics led by current anti-railer-in-chief Cliff Slater, who called BRT a “farce” among other things.

It’s been 72 days since Mr. Cayetano officially announced he’s running for mayor, and we may have to wait another dozen or more before the candidate shares details of his recycled BRT plan. When he does, the story likely will be included in our review of April’s madness.

Traffic-free Rail Travel Will Be Big for Commuters, But One Goal Can Benefit All Residents: TOD Will Reduce Development Pressures throughout Oahu

Without rail's effect on Second City growth, other neighborhoods would feel the pressure.

We’ll never stop talking about rail’s ability to eliminate the traffic congestion issue for those who choose to ride the train. It’s a huge deliverable that rail opponents refuse to acknowledge as they harp about congestion’s continued growth even after rail is built. As the city’s Wayne Yoshioka once famously said, “...no kidding….”

But increased mobility through traffic avoidance is just one of rail’s four main goals, and the other three deserve repeated mention, too. One of them is a direct response to those who oppose rail because they don’t live near the line and don’t think they’ll ride rail.

The “community” argument does seem to move some opponents off the fence and over to the pro-rail side. East Honolulu residents who embrace the community concept and truly care about what traffic congestion is doing to the lives of west side commuters have said this message resonates for them.

But self-interest is a strong motivation, and rail has an answer for the what’s-in-it-for-me folks. By focusing Oahu’s future development throughout this century toward the ewa plain and along the rail line, the project will reduce pressure to develop on the east side, windward side and North Shore.

If this isn’t a logical response to the hard-core environmentalists among us, then they might want to redefine themselves. Smart Growth is what Honolulu rail is all about, and the more we’ve thought about it, the more significant this goal seems.

Keep the Country Country

Everybody will benefit from the rail project for all the generations of the 21st century. The population in the Second City region on the ewa plain is expected to increase 350 percent by 2030 compared to 2000. The city’s General Plan has focused development in the region for decades, and rail will facilitate that focus.

Residents all over Oahu surely can see the benefit of supporting rail as a logical tool in channeling a huge slice of the island’s inevitable growth to ewa. Transit-oriented development (TOD) around rail stations will be a major feature of the project – almost the very definition of Smart Growth.

So the issue the I’ll-never-ride crowd seems to be missing is they’ll benefit from rail even if they never do ride – not only because daily car trips in the urban core will be reduced from what they'd be without rail but also by relieving development pressure in their own neighborhoods.

Not everyone is motivated by "community" spirit; far from it, but when it comes to self interest, that's a motivator that never dies.

Columnist’s Unrelenting Rants Against Rail Project Give Supporters Opening for a Rational Contrast

As if to underscore our prediction that he’d never write one single paragraph of positive content about the Honolulu rail project in 2012, Dave Shapiro steps up today with yet another anti-rail piece: City’s rush to build rail unrealistic, unnecessary (subscription required).

As a columnist, Mr. Shapiro is one of the few journalists at the Star-Advertiser whose job is to tell readers his opinions on current events. Rail’s one of those big, slow-moving targets columnists love to hate, even if they don’t particularly understand rail. There’s plenty evidence they don’t in columns written by Mr. Shapiro, Cynthia Oi and Richard Borreca.

But that’s OK, and we’re turning a new leaf here at Yes2Rail about Mr. Shapiro’s well-documented anti-politician, anti-government-spending convictions. We’re now embracing his consistent opposition as an opportunity to build on.

Wait or Act?

His column today tries to make the case that the city should have waited for final approval of the anticipated $1.55 billion in federal funding before moving to begin construction. That would have been the better course, he says, than setting an aggressive construction schedule.

When that schedule couldn’t be met due to various delays, the city paid a $15 million delay claim to Kiewit, which had geared up to start building the project. In other words, in suggesting the Full Final Funding Agreement was needed first, Mr. Shapiro believes all work should have stopped until late this year, since final approval of big federal spending on the project isn’t anticipated until around the fourth quarter.

But what about the delays? There’s no perspective in Mr. Shapiro’s column – nothing about former Governor Lingle’s refusal to accept the Final Environmental Impact Statement during her final months in office. She blocked the project’s advance for nearly half a year following the Federal Transit Administration's sign-off on the FEIS. Governor Abercrombie accepted the document on the 10th day of his new administration.

Then There’s the Lawsuit

Mr. Shapiro has said good things in his column about the lawsuit to kill the project filed by anti-railer-in-chief Cliff Slater, mayoral candidate Ben Cayetano and others nearly a year ago. That’s created another delay, of course. Oral arguments in that case won’t even happen until this August.

Commuters stuck in traffic morning and night in the east-west corridor undoubtedly have their own opinions about these delays and about those who’ve caused them. Faced with either sitting back to let all the contingencies play out or take action to start the project as early as possible, the city chose the latter.

Construction costs increase $10 million for each month of delay, according to the city, but the columnist sweeps those considerations away in yet another swipe at politicians.

Being paid to express your opinions in daily newspaper journalism is a privilege reserved to editorial writers, columnists and cartoonists. The Star-Advertiser’s three opinion columnists will continue to knock rail all year. That’s our prediction, and here’s another one:

The newspaper’s editorial position to support Honolulu rail will not waiver, thanks to the editorial page staff's broader appreciation of rail’s goals and what the project will deliver to the public for all the decades in the 21st century. It's a bigger vision than the columnists can muster.

Anti-Railers’ Main Tactic: Repetition Ad Nauseum, Plus: Law Students Get Lesson in Meaninglessness

Mr. Leslie T. Rogers
Regional Administrator
Federal Transit Administration, Region IX
U.S. Department of Transportation
201 Mission Street, Suite 1650
San Francisco, CA 94105

Subject: Recent Correspondence

Dear Mr. Rogers:

Kindly disregard Randall Roth’s letter. You’ve heard it all before.

Yours truly,

Yes2Rail

Our apocryphal letter to the FTA is a response to a letter publicized yesterday from anti-railer Randall Roth to the agency. He's one of the Gang of Four plaintiffs who want to kill Honolulu rail. Civil Beat has posted it (access is free to occasional users) and sums it up as “a reheated version of all the arguments against rail you’ve heard before….”

Professor Roth of the UH Law School dredges up everything under the tropical sun in his letter – anti-rail Governor Linda Lingle’s “study” written by known rail opponents; sewers; the retirement system; UH dormitories; the six-year-old internal emails between FTA colleagues, and he ends with a flourish by repeating Cliff Slater’s trademarked obfuscation – a quote by the city in the Final Environmental Impact Statement:

“You are correct in pointing out that traffic congestion will be worse in the future with rail than what it is today without rail, and that is supported by data included in the Final EIS.”

Had we actually written to the FTA, we would have pointed out the deceptive nature of the Slater/Roth/Gang of Four’s anti-rail main talking point: (1) Congestion will increase even if rail is built; (2) Why build rail?

The FTA itself says why rail should be built: “…the purpose of the Project is to provide an alternative to the use of congested highways for many travelers.” Honolulu rail will be the congestion-avoiding option that’s missing today.

Even Mr. Slater had to admit when cornered at the City Council that traffic congestion will be worse without rail than with it. The FTA knows the truth of that statement, but it’s a truth the Gang of Four doesn’t want the public to know.

Springtime Follies

HawaiiReporter.com posted this oxymoronic headline yesterday: “New Secret Weapon in Federal Anti-Rail Lawsuit in Honolulu: University Law Students.”

The inventive Professor Roth has come up with a new way for his law students to earn extra credit – either in actual practice or in the minds of the law faculty. Nine of them are spending their spring break reviewing 155,000 pages of documents turned over in the anti-rail lawsuit by the city and federal governments.

The FTA has overseen Honolulu rail for years and has granted it a long list of approvals, culminating last month with the issuance of a Letter of No Prejudice. The LONP authorizes the city to begin construction, so there’s no doubt where the FTA stands on Honolulu rail.

The meaninglessness of the law students’ quest in dredging up “gotcha” emails from the trove of documents is easily appreciated if you imagine the FTA emails as if they were written by technicians inside the XYZ car company years before a new model rolled off a Detroit assembly line.

“If those guys up in planning keep working like this, we’ll all be part of the next Edsel,” says one. “Yeah, you can’t take seriously their solution to the radiator overflow problem,” responds another.

Once the bugs are fixed and the new car model is sitting in showrooms across the country, those emails are meaningless eyewash, yet Mr. Roth and friends would have you believe they’re the car company’s smoking gun.

It’s ridiculous, of course, and the UH law professor would know that if his judgment hadn’t been so thoroughly co-opted by the truth-twisting Mr. Slater.

This post has been added to our "aggregation site" under the heading Mr. Cliff Slater (and Friends).

In Honor of ‘Mad Men’ – Their Take on Trains

The hit cable TV series Mad Men launched its fifth season last night. The  series is attracting almost as much media attention as The Hunger Games movie these days, so to join in the Mad Men hype, we’re once again posting a video created by two of the show’s stars, Vincent Kartheiser and Rich Sommer.

They're fans of proposed high-speed rail in the United States, but as we noted in March 2011 when we first posted this video, we think most if not all of their dialogue applies to the Honolulu rail project. Enjoy the video on Kuhio Day, this uniquely Hawaiian holiday.

Mayoral Candidate Wants 'Truth' in Rail Debate, So Let It Begin: 'What’s Your Plan, Governor?'

NEW RULE: Candidates for public office can't complain about "truth" in media coverage if they avoid telling it themselves.

That seems about right this morning in light of mayoral candidate Ben Cayetano’s commentary in the Star-Advertiser (subscription) complaining about the newspaper’s hard-hitting editorial published one week ago on his recent campaign tactics.

Mr. Cayetano’s piece begins: “Since when is telling the public the truth a disservice?” There are multiple answers to that question.

First, it’s a disservice when the alleged truth the former governor is promoting is so obviously a campaign trick. He pulled six emails out of a half million documents – they represent 12/100,000ths of the total – to “prove” his assertion that the Federal Transit Administration has reservations about Honolulu rail. The FTA’s many endorsements of the project since those emails were written underscore the trick’s falsehood.

Second, the “fawning grandstanding” (Mr. Cayetano’s description) of Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s support for rail in testimony before a US Senate committee refutes the candidate’s gotcha campaign trick.

Mr. Cayetano takes issue with the Secretary’s statement that rail “will deliver people all over the island” – a statement the candidate himself describes as "off-the-cuff." If given a second chance at that sentence, Mr. LaHood undoubtedly would insert “from” before “all.” Cayetano ridicules a Cabinet member for want of a preposition.

In truth, rail will indeed serve people from all over the island by improving their mobility once they’re in the urban corridor. Those already living and/or working there will walk, take TheBus or drive to the nearest station, and those who live “all over the island” will avoid traffic once they’re in the corridor if they choose to switch travel modes and ride the train.

Third, Mr. Cayetano needs to avoid discussing The Truth because he strays from it so often. We’ve made the point repeatedly here at Yes2Rail, and we’re not alone; Civil Beat’s Fact Checks found examples of his and other anti-railers’ statements that were false or only half true – which means they're also half false. You can find examples here, here, here and here.

Mr. Cayetano has adopted Cliff Slater’s main anti-rail tactic of attributing statements to the city about rail’s impact on future congestion that the city has never made. We’re calling it the “Rotten Apple Effect” that could well be the campaign’s undoing if the mainstream media ever spend more than a few seconds or paragraphs on it.

66 Days and Counting

But the truth of all truths about Mr. Cayetano’s position on rail is that he entered the race for mayor without a transportation plan to replace the project.

One might have thought such a plan would have been the first thing he’d present upon announcing his candidacy, since killing rail would kill thousands of jobs and years planning. From what little we know, however, the plan is still being written – without benefit of public input in hearings or scoping meetings of any sort.

Mr. Cayetano told Civil Beat in an email that the core of the plan is “a Bus Rapid Transit system” that was written during the Harris Administration in 2000. The candidate says he’ll take the wraps off by mid-April.

Since April 15th will be the middle of that month, maybe we will read about Mr. Cayetano’s bus-based plan three weeks from today in the Sunday paper. That’s when the real truth-telling will begin about how much of what may have been Truth in 2000 is still Truth today.

Ironically, the last sentence in Mr. Cayetano's commentary states: "The public deserves answers." Truly.

LTE Forum: If Technology & Buses Could ‘Solve’ Traffic Congestion, There Wouldn’t Be Any Today, Plus: ‘Rotten Apple’ Effect Rots Anti-Rail Efforts

Today’s letters to the editor are worth that ever-popular “second look,” and we provide it in today’s LTE Forum:

Use technology to solve traffic (Star-Advertiser, 3/23 – subscription)

“I could not agree more with Jay Fidell (Yes2Rail took issue with Mr. Fidell’s column). I’ve been here 2 ½ years and notice so many non-smart traffic signals everywhere. We sit and sit, with no cross or oncoming traffic. Then the light finally turns green for both cars and pedestrians. So we sit longer still…. We need smarter traffic signals. Congestion could definitely be helped.”

Congestion presumably would be helped on streets and thoroughfares if equipped with traffic signals that were smart as smart can be, and for all we know, the city is working on it. But the biggest traffic issue on Oahu is on the H-1 freeway, which obviously has no signals. Improving traffic flow on surface streets using smart signals might attract some drivers from the freeway, but the bottom line on both the freeway and surface streets is that congestion inevitably will grow with the population’s increase. Honolulu rail will bypass that congestion and provide the traffic-free travel option that’s now missing.

Bunda was not realistic either (S-A, 3/23)

“Former state Sen. Robert Bunda’s recent commentary is more of a hit piece against former Gov. Ben Cayetano’s campaign for mayor than offering a real solution himself…. (Yes2Rail commented on the piece). “Bunda…wants us to believe that elevated rail will somehow solve West Oahu’s ‘traffic mess’ and simultaneously reduce the traffic he faces on H-1 from Wahiawa every day…. The facts as presented in the city’s own environmental impact statement show that traffic will be worse with or without rail.”

This letter from an Ewa Beach resident who frequently contributes anti-rail missives is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the anti-railer campaign (see ‘Rotten Apple Effect’ below). Mr. Bunda’s commentary did not say anything about elevated rail somehow solving West Oahu’s traffic mess. He didn’t say traffic would be reduced. These are the anti-railer’s words – inserted into Senator Bunda's mouth as a bogus suggestion that rail proponents have sold rail on the promise of “solving” traffic congestion. Not true!

To whom did LaHood allude? (S-A, 3/23)

“In the wake of the Federal Transit Administration’s email embarrassment…, U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye led Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood through a ritual reaffirmation of the FTA’s support for Honolulu rail. LaHood said: ‘We’re committed…until we hear differently from others who are intimately involved in this…’ To whom did LaHood allude? To Ben Cayetano if he becomes mayor? To the opinion of the Oahu public, which has turned against rail…..?”

We don’t know to whom the Secretary was alluding either – maybe nobody, since he was speaking extemporaneously. What’s perfectly clear, however, was his full-on endorsement of Honolulu rail, which the letter doesn’t quote (but Yes2Rail did). As for public opinion turning against rail, we don’t believe it. The Star-Advertiser’s poll showing alleged slippage of public support for the project was flawed in at least two ways, which we outlined here and here.

‘Rotten Apple Effect’

The more we see and read about the anti-rail campaign by major players like Cliff Slater and Ben Cayetano, the more obvious is the problem at its core. Bluntly put, it’s rotten.

Messrs Slater and Cayetano and their supporters, like the Ewa Beach letter writer, falsely claim the city has misled the public on rail and its effect on future traffic congestion. Mr. Slater’s website says, “The City never told the truth about traffic congestion reduction” and calls it “The Greatest Lie of All.” Since Mr. Slater’s claim simply is not true, some would call Mr. Slater’s accusation a lie in its own right. A campaign built on a lie by definition is rotten and missing the vital quality of integrity.

Ironically, one of Mr. Slater’s own websites contains the proof of the city’s truth-telling. It includes a link to a letter from Councilmember Gary Okino to his constituents in February 2006. Mr. Slater uses the letter as a “gotcha” tactic by quoting Mr. Okino’s truthful statement about what traffic congestion will be like decades later in an era of increasing population:

“City and State officials are working to make fixed rail in Honolulu a reality. Building a rail system will not eliminate today’s traffic congestion, but it will provide a convenient and effective alternative for those wishing to bypass highway gridlock in the future.”

Mr. Okino said it exactly the way the city has promoted rail from the start – as an option for travelers to bypass congestion. Rail isn’t a “solution” to traffic; it can’t make congestion magically disappear, but that’s what Mr. Slater, Mr. Cayetano, the Ewa Beach resident and other opponents want you to believe the city said it would do. It didn't then and doesn't now.

This is the cynical, dumbed-down and disrespectful core of their anti-rail campaign that we’ve been highlighting since July 2010 at our “aggregate site" under the Mr. Cliff Slater heading. Oahu residents deserve more respect than these leading rail opponents are giving them, and their lack of integrity may well be their campaign's downfall in the long run.