I am in traffic in downtown Honolulu, creeping along at about 5 miles per hour — on a Saturday! According to state Sen. Cal Kawamoto, the state capital is likely to become one of the most congested in the U.S.
The Star-Bulletin reports: "Drivers in Honolulu, on average, spent five minutes and 45 seconds stuck in rush-hour traffic each working day … Out of the full year, that amounts to one full 24-hour day spent sitting on the road."
OK, so there are worse places for traffic. In San Francisco, the average commuter was stuck in gridlock for 92 hours a year, much worse than Honolulu.
But there’s a growing sense in this corner of paradise that it’s time to do something about traffic, because it’s only going to get worse as mainlanders flow in and development continues to take off. Some 72 percent of Hawaii’s entire population lives in Honolulu County, and the city’s population will top a million by 2025.
Oahu is considering a $2.64-billion light rail system, and finding a way to pay for it is controversial, to say the least. Critics say it will cost too much, and residents of other islands are none too happy about being asked to help pay for it. The light rail system would be the biggest public-works project ever undertaken in the state.
British-born Honolulu resident Cliff Slater typifies the modern rail critic, chanting the mantra of building more highway miles and predicting disaster if the trains run. "We have an obvious need to build more roads," says Slater, adding that Hawaii has fewer urban road miles per capita than any other state.
In an op-ed piece, island resident Johnny Dollar cites "transportation expert" Wendell Cox, who can usually be found denouncing any proposed rail system in the U.S. Cox charges that because ridership will be low and costs high, operating costs per passenger mile will "exceed 250 percent of projections."
They said all this about Portland, Ore., when it first proposed light rail. But the actual achievement is beyond expectations. From 1999 to 2000, Portland Tri-Met light-rail travel increased 10,000 rides per day, exceeding 70,000 trips daily. That meant 300 cars a day were being taken off the roads.
They love light rail in Portland (where an airport spur was recently opened) and in many of the other cities that have realized that new highways quickly fill up. San Francisco’s Muni system carries 145,000 people daily, and they’d all be on the roads without the train. If "building out of congestion" worked, Los Angeles would be free-flowing.
Hawaii has a long history of rejecting light-rail funding, even though more than half of it comes from the federal government. I predict this time it will actually happen.
My trip to Hawaii also included several days on the delightful island of Maui, which is as large as Oahu but has only 120,000 people (plus kazillions of tourists, of course). Much of Maui is still rural and agricultural, which surprised me (I’d been expecting wall-to-wall tourist development).
Traffic is mostly free-flowing to hippie meccas like Paia, where hemp clothing is on sale in the boutiques. The streets are full of SUVs, though, which defies logic: Who needs four-wheel-drive when it never snows and all the ice is in the mai tais? Sure, Maui has some rural roads, but nothing all that challenging. And gasoline routinely tops $2 a gallon in Hawaii!
Aloha, Hawaii. I had a wonderful time, enjoyed missing the winter storms and will definitely return, hoping to ride on the new light-rail system.
