Island Voices
City needs to back up, re-examine transit plan

By Wally Bachman
Science adviser for CARE, Citizens Advocating Responsible Education

There is no room on Honolulu’s busy streets for the city’s latest rapid transit plan, a lane-devouring beast called the BRT.

Now that most of us are thinking about the tragic naval accident that took nine innocent lives on Feb. 9, I believe we should learn from the mistakes that were made.

We should be concerned when two untrained civilians, Transportation Chairman Duke Bainum and Vice Chairwoman Rene Mansho, are at the helm of this billion-dollar project and continue to ignore warnings concerning the impact of losing four heavily traveled lanes connecting Honolulu and Waikiki.

Bainum and Mansho are refusing to even schedule a hearing for Resolution 00-280, which asks them to begin to collect relevant data regarding the loss of lanes to the proposed BRT.

It seems that Mansho is pushing this project because she believes it will make up for the fact that she cast the crucial turnaround vote that killed the planned elevated rail system called HART in 1992.

Although streetcars have a certain nostalgic appeal and work well in cities with relatively few private vehicles, we do not have lanes to sacrifice to a system that will become paralyzed with any major accident or blockage along its route.

Although it is true that Resolution 00-280 calls for only a partial test of the BRT plans, it is designed to be much safer than a more complete test that would include changing the lights from their present patterns to extra green time for what was first called the CityTram.

This feature, now restricted to emergency situations, is the basis for the city’s projected time savings in the draft environmental impact statement.

Unfortunately, to cause a traffic light to go prematurely red will only invite accidents to occur.

Any realistic solution to Ho-nolulu’s traffic problems should focus on providing a new dependable system that will not create bottlenecks and not be ground to a halt every time an accident or intrusion blocks its path.

We have already wasted more than $7 million on a worthless draft EIS that does not even begin to discuss what will happen to all the vehicles to be evicted from the proposed BRT lanes.

Sounds like the script of a disaster movie to me. It’s time to slow down and take some critical measurements, for we are on a collision course with gridlock.

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