Second Opinion
City's rapid transit vision will fade
By Cliff Slater
Elected officials will back off from plans for a Bus Rapid Transit system once they hear voters' objections.
People often ask me why the city's Bus Rapid Transit vision has not engaged my attention in the same way as did the city's last vision: heavy rail transit. It's simple: I do not believe the BRT vision will survive beyond the next gubernatorial election.
BRT's sole purpose is to give the mayor a little gravitas, to inculcate into the voters the idea that here is a man who can plan for more than fake rocks. The BRT vision serves to boost him up from his current levitas — the unbearable lightness of being mayor, so to speak.
Why will BRT not survive? Like last time around, voters eventually will wake up to the reality of this vision and reject it.
First, you must understand that while BRT is rubber-tired, it is like a streetcar because it uses dedicated lanes in the middle of streets. Thus, it embodies all the congestion-causing drawbacks of a light rail line that Mayor Jeremy Harris correctly opposed when he was promoting heavy rail transit.
Strangely, the aim of city planners is to reduce congestion by making traffic so bad that vehicle drivers will be forced to ride the BRT. This will reduce traffic congestion, they say.
They are serious. Here's what the planners say, "A key strategy to mitigate traffic congestion is to get people out of their cars. This requires that alternative modes such as walking, bicycling and using public transit be given priority" and that "the present automobile orientation must move to a more balanced mix of transportation modes."
Take Kapi'olani Boulevard, for example. They plan to appropriate the two center lanes for the exclusive use of BRT, leaving just two lanes town-bound for city buses and vehicles instead of the current four lanes. Traffic also will be held up while BRT passengers cross the street from BRT islands.
The planners freely acknowledge that all this will create massive traffic congestion. They say, "Most intersections within downtown Ho-nolulu and Waikiki would be subject to extreme congestion during peak periods. However, the exclusive BRT lanes would allow transit passengers on transit vehicles to avoid this congestion." In other words, they are going to force you onto BRT.
Now the real question is: Have other cities reduced traffic congestion with new kinds of transit? No.
Visionaries will ask, "But what about Portland's MAX light rail? And San Jose's light rail? And Sacramento's rail line?"
Fortunately, we have a federally sponsored study by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute that has tracked U.S. traffic congestion annually since 1982 by calculating a Roadway Congestion Index for each major metropolitan area.
Examining the results, we find that before Portland opened its rail line in 1984, its index was 0.81. From then on it has worsened each year to the highly congested 1.24 level it is today (Honolulu is 1.06). There is absolutely no indication of its rail line ever having had any beneficial effect. San Jose, which opened in 1987, had the same result. Likewise with Sacramento.
In fact, it is the same for any rail line opened during the 1980s and '90s for which we have data. Check them yourself online.
Planners seem not to understand that the forgotten 90 percent of us using automobiles do it for good reason. And, rather than submissively follow the planners' diktats to ride BRT, we will one day wake up to the idea of this new level of traffic congestion and go ballistic.
This will frighten elected officials into believing they might be un-elected and that will be the end of BRT. I hope.
Cliff Slater is a regular columnist whose footnoted columns can be found on the Web.
