Posted on: Sunday, June 19, 2005

ISLAND VOICES
Here's how to derail transit plans this time around

By Karl Kim

When it comes to great ideas such as rail transit in Honolulu, we have no shortage of ways of smothering them. Of course it is always much easier to stop a project than to work collaboratively to build one.

Indeed, we have a sorry history of failure when it comes to the planning and implementation of fixed rail. At the risk of prematurely predicting its downfall — yet again — here are some sure-fire ways to stop our rail project dead in its tracks:

• Focus narrowly on costs without accounting for benefits. This is easy to do with expensive, risky, high-visibility projects. It takes real leadership to look beyond the price tag of any large-scale capital project and to determine the benefits, economy-wide, of improvements in our transportation system.

If we ignore the social benefits of investment in public transit or the equity issues with improving transit, then it becomes all too easy to complain about the costs.

• Adopt a short-term time perspective. Fixed rail alone will not solve today's traffic problems — it is a project that should be planned with at least a 30- to 50-year time frame.

Forgetting, too, that we have one of the fastest-growing aging populations in the nation and that we need alternatives to driving, and assuming that people and commuters will behave in the future, just like they do today, will ensure that nothing gets built.

• Ignore density and development. We have some of the most densely populated corridors in the world. Designing a system that does not serve built-up areas such as Waikiki, UH, Makiki, downtown, Salt Lake and other areas with high population or employment concentrations or the potential for increased high-rise, dense urban development is a sure recipe for failure. Ignoring students, tourists, stadium events, military bases and the airport will ensure that.

• Pick the wrong technology. There have been significant improvements in vehicle design and transit technologies. With so many possible choices between at-grade and elevated systems, rubber-tired vs. steel-wheel vehicles, automated or conventional train control and other advancements, it would be very easy, as we did the last time around, to select the wrong system for Honolulu.

• Plan transit in isolation. Rail transit will not work unless it is fully integrated with bus, shuttle, taxi, bicycle and pedestrian improvements. Transit must also be integrated with park-and-ride lots and other facilities for motor vehicles. It needs to be one of many alternatives for increasing mobility.

Treating rail as the end all and be all for our transport woes will surely lead to its demise.

• Design a system for someplace else. Hawai'i is a special place, one that is rich in social, cultural and environmental resources, requiring a balance between built and natural spaces. Ignoring these challenges and opportunities for urban design will hasten transit's defeat in Honolulu.

• Follow the feds too closely. The lure of fast money from the federal government could lead us in directions that are not necessarily in our best interests. Federal mandates, procedures and prescribed approaches may work elsewhere, but without strong local leadership and control over the planning and design, we could end up with a system we don't want.

• Forgo joint development. Another way to shortchange ourselves is to ignore the tremendous opportunities for joint development, value capture and increased revenues associated with the development of stations, transit malls, and urban service delivery districts.

• Forget past efforts. There's a huge pile of studies, consultant reports, ridership forecasts, alignment alternatives and other work that have been done in Honolulu related to transit. We need a systematic effort to determine what's still useful and what needs to be redone.

Without knowing the "value added" of this new round of planning efforts, it would be easy to simply reject any proposal based on a vague memory of the past.

• Politicize the process. It would be all too easy to see our transit plans go up in smoke as a result of partisan pyrotechnics or smoldering embers left over from political campfires. There are those who couldn't care less about transit and transportation, but are more interested in waging yet another war. Transit plans make great kindling for such fires.

There are so many different ways to kill off transit. But before we reach that conclusion, shouldn't we do more to ensure that there is objective, full and careful analysis of alternatives, complete disclosure of short and long-term impacts, deep public involvement in the planning process, thorough accounting of benefits and costs, and open, engaged, transparent deliberation of all aspects of transit in Honolulu this time around?

Karl Kim is professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.