Honolulu has a growing traffic problem. This is not news. Honolulu needs to solve the traffic problem. From that, the news flows.
For a few decades a multi-point mass transit rail system has been floated as the panacea du-jour for the city’s increasingly congested traffic. The cost? A few billion taxpayer dollars. The benefits? An alternative to the bus. The reality? Something else to avoid riding besides the bus.
Oahu real estate is growing only in price, not in geography. 200,000 to 300,000 people commute from here to there each day in cars and trucks and clog the highways and city streets. Add a little rain, mix in pedestrians and a minor fender bender, and the whole grid comes to a grinding halt. Including the busses.
The grinding halt occurs more frequently these days. 60,000 new cars a year make parking the most unpopular participant sport in Honolulu.
A rail system is the only way to solve the problem says city councilman Gary Okino, “Honolulu needs to move, I would say, 200 to 300-thousand people a day and only one kind of system would do it and that’s a high-speed, high-capacity rail system and that is why I am so in favor of it.”
That and the fact that any rail system for Honolulu goes through his district. Would he be so interested and supportive if he served residents of Waimanalo?
The problem here is that Okino is right.
Only an efficient rail system can move that many people into and out of the city. Oh, except for the streets that already move more than that number of people each day. And the streets are paid for already. And each driver gets to go exactly where they wish (albeit it not on much of a timely schedule).
The only way a rail system can move that many people each day is if the city makes riding the rail system mandatory. That’s right. Make it mandatory to ride The Rail system and The Bus. Trucks and cars are for suckers and the rich. Let them have their expensive vehicles but outlaw their use by commoners, say, any household that makes less than $250,000 a year in gross personal income.
Give us what we need, Mister and Mrs. Councilpersons– slow and inexpensive transportation to destinations not too many blocks or miles from where we really want to go. All of it paid for by taxpayers, whether they be from Hawaii or the mainland.
Come to think of it, mandatory rail usage and outlawing vehicular traffic for anyone in a household making less than $250,000 a year would also solve the city’s housing problem. How? Think of how many of us making $40,000 or so a year would band together with friends and relatives in a single household simply so we could use our cars.
Extra bodies living together to meet the minimum requirements to own and use a car would increase the supply of available housing units, driving down the price. That’s just what we want for our properties, right? Lower prices.
Shakespeare’s view of the Honolulu traffic mess and limited solutions would be to say, “To rail or not to rail? That is the question.” More appropriate is the battle cry found in Julius Caesar. “Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.”
A fixed rail system is not at all unlike unpopular wars. They’re easy to get into, difficult to get out of, but everyone pays the price.
Mandatory is tough to sell, but they (the city) could close certain streets to vehicle traffic during the day. Another thing is raise the gas tax in the county by significant amount and use that money to fund a FREE rail and bus system. Hawaii is blessed since you really can’t go off island to purchase gasoline. Elsewhere, people just move on to the next area to purchase gas without the tax.