 I'm Jay Fidel, and this is Community Matters. And the title of our episode is Glyph Slater writes about transit, and does he ever? It's growth, it's decline, and it's pending demise. That's going in distance, isn't it? So what's at the end of the road for transit? Here's a book cover. It's available on Amazon. And it's absolutely worth looking at because it looked into the future and it connects all the dots about everything that has happened. Not only locally, we'll talk about that, but nationally. You know, they used to say that as General Motors goes, so goes the nation. Well, I would like to say, and maybe Glyph will agree with me, as transit goes, so goes the nation. Welcome to the show, Glyph. It's an honor to have you here. Thank you. I totally agree with you. I only mentioned Honolulu Rail twice briefly in the book. I talk about it being the last gospel of the Royal Renaissance. It is so bad so far, okay, but it's not worth covering. Well, you've been covering this. You've been covering rail transit here in Hawaii, and now in the national scene for 30 years. You're a businessman who turned into a, what do I call it, an urban planner, scholar person. And this book and your efforts, your remarks, your positions on rail at the time that Mufi Adamin was forcing it down on the throats, in my opinion, have been very helpful to the public conversation. Unfortunately, the political wins determined the result, and now we have the result. So let's talk about rail in Honolulu first, even though it's only mentioned in your book a couple of times. I remember you saying, and you said it a number of times in public, I was on the neighborhood board at the time, and I was listening, that rail wasn't going to work. Your thoughts about that, your thoughts about whether the federal government has seen what you were saying. When I said that it was going to go over $7 billion, he accused me of lying. It's over $10 billion now, and it's stealing his way to $15 billion. So I guess he should eat those words. Yeah, yeah. But Pena's Prevalores, who's more qualified than anybody, says that he thinks it's just going to be $15 billion before it's all finished. In the beginning, when it first came out, when I was talking about $7 billion, I never thought that there would be any cost over runs before they got to dealing at. How can you get cost over runs and not building something in an open field? There's no obstruction. Now, they'll be going now into denser areas. It gets to be quite tricky, especially when you get into the waterfront, because that waterfront is mostly filled land. It's very plastic. You've got nothing dealing with anything that's really solid. The fact that they still don't have anybody, and haven't from the beginning had anybody that has ever built a rail line, okay? Let alone an elevated rail line. I mean, you know, it's been an amateur operation from the beginning. Well, they've had a lot of politicians in there. Yeah, and they've got a lot of qualified engineers, but rail is a different bird all together. You really need to get real expertise. Even then, you've got to be prepared for cost over runs. What about the ridership? It started out last summer with the inaugural trip, and it's still working on the inaugural trip, because not a lot of people are taking it, even though it's supposed to be functioning. Your thoughts about ridership in the beginning and the middle and the end? Well, first off, I think it was an error on their part to carry people from nowhere to nowhere, okay? I mean, they can't expect to have any ridership. That was really an error, because people finish up laughing up. I think in time, when they eventually get to Alamoana, their ridership will be, I think, about a quarter of what they forecasted. That was based on, if you look at all the other rail lines that have been built, especially the elevated ones, and you look at riders per million of population, you look at the riders per length of track, you come up with a number that's like 25% of what they're forecasting. Well, it sounds like a boat. It sounds like a boat. You know what a boat is? A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money, and a rail sounds like a hole in the ground into which you pour money, because it's going to get worse, not better. Am I right? It's going to get more expensive as it gets older, right? Yeah. Oh, yes. That's the problem. They keep saying, once you've got a rail line, it's in, it's forever. It's not forever at all. They start replacing rails in as little as 15 years. The average, I think, is 25 years. That's just the rail, and then the refurbishing of the trains themselves, they don't last that long. You've got a lot of people, of course, when you don't have many people riding them, they'll last longer. That's a loss every day is greater. It's a loss every single day. Well, the big thing is that they try to hide the maintenance costs, but in addition to the maintenance, there is the replacement. The replacement and refurbishing. And this is the thing that always comes as a surprise when somebody says, we need another $20 million to do X. We need $50 million to do this, and it just adds up. But the time 50 years rolls around, you'll spend pretty much what it costs you to build in the first place. One of the issues that came up when you gave me a ride on a bus, you arranged a bus from West Oahu into town following the path of the then planned rail, and we drove through, and what was clear to me is that wherever the rail went, it was going to have an elevated rail, as in New York, as in the Third Avenue subway and all that. It has an effect on the neighborhood, doesn't it? And that's permanent. You can't really undo that so well, and where you could see the mountains and the ocean and the sky in or around this elevated rail, that's gone. Is that something that we should be concerned about now? Very much so. Very much so. That portion when the rail transitions from Dillingham over to Nimitz and Vaisal Moana. You've got two major stations there, trying to town and downtown, and they're just going to wall off the ocean view. Well, the other thing, and I haven't followed this, maybe you have, is that when you're going to build rail, you have to cut the corners of a square block. In other words, the rail doesn't go 90 degrees. It goes in an easy, gradual arc around the corner of that block. So you have to condemn a good part of that block to accommodate that arc. And I don't think they ever finished acquiring the land and the rights to move that rail anywhere. I don't know where it stops, but I don't think it goes to Alamoana, certainly, and they have not planned for or acquired the rights to go there. So if and when, and maybe never, they decide to go as far as they were talking about to Alamoana, it's going to cost them a fortune because they haven't done it yet. Am I right? I'm not sure about that part. I know that it's still an open situation on a good number of parcels that they need, but I mean, you know, no condemnation can stop them from condemning it. And condemnation suits can get very political, especially around what is reasonable compensation for the rights being condemned. It's not like a fee simple thing. It's just other than that, and you have to have a bunch of appraisers trying to figure out what it's worth. Let me go to a Pete Buttigieg came here last week. What was the significance of his visit? What's the takeaway from his visit? And how is that going to affect things? I always remember another former Department of Transportation guy who rolled in and testified at City Council, this was a marvelous, you know, this was a marvelous thing for the city. And then I later found he'd been paid $10,000 for that. Yeah, that's what happens. So somewhere in here, you know, you were the Gadfly. You were the, you and Panos Previduros, I should say. We're talking about the city planning considerations and whether this was going to work. And you concluded that it was not going to work and you were a very strong voice for that proposition for a long time. But in the end, it was determined by political considerations and Buffy and unions and what have you. And here we are. Somewhere in there, you got to be national. Somewhere in there, you started focusing on learning about writing about the national transit scene as reflected in your book, Transit. Its growth, decline and pending demise, which just came out and it's available on Amazon elsewhere. And here's the cover. And I'm very interested in, okay, you had a correction to what I said. It's available on Amazon, except to Hawaii residents. You can't buy it if you're a Hawaii resident. What is it? Radioactive? I don't know. When you try to buy it, they take you all the way to the end and then tell you that there's something wrong with your address and you can't ship to that address. Okay? No, not okay. So having spent many, many hours getting the run around from Amazon, I finally concluded that something like that suspicions earlier, but now I'm of the opinion that Amazon needs a lot of city permissions for their new warehouse and the city as it's leaned on. That's a story. That's a story all in itself, if that's an outrage. So anyway, you got involved in looking at rail from a national point of view when you wrote this book. It is top of the block. It's a masterwork on rail in these United States. It goes into so many issues and historical developments and public officials. And you have a picture of Lyndon Johnson on the cover. That's got to have a significance. Do you want to talk about the history and how Lyndon Johnson got involved and what's the track of the book and the coverage so we will all know where rail has taken us nationally? When the first move was made with the Urban Mass Transportation Bill of 1962 and that Kennedy was involved and he was quite clear that he wanted where possible, he wanted everything to be private, profitable. People would pay appropriately. And there was really a free message to Congress in 1962. That was a free market statement if you ever wanted one. So then he was assassinated and so then we have Johnson takes over. And John, the bill that Johnson signed in 1964 was the absolute antithesis of what Kennedy wanted. But he still didn't get any money. They passed the act but they didn't fund it. So it went until 1970. There's another bill 1970. And that to everyone's surprise was funded by Nixon. So the tune of $10 billion which was a lot of money in those days. So it was a real bipartisan effort. So what I get from your book and from the review of it is that we started out with the Kennedy approach, entrepreneurs, private capital building rail systems and other transit systems around the country. And that was successful. But somewhere along the line, the federal government got involved and it essentially caused government to buy up the positions of all these private entrepreneurs. And so you look on phase one, it was owned and operated by private capital. And phase two, it was owned pretty much, all of it was owned pretty much by municipal, state, and federal capital. And if I'm going to build a rail system, the God, this is an adage about building railroads here. If I'm going to build a rail system, I don't want government doing it. In this country, I want private industry doing it. So we went from private industry to government running rail. And government has the money for sure, but does government have the management skills? Does government have the ability to actually run these systems? And was that a good move? I take it from your book and from the reviews of it that you don't feel it was a good move at all. No. For example, it takes twice as many people to run transit today for the expense and the employees for each 100,000 rides takes twice as much today as it did when it was private in 1970. And you can't run a railroad that way. You know, the other thing is with the rail, when they started to build it, it was in private hands. Okay? Then over time, governments took it over because they felt they needed for employees. Okay? But the buses stayed private. Okay? So as we get to say 1960, the buses, bus companies are largely private. Okay? And the rail lines leaving aside these street cars, that was all government run. Okay? Now, so now we get, and this is where we get into the urban transportation bill, is this is where they made it and they were very obvious about it. I'm not sure that in the book Congress was quite obvious in their intent to socialize the bus system. That's right. Indeed. It got socialized because the government was willing to pay the entrepreneurs at least fair market value and maybe more. And the entrepreneurs are only too happy to sell it to the government. Right? We had that here with the bus system. Right? Used to be private. Yeah. Harry Weinberg. Harry Weinberg. Yeah. That bus system was private and profitable so the day it was taken over by the city. The other thing I think it's appropriate to include in our conversation here is the technology. The one thing about rail and fixed infrastructure like this is very hard to change it. And if the community changes, and of course it changes the communities such as we are seeing with Honolulu Rail now, but if the community around it changes and more importantly, if the technology changes, you've got a big problem on your hands because it no longer fits within a dynamic urban plan. Can you comment on that? Well, you've got a perfectly good example of where two things, Uber and remote work, that's caused about one third drop in the rail and that's caused real problems for everybody even if they don't want to admit it. And most are really admitting it now. Okay, what are we going to do now? Under the body of administration, we have a priority for infrastructure that certainly includes rail and the Department of Transportation and the Board of Judge. But the reality is the government is to maintain the rail system, the transit system that has been built or is in the process of being built in this country is going to cost the federal government a lot of money. And the fact is that rail is expensive. It's in the billions every time you look. And that is always more than you thought. And so when you, you know, the government, federal government is not a bottomless pit of money. When you talk about the fiscal policy going forward and you include rail that we don't actually need, this creates a national problem. I think that's what you're saying, is it? Yeah. Yeah. We're, I can, chapter six, for example, I showed that the recovery from COVID of the rail and you see it come up to the ridership, one third less than it was in 2019. And it seems stuck there. But Uber is doing better than they did in 2019. And because the traffic flow is same as it was before, has been for some time. From the outset, even from the day when you took me for that bus ride from West Oahu, this is all a question of urban planning, urban development. It's a question of putting the roads where they should be. It's a question of maintaining the roads, managing the roads. And, you know, in general, planning the expansion of the city. And one of the big focus points in that period of time was the Kakako, which I must say is really not a successful venture, a successful chapter in urban planning. That's my opinion anyway. But clearly, when you have a situation where the downtown is becoming less relevant, vacancies are going up downtown. Landlord profitability is going down. And rail is going to serve these areas with fewer and fewer riders because remote work, as you said, has changed. So how does the city, the urban authorities, including the federal government that supports the urban authorities, how do they modify the original plan and expectations on the basis of which they provided and promised to provide many tens of billions of dollars around the country? How does the change, how should they, can they adapt to that change? I don't think that rail in time or rail or transit in time is going to be relevant. It doesn't provide really what people want. You know, one of the things that I looked at recently and didn't have, I don't have the book, but I put it on the website. What's the name of the website? cliffslater.com. Thank you. And that is that in Los Angeles, that Uber is cheaper than light rail. Well, let me offer it. It's also more democratic. If I need transportation, I call Uber, I pay for that. The other guy who doesn't need transportation, he doesn't pay for it. So there's an equity there. If I'm getting the benefit, I'm paying the cost. When you have a community infrastructure like rail, everybody pays, even those who never use it. You know, you imply, Cliff, that over a period of time, as rail becomes irrelevant, not only in Honolulu and transit, I should say, but elsewhere in the country where it doesn't keep up with changes in the urban dynamic, where people have other ways to get around or they don't need to get around, rail becomes irrelevant. And thus, you know, it falls into disrepair. It falls into even disuse. Maybe the authorities that wanted to have it before no longer want to have it. But what happens to a 10 or 15 billion dollar project that is essentially irrelevant? What happens over five, 10, 15 years to that project and to the community that it runs through? Well, it's a problem. So I wish they would not, you know, damage is done as far as bringing the rail in as far as Middle Street, but I wish they'd stop there because to go across our waterfront, no reasonable future for ridership. You know, one of the things about building concrete, such as we have done in Kakarako, is that you can say for a mortgage or a lease, you can say, oh, this has a useful life of, say, 50 years or maybe even 100 years. But in fact, the structure in concrete is going to last a lot longer than that. And it's going to take some kind of action. You know, in Singapore, buildings in concrete have to come down after a period of time. They can't just stay up there and get old. We don't have that in Hawaii or in the United States. You can't force the demolition of a building unless it's, you know, dangerous in some way. But my thought is that, gee whiz, if you build it in concrete, it has a useful life, really, of hundreds of years. And the cost of removing it is astronomical. I mean, if it costs 10 or 15 billion dollars to build Honolulu Rail or any rail system, transit system in a similar city, it costs the same amount to tear it down, right? I don't think so because they don't, they don't need the engineering staff to pull it down. It's just, you know, that's just construction folks will take it. I accept that, but it isn't easy, though. Yeah. Well, you know, the environmental work that has gone into this thing, I mean, because the trains are just a minor, minor cost in this thing. Let me go further and say, if you were in charge of this, and I'm not, I suppose I'm bifurcating my question, if you were in charge of what has happened here in Honolulu, and in like cities, like systems elsewhere, which have been supported by the federal government to the tune of many tens of billions, what would you do with a rail system that doesn't work? What would you do with it? How would you change it? How would you demolish it or abandon it? What do you do with all these very expensive systems that the federal government has paid for and managed? Well, I guess the place you'd go look at would be New York because they had all elevated rail, and they took it all down. Yeah, I mentioned the 3rd Avenue L a little while ago, which was really, it was awful to be anywhere near that elevated rail. People hated to be there. They took it all down, and all of a sudden it was sunshine again, sunlight. And that was because people really hated it, and they politically required it to take it down. And so that was a good move, and that was the logical extension of all of this, isn't it? I think so. There are certain things that we could do, take it to Middle Street, and have it join up there with buses. Look at that as a possibility. Our original proposal to the city, which they lied about, was that we could have, for a lot less money than they were then proposing for rail, $5 million, $5 billion. We were proposing a three-lane, elevated highway that would come into town, basically to Middle Street, and to pick up stuff in the cars in the couple A area. And bring them in and spread them out over downtown. That could have been done for a lot less. We got that example from the one in Tampa, Florida, where they did exactly that. They built 10 miles of it for like something $400 million, if memory serves me right. It was just unbelievably inexpensive. Now, given Hawaii's union stuff, it may have cost us double that. There's still nothing like what the rail has cost, and will continue to cost. What about national policy? What does the administration and the given administration do to alleviate this problem? Here's the question. How can we reverse the Lyndon Johnson shift, the Richard Nixon shift, and go back to private ownership instead of federal and municipal ownership? Is that a possibility? And if so, how could we do it? Well, first off, just take up the thought of Uber being cheaper than light rail. And think in terms also of the forthcoming driverless automobiles, buses. When you can have a four-passenger bus and working automatically, utilizing Uber-like software, exactly how that would work. I don't know, but we have to think in those terms. And I think that I don't think I think what will happen is that people will just abandon the rail, because the thing that kills transit and all this has is affluence. As we get more affluent, transit has become, for many years now, an inferior good. More money you have, the less you want of it. But I think that the rail, I just think just, let's say they build it as far as we want to send it. They're not going to have much to ridership as they anticipate. But they're going to have the expense. Over here, we've got people starting to operate automatic bans to take people door to door on call. And the automatic bans will have access to the shopping center. As that stuff impacts more and Uber pool becomes automatic, then I just see the transit fading away. And then you finish up being left with the infrastructure. So then you've got a problem. But you're always anticipated. You always warned us about that. And your book is a warning about that. So are you going to write another one? Are you going to write a sequel? It's sort of like I told you so, sort of thing. Some of the things that were in fun in the history, for example, I find that in London, when buses were all private until 1930, okay? Now, prior to that time, they had no fixed stops for buses. Okay? If you wanted a bus, you had one going by, okay? And if you wanted to stop and hang on the bell, but there was no fixed stops anywhere. And they're private. I'm thinking, I'm still looking into this. I'm thinking, if they're private and they are resisting change that some people are calling for at the time, then it must be more profitable for them to not have stops. A good point. Okay. Now, going from taking a lot more buses from stops to no stops, that's going to take a little bit of work. Well, it costs money to make a bus stop. There'll be people who will oppose that as they do. In the end of the day, it's not just urban planning, it's politics. And it's kind of the reverse of NIMBY. I want you to have a bus stop at my door. When I first started to do this is when Frank Fassie got reelected on 1984, and then proposed the rail system. And I just started to look at the financial projections. And I thought to myself, this doesn't work. This is ridiculous. So my wife and I went in the various senators. And they were, because I thought, well, they just don't know what they're getting into. And after talking to not too many of them, we all thank me for taking time out of my busy day. Okay. Now, you have dedicated, may I say, aside from the fact you had a career with Maui Divers, you founded that company. And you were the businessman first. But then somewhere along the line, you got into rail and unloom and now national rail. And you have dedicated your life to that. So I want to say that I truly appreciate the contributions you have made to the public conversation about it. And I hope people go and find that book and look at that book. And if they're worried about it, you know, not getting to them because of this twist with Amazon, then what they could do is send it to their families on the mainland and have their families send it to them here in Hawaii. But they can get into Bons and Noble. There you go. All right. Thank you very much for that. Who don't have a warehouse. Simple. Okay. Well, Cliff, it's been great to talk to you and catch up with you. I haven't seen you in a long time and it's really a joy to be able to share our thoughts together and hear what you're doing and hear about this book. I wish you all the best in every way. Cliff Slater, a businessman who has seen the light on rail and who has expressed himself for decades and decades. It's great for the public conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Aloha.