 Bingo. So what is an informed citizen? An informed citizen is Ray Tsuchiyama. He's right here with me today. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech and this is one of our shows about life after statehood. And Ray is our contributing guest here to help us understand all the things that have happened. Hi Ray. Great to be here on this very delightful afternoon. A little cool so I wore my long-sleeved shirt. And this topic you know is about cars and about the state and in my own family back in the 30s in plantation Maui my uncle and father had a car. They shared it and it went everywhere and and my father so infatuated the cars he applied to study auto engineering in Detroit and left unfortunately just after just before Pearl Harbor in 1941. That's where he landed. But that's the way Hawaii was about. All about cars even back then before the war. It was emancipation. It was freedom. You could get around. You know you weren't locked in. I mean I think life on the plantation to go back to our old thing about analyzing the plantation. Life on the plantation was very static geographically. You stayed there. You didn't leave. You might not leave that island that plantation for years and years and years. Things moved at a much slower pace and that meant that you didn't get out much. With cars you got out. That was really a huge big change. Even on Maui and even on other islands it liberated people to spend weekends outside. And that's how this discovered on Maui Kihei and Wailea. And they used to spend a whole weekend there fishing, camping, a great outdoor experience that strange enough today we don't have much of because we don't have many parks and the fishing has gone in many of the beaches. But that's a way to get out and enjoy the outdoors. And also like you say, get out from the probing eyes of your neighbors in the plantation camp. It was a very closed environment, you're correct. And in the late 40s and 50s the first kind of suburb, Kahului was a suburb that kind of was planned out. And the people moved out. It was the mall, Kahului Mall, one of the earliest malls in the United States. You had to get there, our folks and so forth through the car. And so everybody had to have a car. What's so ironic about it Ray, is that in those days the car could take you to places of recreation. It could take you, you know, fair distances at least on that island. And you could again be liberated. Today we have the same passion for cars. In fact the title of the show is something about all about cars in Hawaii, but it's about Hawaii's passionate love affair with cars. Today we have the same passion, if not more of a passion, because after all they're beautiful. They're beautiful animals, cars these days. We talk about that. But there's fewer places to go to. And it's more difficult to get there because of the traffic. So what we were left with this cultural thing about cars being the enabler, but they don't enable us any more. Problem. Well strangely you have a very good point because in the beginning of every morning is your car. You get into your car from far off dark couple-a. People get up at 4.35 o'clock in the morning to get into the car to enjoy that ride. It's not enjoyment anymore. You're right. It is depressing, unhappy commute. And you listen to the radio and you rail against other drivers, you know, moving in. And you reach downtown and you park. And you park with thousands of others. And you're a beautiful expensive, you know, car. You're a stallion, so to speak, sits in the parking garage all day long. And then what you do afterwards instead of socializing with your colleagues or going to a concert or seeing an art show or going to a Hula recital or meeting young people and talking to them, mentoring, you get in your car and go back because you have to get back home as soon as possible. Yeah, two hours one way, two hours the other way. What a waste of time. What a waste of the economy. What a waste of human effort. Sit there. It's good for the radio, though. You know, problem, the problem is that, you know, this is a vortex heading into the corner. I mean, we, I always liken us to frogs in water that's being boiled ever so slowly. We don't realize what's happening. And I'm not campaigning for rail by any means, but I really wish there were mass transit that we wouldn't be so wedded to the car. When the car doesn't really do that much for us anymore. And we pay $6 billion a year for gas coming in and we still have a very, very, very high percentage of gas cars, you know, petroleum fueled cars in the state. There's only 5,000 in about a million cars. Only 5,000 cars are electric cars. We are not, sorry, we're not making progress on that. We can build all the charging stations you want. But actually, I don't think that, you know, range anxiety is the problem. People are in love with their gas-guzzling fossil-fuel cars. That's what it is. Well, historically, I mentioned before that Henry Perrine Baldwin bought an electric car. This is in the late 1880s. And of course, people had carriages and buggies and human carriage sold these buggies and for far-off people in Manoa and Nuan were trekking to downtown. The post-war war is categorized or focused on the price of gasoline. And the price of gasoline in the post-war period was barely $0.25 a gallon. And they thought it would last forever. Never, never. And of course comes, you know, a series of gas panics in the 70s after the Yom Kippur War, for example, and others that suddenly people buying smaller cars. But we are in, again, a period of low oil prices. And if somebody told me, you know, five years ago, oh, oil will be under $50 a barrel, I would be shocked because back then it was $100, $120 a gallon, I mean, a barrel of oil. In many countries, though, like Japan or in Western Europe, the price of gasoline is $9 a gallon. So that's a disincentive to own a car. It's more of an incentive to use mass transit and they have to have very good mass transit systems. Or in Norway, forcing people by taxis and so on to buy electric cars and putting in many, many, many electric charging stations. Japan has more electric charging stations than gasoline stations, though. It's amazing. And so they're looking to the future because Japan, of course, imports 100% of oil in gasoline to the country. And so we are in a period, though, again, an illusionary. Oil prices go up and down through history. But now people are buying, again, SUVs, light trucks, and larger cars. Yeah, that's the part that blows, they can't remember. You know, it's like amnesia. It's only a few years ago that you would not do that. That would be crazy. Now they're back to those $70,000 SUVs and big trucks and what have you, which guzzle gas. And you can say that the cafe standards impose great efficiency. But sorry, it's still gas. And we're still bringing oil in. We're bringing the gas, the cars, the parts. Everything comes in and we have to send money out. That's the way, and we have no real alternative way of getting around. We have not attended to bicycles, sorry to say. If I want to disagree, call me up. We have not attended to walking, you know. When I came out here, I was in the service and the guy said, you want to go to Honolulu? I said, yeah. He said, yeah, you should go to Honolulu because Honolulu is a walking city. Really? Is Honolulu a walking city? You think Honolulu is a walking city? It's not a walking city at all. I mean, Chinatown, that's a walk maybe. And Waikiki, if you can get there, is a walk. But mostly it's not a walk. We don't have sidewalks, we don't have walking paths. We don't have places, only the trails, the DLNR controls. There's no place to really walk there. They're all deteriorated. So what we have here is the car. And people are still in love with the car, the big car, the expensive car. The car, you got to spend a good party of disposable income buying and fueling and paying insurance for. This is a vortex, right? In a population of maybe 950,000 on one island of Oahu, I haven't seen statistics clearly, but there must be more than 600,000 or 650,000 cars at any point in time on Oahu. And on neighboring islands, it's even worse because of the lack of buses and so forth. People live farther away into the mountains like Kula and Makawa. And so one family may have 3.5 or 4 cars for their family. Here it's hard to have more than 2 because there are, especially condo areas, there are more parking stalls. So we have, like you say, a non-sustainable kind of paradigm that we live in. We import the cars and then they're obsolete after a while. And then where do they go? And they're very massively built machines and so forth. And the irony of the car to me, although we've made tremendous advances in electronics, if you see, if Henry Ford was alive today and you open up the engine, oh, he recognizes the engine. It's a principle of internal combustion. There's a mixture of oxygen and gasoline and there's a spark and that drives the combustion cylinders and that drives the axle and drives the car. Now, if you look at computing and see the amount of advances and a huge amount of memory and chips and so forth, it's amazing that cars don't get a thousand miles a gallon by now in the year 2017 because cars have been around since the 1880s and 90s. And so the engine itself has not really proven to be a cost-effective, very sustainable paradigm of transportation. But we're stuck with it. Well, there's emotional reasons. And in the state of Hawaii here in life after statehood, I think a lot of people have this bond with cars that goes way back culturally to your dad's time and to the time when we were liberated by cars. I remember when I, and it's a skewed view of it, not the same as the mainland, which also in California had a lot of cars. Very much, yeah. When I came here, a couple of things stick in my mind. One is you're off the plane. And after you have your fill of pineapple juice and hula girls, then you get in the taxi. And the taxi is a Cadillac. It's one of those stricter Cadillacs. Oh, yeah, it's huge. It's a ship. Sometimes you get a wedding cut, one of those, it stretches for like 30 feet. And why do you need that? I came from New York where they had checker cabs. And even now, the cabs are very modest and they're very efficient. They get around and it's a way of doing transportation. We've always outsized the cabs. And in fact now, I wanted to mention this to you, now we have a problem with the cabs because the cabs have gone slack. They're not efficient. They're not well trained. It's hard to get a cab that'll take you to the right place at the right time. Enter Uber and lift. Okay. The conventional cabs fight like hell. They don't want Uber to lift on the scene. They want to crush them with a, you know, legislation in the city council and the like. And the result is we do not have an effective taxi cab fleet operating here. It's just really too bad. Because think of how much more efficient that is. Well, if you're going to go efficiency and sustainability in Tokyo, the cars, the taxis are kind of small, some of them are larger, but they're powered by natural gas. So they don't pollute. And so you can have a huge fleet of cars. But again, it's looking at the future of transportation. You have a easy to access mass transit system and a taxi cab fleet that's based on not on gasoline pollution polluting. But you have an interesting point. It's not integrated. You know, taxis are not integrated into the larger scheme of easy access to the politicians. Because when you're correct that the major use of taxis are at the airport, going from the airport to Waikiki and back again. And it's not used. It's just like a $50 ride by the way. But it's not used. It's world class. Short hops or business and so forth. Because if you go to San Francisco airport, you see many people taking boat to Union Square. But they have very small bags. They're there for business. Two nights, maybe three at very most. And then they go back and then take their bag with them. But here at the International Airport, you have families. You have like 10 people as a group coming in with grandpa and grandma aunts and cousins and so forth. They have to fit all their bags into large taxis and then move to Waikiki. Well, I mean, it's astounding how long you have to wait for a taxi out there. I mean, not too long ago I came back from a trip and waiting a long time. Like 20 minutes, maybe more than 20 minutes for a taxi. No city that I've been at lately makes you wait that long. So the guy drives up, we get in the cab and I say, gee, what happened here? Why we waited so long? He says, I don't know. I was right outside. They wouldn't let me come inside. He was waiting. He was waiting so we could wait. What kind of thing is that? What we have is a really inefficient system at the airport. And we don't have an efficient system, in my view, around the city. It could be a tremendous advantage in an array of transportation options, but it isn't. And then Uber and Lyft, you know, they are more efficient. They are cheaper by a substantial percentage. And we don't have them and they're being marginalized and pushed out. This is very sad. But there's good news, Ray. Right after this break, I'm going to tell you the good news and you're going to agree with me about the good news. All right. Hi, I'm Tim Appichella. I'm the host for Moving Hawaii Forward. And this show is dedicated to transportation and traffic issues in Oahu. We are all frustrated by sitting in our cars in bumper to bumper traffic. And this show is dedicated to talking with folks that not only we can define the problem, but we hopefully can come to the table with some solutions. So I invite you to join me every Tuesday at 12 noon. And let's move Hawaii forward. Aloha. I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii is my mainland every Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. I also have a blog of the same game at kauilukas.com, where you can see all of my past shows. Join me this Friday and every Friday at 3 p.m. Aloha. Bingo. We're back. The good news, Ray. Okay, go ahead. That's Ray Tsuchiyama, by the way. He's an informed citizen. We're talking about cars here in life after statehood. We're talking about all about cars. And our subtitle is Hawaii's most passionate affair, most passionate love affair with cars. Enter soon. And we had a show about this a couple of weeks ago, so I know a little about it. Right. Self-driving cars. Oh, yeah. Now one thing about Hawaii is we are a consumer state. Everybody thinks of consumer. You know, if a plane comes and drops it off, it's got to be good. That's not necessarily true. We don't make anything here, so we have to get things made from the outside. Great consumers. We work our tailbones off so we can be great consumers. Okay, the other thing we like is technology. We like to consume it, not make it, not design it, not make a living with it, but consume it. Okay. So enter the self-driving car. Okay. This is big. Okay. And we are the perfect place for it. I mean, really the question raised, you know, how come we haven't been involved in the laboratory of developing it? It's not here. My information is it's in Silicon Valley. That's where it's being developed. The big long drives out into the mountains and, you know, all over the place. Yeah. And that's where people are tolerant of it. You know, I mean, so there's an accident, they're not going to get a while. Right. And I think they'd be afraid that the lawyers will descend on any accident here and won't be so good for testing. And the police, by the way. Okay. So, but it will come. Oh, yes. It will come. It will come. It will come. It's tremendous advances. But remember what I said before the break. There haven't been advances on the car itself, but advances in sensors, software, and telecommunications. You see what I mean? Well, yeah, right. We're still stuck with a car that still gets barely 20 miles a gallon. It's kind of strange to kind of think. Silicon Valley has not applied all its energy on to making a better car. You see, they use a car made by Detroit still. See, and that's, I think, interesting insight to me because it is very hard to design a new engine from scratch. I mean, look at the battery. The batteries should be much better at this point. And there are battery cars like Tesla's and Prius' and rechargeable cars. But at this point, they should be way better batteries. But battery R&D never took off during the 70s and 80s because of the, again, the gas engine that overpowered everything. And that's a love affair. Yeah. I mean, you hear that roar that makes you think of your childhood. But going back to self-driving cars, you think that's a good thing for Hawaii? And why? Okay. You thought you'd stump me on that. You're raising the point. I'm trying to see where you're going with this because we agree that adding more cars, even if it's self-driving cars, is not changing the landscape of cars. Well, let me leave back up a little and talk about congestion. Okay. Because congestion, you know, makes me wild. I don't know about you. I used to sit there during Mofi Haneman's time when he was pushing on rail. And I guess every mayor since that has pushed on rail. And I say to myself, you know, rail's not going to help, not one bit. And is he doing anything for the congestion where I'm at, where I'm sitting in my parked on the freeway? And the answer is no. And every time you look, you know, you sit there, parked on the freeway, and you think, is anybody around here? Is there anybody fixing this? Is there anybody who cares about me sitting for hours on the freeway? Answer, no. I do not understand that. With a modern technology, we do not have traffic signals. So it has not been addressed. You can do much more efficient transportation in electric cars, because electric cars, they move along, right? They don't get stuck. And I think that's one element, one small element. With electric cars comes electronic sensors at the intersections and on the traffic lights. There's a bill in the ledge, by the way. I don't know what happened to it, to put, you know, traffic cameras on the red lights again, like the van cams, remember that? Anyway, so I think the technology will go hand in glove between the traffic signals, the timed lights, the electric cars. And for car riding, it'll be good. And we have a great place for it, because we should not be worrying about range anxiety, because we're too small for range anxiety. The longest trip is, what, 150 miles or so? So I think that's a good thing. And because people love cars, that's a good, you know, it's going to meet that demand, so to speak. I grant you that, you know, a properly designed mass transit system would be better. But I don't think that's in the cards, do you? It's a good question to be. Like I said before in the show, I'm all for mass transit. And I've been focused on at grade from a ministry, because it's a feta complete, you know, a couple of days to ministry. I'll tell you a short story. One quick short story. There was a thing in the paper two weeks ago after we spoke about this. And it was a picture, it was a photoshopped picture of a street. Right, right, right, you're right, they come in on a statue, right? Yeah, I think it was. And it was at grade with a very appealing picture of a train at grade, you know, coming right down the street. Just like Portland or anybody else. You know, but the funny thing is the thing looks just like a bus. Why do you, well, exactly do you achieve? It just looks just like a bus. I said, why can't that be a bus? Why can't we do that tomorrow with buses? Yeah. Good point. And if the bus system was so great, everybody should be riding it. Well, in order to change human conduct, you have to give incentives, you know, those incentives have happened, you know, through our civilized lifetimes, and you can incentivize against cars, you know, you tax them, you can incentivize in favor of bus, you can make it free. Until Billy Canoy got in trouble, well, until Billy Canoy's term, there was free bus rides on the big island. Wow, that's a good incentive right there. It was great. I loved it. You know, they didn't have to use the car. They didn't have to drive over the saddle road in the middle of the night and get in accidents and all this. So this was, this was a blessing. It was a major blessing. And now it's gone. I mean, we, we touched that. Well, it's too bad. Because you have to boost, you have to change, like you say, it's not a transportation issue. It's changing people's behavior issue or building an employment center in Kapolei. So they don't have to come to downtown or Waikiki to work. And you're absolutely right. It's again, you have to look at changing the patterns of people working or driving and or changing, making bike lanes accessible or teaching people. It's an education, a lot of information, or like you say, hitting people in the head with $8, $10 gallons of gasoline. That's, that's a distance. That's one right. Yeah, that's a distance of, or in Singapore. There's a building that led to that too, not, not, not taxes, you know, a lot of taxes. Or, or in Singapore, you're absolutely right. You have to pay in order to really enter the central business district, for example. And that's a great idea. And then you park and then it's a lot more money. Why can't we do that? Why doesn't you do that right now? It's very easy. It's very easy. And so there's ways to carpool, to take the bus, you know, or, you know, or, or, or to really establish centers of employment, you know, out in Waipahu, Pro City or Kapolei. I don't know why people have not, yeah, yeah. We haven't done that. So there's many areas where you can take and then have jobs. A lot of people want jobs out beyond Red Hill. Well, aside from the, you know, the fact that we could have planned and didn't plan and that we could now be planning and aren't, aside from that, I think it's, it's, it's this love affair. It's a passionate love affair. And it goes back to all these images. My mind, images, okay, after the war, they had a parade in Waikiki. It was memorialized on Color Film 1945, right? And, and there was this parade of cars that went through Waikiki in color, right? And all the girls with the lays and all Godly, and they were kissing all the soldiers and sailors, what have you. And it went on and on all day with everybody's car, okay? That's an image that sticks in your mind. And it's, it's love. It's, it's going out on dates. It's parking, watching submarine races. Well, again, you have, you know, what is no longer around but still part of that culture, wildlife drive-ins, the Leakey Leakey drive-ins, and you had, you know, roller skates. Yeah, you saw people on roller skates serving you your, right, hamburger and roller skates. I've been there. And, and, and so it was a car culture. I mean, in the 60s, 70s, I mean, you know, back in the old days, there were very few zippies, but there was one on, on King Street by Washington Intermediate. That's where we used to go and go round and round, you know, looking at people at BC, sure, in your car. So, so, but of course gas was quite cheap back then. But you're, you're correct, this obsession with cars and how they become part of your expression of yourself, your personality. That's where it goes. I'm a big guy. I'm a really big guy, you know. And you can afford $100, you know, per fill-up. That's where, but if you hit people over and over, but that's, again, when you do that, this incentive, people say you hit people with lower incomes, you see, who drive also their car. And, and the people who are wealthier don't care about spending $100 a fill-up and so forth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you have to find a way to do it up. And that's just, I mean, if you and I lock us in a room for about 20 minutes, we'd figure that out. I just think, I think the legislature and the city council, they are, they're, they're all fogged up about this because of that emotional relationship. And it's not only the relationship of the individual legislators, it's they're affected by the, you know, the, the passion of their constituents who don't want to really change this, who love, you know, love to have their pristine moment driving around with the air conditioner on and the radio and the television in the backseat and all the kids playing games. It's an American dream with the car. It's private, it's family. And again, in my father's day, they used to go all the time to Kihei while they were here. It's barely once a month now out to Alamona Park and, and, and try to find a parking space and try to find your playroom. And you're, and you're competing with many other people who want to go there more often from Kalihi or Moro Luo or out, out, you know, in Waipahu. And it's, it's, it's really hard now. It's really difficult to find that space with your brood or group. And the irony is that back in the day, getting off the plantation, coming into statehood, it was not an isolating feature, but a togetherness feature. The car was a social magnet. You know, you invite people in your car, you, you know, it was a place to gather and a place of gathering cars, you know, on Saturday night, what have you. But now it's an isolating feature, isn't it? That's correct. That's right. The neighborhoods are gone. All the little neighborhoods from Paowa, you know, they're like dinosaurs. You see, you see a world that's gone. Why, why, but there's someone coming back and so forth. But again, mass transit and trolleys could have retained all that after the war, but that's all gone to the car. Yeah. Yeah. So really, this is, it's, to me, this is really, really important. I mean, the social level that we get into mass transit, that we have tons of buses. And if you like grade, grail at grade, okay, that too. But mostly, you know, places where people rub shoulders. Like in Europe, that's what makes Europe so interesting, as people watching, as people touching each other. In Europe, of course, you know, when after work, you had a light meal or whatever, and you walked or saw a concert, you watch a, you know, you listen to a concert or see a movie, or you just walk and you meet other people and talk. And that's, that's what's missing about the dialogue of Hawaii today. And it's all like TV to you, and, you know, that's it. And then you listen by yourself, very nicely in your car, going to work and back. And that's how you receive the news. And it's not, it's not a part of a democratic institution. Yeah. So mass transit is more than just getting around using cars and not using cars, saving gas and not saving gas. Mass transit is remaking, should be remaking our society here. I guess you, I take your point on electric cars, because that's not necessary. That's also isolating. What we need to do is get together. We need to have a cohesive community. We're not going to achieve that until we get into mass transit and make it beautiful, make it world class. We don't even have it non-world class now. Well, there's a famous, well, people in regional planning say, a city that can't get bike lanes right is challenged by mass transit. Ray, it's wonderful to talk to you. I'd like to do this again and again. There are so many subjects and wrinkles and variations and themes we could talk about. We will, right? Okay. Thank you. Look forward to it. Thank you very much. Ray Tucciama.