 I'm Tim Apachele, your host for Moving Hawaii Forward. Each Tuesday, our show is dedicated at looking at traffic on Oahu and finding ways to both address it and hopefully solutions to improve it. One option to relieve traffic was a demonstration ferry project, the Department of Transportation Services, set up back in 2008. It was short-lived, however, there were and have been discussions about from a couple lawmakers that maybe another ferry could be put in service. I'm here with Stan Osserman, also known as Stan the Energy Man, who may have some ideas about ferries or potential involvement of alternative energy for this future concept. So with me today, Stan, thank you very much for coming on the show. Very much appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to some of your ideas about not only ferry service, but also alternative energy for other vehicles. So thank you. Good to be here, Tim. Yeah. Nice to finally meet you and congratulations on your show. Oh, appreciate it. It's been looking good so far, so I'm really impressed that we definitely need to be talking more about transportation. As you know, Blue Planet keeps giving Hawaii and Oahu a D-minus and D-plus area for transportation, and we're not doing too well in renewable transportation so far. So thanks for the help. Texas A&M, their traffic review for the nation puts so Honolulu about number seven. So we're always either six or seven, and that's not a good place to be when you're trying to attract tourists. Nope, sure not. Yeah. Dan, how did you get into the alternate energy business and how did you all start this? Well, I was actually working with a National Guard. I was an active duty officer, full-time officer, I should say, with the National Guard for the last 35 years, retired in 2014. But during that time, when I was a colonel, the governor wanted all the colonels in the Guard to facilitate anything that had to do with active duty projects, like Makua strikers or new flight patterns or whatever it was. Mine happened to be energy. So I was actually selected by the governor to work on energy projects with USPACOM and all the components here. So about 2005, 2006 forward, I was doing a lot of energy stuff between the military and the state of Hawaii, and that's how I got into energy overall. When I retired, the job at HCAT came open and had been open a while, and they were looking for someone that had my kind of background, so I jumped in there to run HCAT. Okay, so you are focusing mostly, though, if I'm not mistaken, on hydrogen energy and the application to the state. You're on the state task force, you had that up, right? Well, I'm the state hydrogen implementation coordinator. Right, okay. And that was put into law two years ago, and I'm going to be meeting this afternoon with DOT on some other initiatives on hydrogen in the transportation sector. But a lot of people think hydrogen is something separate from an electric vehicle, and actually one of the biggest points I'd like to make today is that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are electric vehicles. And electrification of the transportation sector is critical for us to meet our goals, our zero emission goals and our clean energy goals. And the hydrogen piece starts to feed back into the solving some of the grid's problems. So some of the things we could be doing to help transportation, i.e. fuel cell vehicles, could also be helping the Hawaiian electric folks with their grid stabilization and energy storage issues that they're going to have to look at as they absorb more and more renewable energy. Right, and the military is getting involved with alternate energy sources for their ships and vehicles and everything, if I'm not mistaken. Yes, they're very active nationwide. I understand the Navy is actually looking at biofuels. They've already done it. They've already done it, yeah. It's Air Force as well. As well. Yes. And so you're working with them as far as the application of hydrogen, or? Right, we're doing two major, we have two major focuses. We've started off in hydrogen with hydrogen vehicles. Currently, we also are doing a microgrid with the Hawaii Air National Guard out at Hickam where we'll demonstrate the wing, a flying wing, a fifth generation top of the line fighter wing can literally come off the grid if it needs to and function entirely off renewable sources for an indefinite period of time. And that may sound fairly common sense and straightforward, but it's never been done before. It's never been demonstrated, and as you know, what works good on paper doesn't always play out well in reality. But we've had some great engineers working on this and they're highly competent that it's gonna demonstrate something that the whole DOD would like to adopt. And for sure, the Air Force has said they want to try and look more seriously at it. Right, I have a friend who works with Cummins and their diesel engines, and things have come a long way over the years because biofuels were gonna be the savior for reduction of fuel consumption. And when it comes to certain technologies of diesel engines that just didn't quite come to save the day, but it's getting better and better as we progress through the years. And there's some great folks like Kelly King and the folks doing Pacific biodiesel that are working on it locally. And a lot of it has to do with, again, this is a holistic approach. When you start looking at biodiesel, you have to also look at agriculture because you're getting the feedstock from agriculture. Well, if you're growing crops just for fuel, maybe that's not as good as growing food and using the residual from that food crop, the stalks, the stems, the leaves to turn into fuel. And it's all got energy in it and most of it's even hydrogen that way. You get on both sides of the street, right? Okay, well, I wanted to talk about, you had mentioned some ideas to me off the show about how we could try to look at traffic issues on the east side of being, excuse me, the west side of say the Ave couple A area. And I'd be interested to kind of follow up on that with you. Sure. Well, I've had a lot of interface with DOT and some folks at Pearl Harbor that are frustrated when it takes so long to get from West O'ahu and even as far as the stadium area in Pearl Harbor Hickam for their folks. And they've always looked for ways to reduce the travel time, the transit time, and reduce the cost even if they can. And we've looked at just all kinds of things. They used to have small little shuttle cruisers that went in Pearl Harbor that could take care of some of the folks that worked for the Navy inside Pearl Harbor at Fort Island or a Navy base proper. But most of those have kind of stopped either from lack of use or whatever. But with traffic, it's always, it's like supply and demand. The worse the traffic gets, the more people are willing to look at alternatives. I think we've almost reached that tipping point where people are just so fed up with sitting in traffic for an hour and a half on a bad day and at 45 minutes on a good day maybe, that it's worth looking at some alternative answers. And one of the things that we have to understand is that not everybody can own a car or should own a car or wants to own a car. But public transportation is not a moneymaker. It's something that the state has to commit to and say, hey, we understand that we're gonna have to pay a bill here, but it's for the greater good. It's to get people more productive or to make more jobs. I mean, if there's more jobs and more production, then there's more tax revenues and it pays for itself. So just to hit on that point, Stan, DTS, which is the bus, their subsidies are 176 million, okay? So even with the best transit systems in the country, the best they're pulling off the fare box is about 19 to 20 cents. Maybe it's a little bit better nowadays, but maybe it's around 20, 21 cents, but that leaves an 80 cent off the dollar deficit for each and every person that gets on that bus. Like I say, it's not a moneymaker. And anybody that goes and thinking it could be or gets sold that it can be, that's a tough case. Okay, well, let's talk a little bit more about your idea about how this might work. Okay, well, one of the things that I can tell you is that transportation is always, in a business sense, it's always a lose. If you can cut transportation logistics costs, you're getting way ahead. And most of the folks like Amazon and folks like FedEx and UPS, they get it. They understand that if you can make things more efficient, they've got it down. So how do you move the most people, the fastest? Well, first of all, you try and shorten the distance, if you can. You try and put the most people on a single vehicle, get an efficient vehicle, try and do that. But we're kind of out of space and out of ideas when it comes to West Oahu. But when you really look at some of the terrain and look at the possibilities, you mentioned in your intro that we've tried a ferry before from West Oahu to downtown and that wasn't really successful. Well, did we shorten the distance? No. Did we make it more convenient? Maybe when it was working. But when it didn't work, you were screwed. And then you had to be out in the ocean. Well, I'm a fisherman. I've designed boats and built boats. And my son and I have fished for over 25 years. And the Hawaiian Ocean is nothing to fool with. You get outside the reef. You're in serious Hawaiian waters that'll take a big boat and make it real uncomfortable at best. It could even be dangerous. And during that demonstration, the duration was a full one hour. Right? Did it save you time? That's enough time to get you green in the gills, so to speak. Yeah, if you're prone to seasickness, that's just another thing added to it. Did it save time? Okay, that's a great question. And I want to address that because I had last week two guests on. They were both commuters. One gentleman, I think he woke up at 3.30 in the morning so he can be at work at seven. He had a solid two hour one-way commute into town. And the other gentleman, he woke up at 5.30 just so he can get to Pearl. And so what was fascinating though is I asked him the question about what do you do when you're in bumper to bumper? I mean, how do you feel that time? And it's a stressful, it has to be stressful. And the gentleman that went to Pearl Harbor said the following. You assume that it's relaxing because you have the music on but you're not relaxed. You're in a constant state of trying to be alert so you don't get into a fender bender. So you're never in a state of relaxation. Whereas to address your comment, if you're on a ferry for an hour, you actually can relax. You can read the paper. You can take a nap before you go into work. That can be said for any kind of public transportation. People on the bus will read, listen to books on tape. I lived in Washington, DC for a summer. People on the Metro there are, they can actually sit down and start work. They can start working. They can work on their laptops. They can do a lot of things. You can't do it when you gotta pay attention to the road. I mean, if you're not paying attention here, you're part of the problem causing accidents that make the commute even slower. That's correct. So, you know, duration, comparing duration is a valid point, but I think there's a state of relaxation that you get to enjoy on one mode versus you're being a single occupancy vehicle driver. So that's why I think the ferry is still a very viable idea and a good concept. And we'll talk a little bit about how the project was set up to begin with and the expectations of what was a viable success. And I think sometimes transit agencies tend to set the bar a little too high. And then after a year's demonstration project, they said, well, we didn't hit our numbers, we weren't even close to the numbers, and therefore this demo didn't work, and we're not gonna do it again. So we'll talk a little bit about that with the ferry project that was back in 2008, but go ahead, I'm sorry, I didn't take you off track here. Yeah, so for what I'm proposing or what I'd like to propose is that we look at express buses on a ferry. Not individual cars on a ferry, but express buses. And I don't know if the producers can throw up any of the slides I've got, but if we can pull one up there. This is actually one of the, this is the end state. This is the trip across Pearl Harbor, as I envision it, and being a military guy, I'm fairly familiar. In fact, if you look at the right-hand side where that red line ends, that's where my hydrogen station is essentially, so I'm very familiar with that corner. But what I've done is drawn a line from a formerly used part of Iroquo Point, which is basically abandoned and owned by the Navy right now with a perfectly good landing site for ferry boats that could make a very short commute inside Pearl Harbor across the Channel, which is maybe 500 yards. I mean, it's almost like a bridge makes more sense except you can't put a bridge there. And if you use the express buses and you put people in express buses, maybe you had a big parking lot. One of my other shots actually spans out a little bit. You can actually see where you could park cars on the right-hand side there where you could actually park some vehicles. I outlined it in black. Is that in black, okay? Yeah, and that's all Navy slash state land that's not currently occupied by the Pulao Rifle Range or any of the housing in Iroquo Point. It's just old weapon storage area that's been abandoned and could be used for mass parking and shuttle buses. I don't know how many acres it is, but I would imagine it's probably at least 100 to 150 acres. It's a lot of area. That's a lot of area. You could put PVN to cover parking. You could put a bus depot in there. And on the left, if you look farther to the left at Kalailoa, that's also state land that's turned over from the Navy or in the process of being turned over from the Navy that could be used also for parking and the buses could start there. And there's several routes that could get you from there to that drop off point for the ferry to go across that short channel. And again, that does shorten the commute which is part of the key. And it also keeps it in the calm water of Pearl Harbor Channel. You can schedule it, you can put a controller there that makes sure that you de-conflict ships coming in and ships do come in and out of Pearl Harbor quite often but it's not constant and you could definitely synchronize the ships. Okay, well, I'm gonna ask a couple of questions about that when we come back from our commercial break. So, this is Tim Mappichella, we'll be right back. Aloha, this is Kelea Akina with the weekly Ehana Kakao. Let's work together program on the Think Tech Hawaii broadcast network, Mondays at two o'clock PM, movers and shakers and great ideas. Join us, we'll see you then, aloha. Aloha and happy new year, it's 2017. Please keep up with me on Power Up Hawaii where Hawaii comes together to talk about a clean and just energy future. Please join me on Tuesdays at one o'clock. Mahalo. Aloha, I am Reg Baker and I am the host of Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We broadcast live every Thursday from two to 230 in the Think Tech studios in downtown Alululu. We highlight successful stories about businesses and individuals and learn their secrets to success. I hope you can join us on our next show on Thursday at two o'clock. Until then, aloha. Welcome back, I'm Tim Appachell. This is Moving Hawaii Forward. My guest this afternoon is Stan Osterman and we're talking about the ferry and we're talking about the viability of maybe another ferry could be implemented and we could try to move people from the Ewa area or the Iroquois Point to Pearl Harbor area. Stan, thanks. Thanks, Tim. And yeah, when we left off, we were talking express buses and you could also put some passengers on their military passengers that if they had a military ID, when they get to the other side on Hickam and Pearl Harbor, they could show their ID and get off the ferry, but the rest of the folks have to stay on the bus and then the bus would route itself straight to the freeway, counterflow to the traffic coming in to Pearl Harbor and Hickam. So it would actually be counterflow already. You wouldn't have to do any special coning or anything. It's a fairly short and a straight route that we already know the articulated buses can make. Well, I think we have a photo of that harbor. So let's take a look at that. There you go. That yellow line there depicts the actual route on the right-hand side of getting to the freeway through Hickam Air Force Base. And on the left-hand side, just shows some of the feeders that go into that area that's abandoned by the Navy right now are not used particularly by the Navy on the south side of their storage areas that could be used for parking lots, maybe parking lots with PV on top, parking vehicles, charging vehicles, shuttling buses across on the ferry. Interesting. And so you could have a morning commute that maybe starts at 4.30 or 5.00 a.m., starts moving across the harbor and then stops at 7.00 or 8.00 a.m. and then starts up again in the afternoon going the other direction, maybe even opening it up to POVs or private vehicles during the middle of the day instead of just the covered city buses. How many buses can you do in vision that could fit on the ferry? I'm looking at between four and six articulated buses on a single ferry. So it'd be really big. That's about 80 people. If it's a full, full bus, it's about 80 folks. So you'd have to really sit down and look at the infrastructure first and then the design of the ships, the ferries that you'd put into place, maybe see if there's something already built that would suit the need and would work and we could get at a reasonable price and look at the price. If you have to start a design from scratch, that's probably gonna be pretty prohibitive. But I mean, I'd say we have the variety of buses. If an articulated bus won't fit, maybe regular 40-footers would work fine. And you just start working with what you can afford and try it out and make sure that it runs right and it works and if it does expand it, if it doesn't, you really have a huge investment. Well, obviously you have a military employer that would be very interested in getting their workers there on time. That's the fed side. And the last demonstration project was between the city and the fed. They split that cost equally. And so maybe there is an opportunity for the feds to say, we're willing to try another demonstration project. I think so and I think people underestimate the great relationship that the military has with the city and the state here in Hawaii. Across the whole island chain, the military has been great stewards of the land and they've really tried hard and I can tell you the leadership in the military really tries hard to work well with the state and the folks at the Chamber of Commerce and the state. They really work hard to make the military feel welcome. And the military is a huge part of our economy here. So it's a win-win-win. If we just sit down, put our heads together and say, hey, can we try this and how do we make it happen? Well, that's a good point, Stan. And that is, can we try this? But I think, and I think you pointed out very well that the other ferry project, demonstration project, probably didn't work. The ridership didn't happen for a variety of reasons. One could be it was just too rough. I don't know. I never wrote it, I just never wrote that particular ferry. And so the question is expectations of what's success? How do you look at success? And if you do obtain success, how do you fund it for years to come? But here's an example where expectations are created for a demonstration project, but not necessarily realistic. So back in 2008, before they put that ferry into place, again, it went from Barbers Point to Aloha Tower, Pier 9 on Aloha Tower, right? Pier 9 in Aloha Tower area. And so they estimated they were gonna take 400 cars off the road. Doesn't sound like a lot, but 400 is better than nothing. And so when I did some digging though, I mean, each, the boat that was used had a capacity of 150 people. And there was only three trips in the morning. There would be a responding three trips. Yeah, return trips. So you take 150 times three trips, that's 450 maximum capacity. They were estimating 400. Okay, so that tells me that they thought they were gonna get ridership well above 80, 90%. And that doesn't happen. It takes years to grow ridership, be it a new route on a bus, be it, I used to write a water taxi from West Seattle to downtown Seattle. And it took years to get the ridership up where people could depend on the boat. It was on time. And it took at least three years for people to feel comfortable. So the point is a demonstration project maybe should be more than one year, to see how do you tweak it left, how do you tweak it right to get the right mix so that this thing can be successful. Exactly, and I think scaling is part of that. You know, it's like the problem we have with hydrogen right now. How do you get it on the road in transportation? Well, where do you start? It's gonna start small and it's gonna have to grow. Some things scale well, some things don't. This kind of project could scale pretty well. If you made one investment in one ferry that could move four 40 foot buses, which would be kind of on the low end. You talked about it with 80 people per bus. About an hour to articulate it. An hour to articulate a bus. Max, max. Let's go with maybe 50 people on a 40 foot bus, including people standing up. You got four buses, that's 200 people right there. Right, on one trip. We start off, yeah, on one trip. And they're making, from that short distance, that's probably a 10 minute drive. And that includes docking on both ends. It's like almost longer to try and dock on either end than the whole trip, than the transit itself. So you think the shortest interval would be about 30 minutes at best? I would think that that would probably be the longest interval. The longest, yeah. But you know, you've done, you know, 50 to 20 minutes, I think. To get across the channel is literally five minutes. It's gonna be positioning the ferry into docket and do it safely. And maybe having to wait for a ship to clear the channel before you can cross, those kind of delays would increase the time. But again, that's- Are those facilities there now? Are they all set and ready to go? Well, what's interesting is the, and Zuri just put up the images again, on the right hand side there, that whole landing is actually completely unused. It's an old landing for ships and offloading like the big cargo ships and things. But totally unused, has a fairly large parking lot. I would say 300 feet by 1,000 feet in front of it, which could be used for maneuvering the buses around and getting them in and out of there in the afternoon. To the right of it is a wastewater treatment plant. So it's not going anywhere. And it's not a facility that has a lot of vehicles and stuff moving in and out. And to the left is where the army puts their ships that do transport. So that area is already taken up. But that area where the red line ends on the right is pretty much unused. The one on the left, special ops uses it from time to time for training. It was put there originally for onloading and offloading munitions. And all those little pads you see in the green area to the left, they're basically empty concrete pads. So it's almost all ready to go, almost. There's gonna have to be an investment there, but it's not $800 million or anything close to what we're spending on some of the other alternatives that we're looking at. So I think if we scaled it small enough, started it off, like you say, give the ridership a chance, give the confidence in the system a chance to prove itself and have people like go park down there, jump across, get over there, be in downtown quick. Let me ask you the correlation between start times at the base versus where the gridlock actually begins on H1. So what are the starting times, do you think? Well, Pearl Harbor Shipyard actually starts fairly early. Those folks are in 5.30. In fact, probably the harbor picture that we had up there, I can actually point to the areas, my son works in the shipyard. They have to park like a half mile away from where they're working. I mean, when you look at the shipyard is just on the north side of Hickam, so it's about the top 30 or picture, that whole part of Hickam is the shipyard. And if you look for the big parking lots, they're a quarter mile or a half mile away from where most of the guys have to work. So if you had a shuttle bus that went on the ferry from West Oahu that was on with the other buses, that was just servicing Hickam. And the people showed their shipyard ID when they got on the shuttle bus and it went straight there. Those folks wouldn't have to drive in and out of Hickam and they could probably start their typical time and decrease the traffic that starts at four and five a.m. from West Oahu. Likewise, I've actually been approached by some of the contractors for Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam to do shuttles on Hickam and Fort Island. Again, that use like the boats that aren't used by Arizona memorial tours to shuttle people more like the old. That would be a fascinating perspective because here's the problem when you get to with the Department of Transportation Services. You're basically trying to, you call it an express bus, but what the transit people call it is a custom bus. And the problem with a custom bus is that it's geared towards a specific targeted employee base. And what they want for recovery, believe it or not, is 100% of operational costs. Now remember, I said all your other regular buses are getting luck at best maybe 19, 20 cents on the dollar. But because it's a specialized bus, they want 100 cents on the dollar, which makes it really, really difficult. Well, that necessarily isn't realistic. So I mean, if you just have to make a point to them that for this experiment, try it. Well, and here's how we got it. I mean, we ran a number of custom buses to the Boeing Corporation. They had their main plan up in Everett, Washington, and we would go from South County all the way up to Everett, Washington. And what would happen is you look at what the revenue was recovered from those who wrote it, but that differential, the Boeing company actually would pay for it. Exactly, and that's how you do it. The Pentagon works the same way, by the way. It's a federal agency. But if you work in the Pentagon and you agree to take public transportation, they give you an annual pass for the whole trip. So if you're looking for that kind of return and the government's willing to say, yeah, we're employers of X number of people out here and it's worth our effort to tell them that's how those things work. That's the kind of effort you need to make. Well, Stan, what I love about this show is I have guests that come on that bring new innovative ideas, things that haven't been really thought about or they've been tried. You know, here's a new way of trying something new. And rather than just sit and gridlock and just be frustrated, we're bringing solutions to the table and I can't thank you enough for bringing your solution to this table. And I think it's a topic worth of discussion in the future. And I'll be glad to come back and talk about how we'll implement it. Okay, good. All right, well, that's our show for this week. I'm Tim Appichella and this is Hawaii Moving Forward and come back next Tuesday and we'll talk to you again. Thank you.