 ThinkTecAway, civil engagement lives here. Aloha. I'm your host, Winston Welch, and I am delighted you are joining us again today for an exciting and new episode of Out and About, a show where we explore a variety of topics, organizations, and events with the people who fuel them in our city, state, country, and world. As a disclaimer, any views or opinions expressed by me are strictly my own or a voice in my head and not connected with any organization. I might be associated with. That said, I am delighted today to have joining me in the studio Nina Pfaffenbach, a Realtor at Landmark Real Estate, and Dr. Brian Bagnall, President of the Greater Waikiki Branch of the Outdoor Circle, on a discussion about livability in Honolulu. So with that, welcome to the show, and thanks for being my guest today. Pleasure. Thank you. So this topic of livability is, I think, becoming a lot more relevant as we are maturing around the world, and I feel like we can see how different cities are livable very transparently and easily according to different things. But the metric that we're going to start with today is one that you had shared, which was from the Economist magazine that talked about Honolulu. And so can you tell us what did they say about Honolulu and livability? Well, the Economist is a business magazine, or newspaper they call themselves. And then they also have an Economist Intelligence Unit, and every year they assess like 185 cities around the world. And I think it's geared for business people, expatriates, but it gets a lot of attention. And so they, for many years, listed Melbourne, Australia as number one, and Vienna number two. This year they switched around. They said Vienna was the most livable city in the world, and Melbourne second. But the surprising news was Honolulu, and I think you can see it on the first graphic here. Oh, our first graphic. It is the most livable city in America. Now, the interesting thing is that you see livables spelt with an E there. And so if you're in England or Australia, something they normally put an E, if you type livable like that in the US, it'll auto correct to without the E. Yeah. It's a crazy spelling because that looks, it looks right. It looks wrong. Maybe because I've lived overseas and was with so many other native English professors. I prefer the E, but I'm getting used to it without it. Well, yes, I suppose we have to, but they said it's the best one in America. Well, I think that's what's so surprising that they listed the 23rd most livable city in the world, Honolulu, and then it was the most livable in the US. So we've got 23 other cities around the world that are higher rank than any other city in the United States. Yes. And we, however, we come in at number 25. So we obviously have some very good, strong points about our city and a lot of those points that you end up selling as a realtor, I think, to either foreign investors or perhaps people coming from the mainland or just people that already live here and know that it is a wonderful city. It's very easy for us to focus on things that may not be right or things we want to improve and that is a never-ending task, and we should always be that way because we should always want a better environment for us and those that come behind us to live in. So what do people tell you when they come to you as a realtor that are looking for property here that may not have grown up here? Many times it's the people, the people of Hawaii. The Aloha spirit is alive and well, really, and so people from the larger cities on the mainland, they come here and they feel instantaneously relaxed. I can see it just within a number of days when I start working with them. Maybe a week goes by, their shoulders are relaxed, the cap goes on backwards, they've got some sand in their feet, and they feel really good about being on a wahoo. That's an interesting thing because it doesn't make it into this livability index. I don't think friendliness of locals is counted by the economist and it's maybe geared more towards when they're looking towards sending an executive to a city and they say, oh, well look, you get to go to Vienna, so it doesn't get better than this. But the Aloha spirit is actually one of those things that does make a place very livable even despite high costs or traffic or the other things that might be a little bit... Absolutely. Well, for traffic, particularly, our traffic is not as bad as it is in some other cities on the mainland, surprisingly. It's difficult for us here, but when working with people from Chicago or New York, for example, or LA, they have a very different idea about traffic. Yeah, Seattle was terrible traffic too. They're only this big, so it's a little bit easier, but I have had colleagues that worked in Waikiki and they were out on the west side and sometimes it would take them two or two and a half hours, but they, I guess, arrived with Aloha, but it's true. People do say it's different here. People are nicer here. So my experience, I've only been on the island for four years and when I first came here, the thing that most impressed me is that there are no billboards and very few outdoor advertising signs. Why is that? Well, that's because the amazing founders of the Outdoor Circle worked for, what, 10 years to get those regulations and to shut that billboard company down, so it was a very hard-earned success. But when you come here, so Nina's saying it's the people, it's also you look and you don't see this oppressive advertising, which you do where I came from in Florida, flashing signs, billboards, and I think those things really interfere with the Aloha spirit because they're aggressive and they affect your brain and we don't have that here. And so to me, the beauty of having no billboards and limited outdoor advertising is a major plus. Visual blight, we can call it. Visual blight. And so in that case, it's a lack of something that's not in this report. It's a lack of visual blight, whereas Aloha spirit, it's not included in this report because they don't count the friendly nature, the welcoming nature of the islands. I often hear that when people say, you know, in working in the tourism industry, and then they say, oh, people are so nice here. And then I thought, are we really nicer or are you just on vacation and you think we're nicer? But maybe we're nicer. But every time that I come back and the plane lands in Honolulu, I do have a palpable sense of, oh, I'm back. It's a wonderful place to live. And it is a wonderful place to live. This island is incredibly beautiful. I'm not even sure that beauty factors into their report either. Was beauty one of the categories? Actually, it might be interesting to talk about those categories. We could write our own criteria for US cities. And we'd still come out number one, I think. We'd come out number one in the whole of the US again. Well, yes. And there's some other competitors that might beg to different say, no, we're number one. I think Portland or something might pop up on there. But certainly, when people think of Hawaii, they think it's the perfect place to live. And only a million of us get to live on this island. But for the purposes of this one, they calculated stability, how scary is it, how violent is it, which obviously we're the safest city in America. Health care, they say, how is the quality of health care? How's the availability, the culture, and the environment? Which they include things like food and drink and level of sporting things and censorship and those sorts of things, which we don't naturally think of. But it's interesting. And temperature rating, which is perfect here most of the year, as well as education. Now they say availability of private education. And I think we rank highest in the number of students that go to private education in the country, don't we? I didn't know that. I think we may. It's something very high. And then the last one is infrastructure. Telecommunications road, public transport. And we probably have, I think, one of the highest percentages of users of public transport in the country. And a very good bus system. A nationally recognized, or internationally recognized, good bus system. A very good bus system. And for seniors, it's an incredibly low pass. It's about $65 a year or something. Yeah, if it's even that much. Yeah, my personal feeling is it should be free if it's public transport and just tax the rest of us, pay some more of that. So when we're looking at issues of livability, though, obviously, we have some things that were left out of this particular survey, like visual blight, which increases our livability, and other things that weren't included like Aloha. But what are some things when you're looking at this and thinking, OK, we're livable, but we've got some challenges to make us more livable? Well, I think the thing that I notice, and Nina's working with us every day, is that we're becoming a high-density urban city, at least Honolulu is, Honolulu Waikiki. So you see, and this has all happened very quickly. And so particularly around here, there's towers going up every day, and that is changing the way we live. And I think we can maybe look at some of the challenges of being in a high-density urban community, like issues like noise and ability to go walking and things like that. So I think the Aloha spirit and the nice people and the lack of billboards and advertising, now we've got some new issues, and that is live in with all this high-density thing. Are we going to cope with that? And are we coping with it? Well, maybe we'll talk a little bit more about noise, because that's the one issue that I think is aggravating people is street noise. And as well as that airplane noise, it's a military island, so we've got helicopters and things. But the number one thing, if you go to the neighborhood board meetings, is street noise. And we can talk a little bit more about that. Street noise. And we do have a lot of noise here. And probably you were just recently in Vienna, and were telling me that the noise level is palpably different. And why is that? Well, I did some research. And the buses and the trucks and the cars there are less noisy. There are EU regulations on how much noise your motor can make. And so if you look at the buses going down the streets here, they're noisy. And in Vienna, they were quiet. And as well as that, trucks here give off a tremendous motor noise. And in Vienna, they were much quieter. So I think some of it is built into, and this is going on over a period of 15 or 20 years, making the vehicles less noisy themselves. And then as well as that, after 10 o'clock at night, you just don't make noises, including the emergency services. They just use their lights. You mean the public's servants, like an ambulance or a fire engine? Fire engine, yeah. After 10 o'clock at night, unless it be a real emergency, they just use their lights. So these noisy buses and street trams and that sort of thing, or that we have here, why are they not noisy there? Are they using some technology from the future that we haven't invented yet here? I think they've done it over a period of maybe more than 20 years, saying in the next 10 years, we want to make sure when you're building trucks or buses, that you build in sound suppression things in them. Interesting enough, the cars that we drive here in Honolulu have got quieter. Remember in the old days, they were kind of noisy. Now, you don't hear much from the cars. Their engines are much quieter. And I think that's probably national regulations for that. But trucks and buses are very noisy here. It's interesting that you mentioned about cars getting quieter, because some of these electric cars now are so quiet that it's a problem for visually impaired people, because they can't hear them. So they're talking about putting in a little sort of clicking device or something to alert people that may be visually impaired that there's a vehicle on the road. So it's interesting. That brings me to another point that we have very high rate of pedestrian fatalities here and bicycle accidents, head and shoulders above our next nearest competitor. So that makes it a little bit less livable when we can't, when we're unfortunately hitting a lot of people, whether it's the pedestrian's fault, the driver's fault, the conditions of the road, some distracted driving, some combination thereof. So I always tell people, look both ways. See the driver's eyes. Put up your hand. Yes. And tell them to stop before you cross the street. And don't assume that they're going to stop, is the way I say it. And it's important in Waikiki with the Bikibikes. Many people are riding on the sidewalks and just go right across the crosswalk. So not only do you have to look both ways as a driver, which I am very often, but you also have to look behind you to check the sidewalk to make sure that there's a bicyclist not coming across. As oftentimes, they don't stop. Especially with the new bike lanes, where you have people going both ways. You might be turning left on King. And then you realize, oh, people might be coming behind me or in front of me, as well as all the other confusing conditions out there. And then there's also the case of people riding the bikes on the wrong side of the road going against traffic, because that's maybe the way they do it, where they're from. And that feels safer, along with walking. We have a break coming up here. But after our break, I wanted to have a sample of noise, because I'm not sure that our individual vehicle noise is going down, because sometimes these motorcycles that have these noise amplifiers or cars that have noise amplifiers on them, it's a part of my crusade against sociopathism, which I think is infected our society, where people are putting these on, especially to make noise. We can talk after the break about what happened yesterday. The biggest bike parade on the island occurred yesterday, right through Waikiki. OK, and you have a special sound-o meter that will play us back some noise, for those of you that don't know, we do suffer from some noise. And it is probably the number one complaint at the neighborhood board, consistently, is noise. And what can we do about it? So we are going to take a short break. I'm Winston Welch. This is out and about on the Think Tech Live streaming network series, where you always learn great things. We're talking with Nina Pfaffenbach, I'm sorry, a realtor at Landmark Real Estate, which is in that great building in Waikiki, and Dr. Brian Bagnell, president of the Greater Waikiki Branch of the Outdoor Circle, a 107-year-old organization that has done so much good for this island. We're talking about livability in Honolulu, and we'll be back in a minute. So stay tuned for more of the story. Aloha. I'm Wendy Lo, and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body, and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha. And aloha. My name is Calvin Griffin, host of Hawaiian Uniform. And every Friday at 11 o'clock here on Think Tech Hawaii, we bring in the latest on what's happening within the military community. And we also invite your response to things that's happening here. For those of you who haven't seen the program before, again, we invite your participation. We're here to give information, not disinformation. And we always enjoy response from the public. But join us here, Hawaiian Uniform, Friday's 11 a.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii, aloha. Aloha, we are back and we're live. I'm Winston Welch, and this is Out and About on the Think Tech Live Streaming Network series. We are talking with Naina Fafenbach, Realtor at Landmark Real Estate in the Great Landmark Building, and Dr. Brian Bagnall, President of the Greater Waikiki Branch of the Outdoor Circle. So if they want to find out more information about the Outdoor Circle, where would they find that about your branch? WaikikiOutdoorCircle.org, we've got a great website. WaikikiOutdoorCircle.org. And what's on your website? Everything, everything. Maps, walking, trees, newsletter. It's really quite a lot of fun. You've got the Waikiki Whisperer on there. That's a little subversive newsletter, yes. Okay, and you bring up issues, germane to Waikiki and the Greater Waikiki Area. And you have beautiful walking tours on there. Trees and maps and things like that. So it's really quite comprehensive, as well as some historical information. Okay, so people are interested in helping you out or perhaps joining or making some other walking paths or want to bring up some topics like noise or light pollution or whatever your topics are. Because Waikiki is so special to the whole of Hawaii and the big tourism thing, that it's a very special place. And so it's a little bit more than rakes and pruning trees and everything. You've got a lot of urban issues as well. I think when the Outdoor Circle has a long history of tackling these issues of 107 years where it's mission to keep Hawaii clean, green, and beautiful and branches all across the islands that have their own different areas of import of what they want to do. And yours is the only urban branch. So you're focusing on other issues, especially like noise. Yeah, and we're new and we're evolving, so I think. So I'd like to give you a little taste of what the noise is like in Waikiki. Okay, yeah, that is fine. Let's go for it. Fire brigade, their homes and their siren. And where was that taken? This was locally. Was that just at the base of your house or just on the street? But I'm trying to find the motorbike. Oh, this was the parade. I think you get the picture. For our few of us at home, though, that would be like a fourth of the actual sound that we hear live. And, you know, so that was a Toys for Tots motorbike parade. So there was a good purpose to it. And it's, as some people might say, oh, it's jet noise, it's the sound of freedom, motorcycle noise, and the apple fires, it's also the sound of freedom. It may be said that, but for many people, especially I know of, or the Waikiki, Diamondhead, Kahala, East Hawaii, the airplanes going overhead is a major source of complaints and noise because they have, and they could just say you have to fly out over the water rather than over the homes, but in fact, I think we're getting a lot, a lot more noise, and you've done some research about noise and its effect on our health. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, I have a personal experience. Actually, I live in an older single-wall construction home in East Oahu, and my neighbor recently installed a machine that was continually running 24 hours a day, and he put it outside of his home, so it was very obvious to us in our home. Adjacent to your home. Yes, very close. And so we discussed it with the neighbor first. Many people, however, may not have that option, but we then called the Department of Health to have them come out and study the machine and see what kind of decibels that it was emitting, and they came right out. Within the first phone call, the Department of Health set up an appointment with both myself and our neighbor and came out and did a reading. And fortunately, the person was told that they cannot run it after 10 p.m., so we have some relief. I didn't realize, so the Department of Health actually somehow regulates noise here? It's very interesting if you look at noise in the various categories of it. I think the first thing is that people recognize all around the world that noise is primarily a health issue. It really affects our livability, and so you can lose sleep, you can become agitated. Sanity, yes. There's a lot of, it's not just an annoyance, it's a health issue. And so in many places, the Department of Health plays a major role in regulating that. However, on this island, street noise from motor vehicles and everything, there are all these laws passed about not having noisy mufflers and blah, blah, but none of them are being enforced. And so that's the dilemma. You've got all these different categories of noise and they're not being enforced. The Department of Health is doing a great job. Yes. My hypothesis would be, wouldn't it be great if the Department of Health became the noise zahs of this island and said, we're gonna take control of all noise? That's a wonderful idea because we do, you know, when we get the neighborhood board reports and I don't know, in the Kapa Hulu Diamondhead, St. Louis Heights, they'll say they had 6,000 calls to 911, something. Yes. One report of noise or one citation for noise. So what happened recently, there were statistics about how many citations for jaywalking there had been, thousands of them, quite expensive, 130 bucks a part. Is that all? Okay. And if you look at the number of citations for noisy vehicles or motorbikes, virtually none. How is that possible? We have to register our vehicles every year. If you have an illegal, if your windows are too dark, they will not give you a safety check. If you have that noise maker on there, maybe it's not considered a safety concern, so they let it slide. I'm not sure, but how hard would it be to tack on something on there that just says, this is, sorry, sociopathic behavior and, or maybe there could be a place where you could snap it on like at a racetrack or something and then enjoy your noise, or maybe you could make it a virtual noise system where it's just in headphones as you're driving. So you could be the one that enjoyed it and not have everyone else enjoy that noise. I think what we're beginning to learn is that this is a very profitable industry on this island for people who sell all these aftermarket things. They're advertising in the automotive magazines and everything like that. And they are making a lot of money selling all these things to people. And they're even willing to put like a $10,000 music system in a car that's worth 500 bucks. And so it's become like a cult. I'm gonna make as much noise as I want and we need some psychiatrists, I think. Well, it is, it's part, I think, part and parcel of this sort of sociopathic behavior that we've witnessed over growing, over time, where people just don't hear. And it goes against the Aloha Spirits. I mean, it does. I hear we have this wonderful Aloha spirit of being careful so people can have calm and peaceful lives and yet this just flies in the face of it and I don't understand it. Why do they want to do this? What experience did you have, Nina, when you were, when this machine was making noise? Were you sad or were you angry? Frustrated. Frustrated. We were extremely frustrated because it's something that unless we closed all of our jealousies and closed our sliding glass doors and brought in air conditioning, that would be the only way we could live. And then you'd have the noise of the air conditioner. And so for those that don't know it, a single wall construction means literally one piece of half inch wood and then the windows are built sort of on top of it. But it's literally a piece of wood. There's no insulation or anything like that. Which leads us to talk about the fact that most people on this island live with louvered windows and fresh breezes blowing through. And so the noise just comes straight through. So jealousies are these things where you folks on the mainland that you slide open and then the wind goes through because, well, if it gets cold here, it's what, under 70? Yeah, 68, yeah, different stocks. What I remember, a few years ago there was a, it went to 58, which freakishly though, and they issued hypothermia warnings on that TV. So we're very vulnerable to the noise by the way people live. And then that leads to a topic for another day and that is light. With all this new LED lighting, people are complaining not only about the noise coming into their apartments, but the light. Because we should have a right to quiet and dark. And darkness, because that also affects our health. It affects the birds, it affects the, marine mammals, astronomy, the telescopes. So when you felt this, and did you get a good resolution with your neighbor? Or was he or she mad or? Well, at first they didn't want to make any changes. So that's why I went the next step and called the Department of Health. So that at least we could have the record that we made a report. So it's a formal report and it's on record and the fact that they are only allowed to have it running until 10 p.m. from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Does that still make you crazy? Just having it on all day like that? You know, we just have to all get along with our neighbor, so it's going to be an ongoing conversation, but we're fortunate that we can converse with our neighbors. Many people can't. They feel intimidated or are uncertain. So it's good to know that there is some relief through the Department of Health. Well, and we do have neutral arbiters for that and they were able to say, yes, this is a violation of these people's health next door because it does affect your health properly. Your blood pressure was going up, you were stressing about it, maybe not sleeping well. Talking about it and all of that, but I think the first thing is to go to someone and say, hey, can you help me here? That's always the best policy. Always the best way and then if you can't get resolution, but I think here in Hawaii people are trying to be sensitive of that because we do live cheek to jowl here. We do. And so it's very important that we keep up that respect of each other and our neighbors. So if you're out there and you've got some noisy something or other, then by all means, talk to your neighbor. There's a wonderful website called quieterohahu.com. Okay. Quieterohahu.com. The guy who does that's worked on it for 10 years. It's an encyclopedia of everything about noise and the regulations and the problems. And he even has a blog where you can send him, you know, information or queries. Quieterohahu.com. Okay. And so all of these factors go into livability and how we make this island the best that it can be so that we're including these other factors that are not in some report written by someone in London with sort of these are the intangible ones that really do make a huge difference. But it's also people like you that are making a huge difference in our community because you're willing to say, hey, let's look at this and do something about it because we want to make it more livable for all of us. This is a reality that we've all got to live here together and we want to share the Aloha. So thank you for coming down and talking about these, this especially the issue of noise, but we'll talk about other ones in the future of light and other issues of livability of parks and complete streets and walking and trees and all of that. So if you would be my guest again, that would be most appreciated. But for today, I'm afraid we're gonna have to wrap up. So thank you for joining me on this issue. Thank you very much. Thank you for having us. We are out of time. We have to wrap it up. Yes, we are sad too. I am Winston Welch. This is out and about on the Think Tech live streaming network series. We have been talking with Nina Pfaffenbach, realtor extraordinaire at the landmark real estate company and Dr. Brian Bagnall, president of the Greater Waikiki branch of the Outdoor Circle. Thanks for tuning in. We welcome your feedback. Click on us, send us to other people. Thanks to our broadcast engineer, the very talented Robert McLean and our floor manager Eric Calander and to Jay Fidel, our executive producer who puts it all together. I will see you here every other Monday at 3 p.m. for more on Out and About. If you have some topics for me, let me know. Aloha everyone.