 Everyone, and welcome to Human Humane Architecture on Think Tech Hawaii. I am this program's co-host, DeSoto Brown, and our normal host, Martin Despang, is currently on vacation, so I'm holding down the fort while he's off having fun for the summer. Now, if you look behind me, you're going to see that there's a picture of an old car, and that's because today's program is about the effects of cars on Hawaii. And I'm not just talking about the obvious effects in some cases. I'm talking about some things that maybe you hadn't thought about. We are really lost without our vehicles. We really can't function as a society without our entire system of privately owned motor vehicles, not only as individuals we depend upon them, but our entire, all our businesses does, do as well. So I want to show you why some of those things have happened. I'm going to show you what it looked like in the past as these things happened, and maybe discuss some of the effects. I don't really have any answers for some of the bad things that have happened, but I can tell you at least what's happened and why it's happened. So let's go to our first slide. And what do we have here? That's not our first slide. I'm sorry. We've got to go back. There we go. That's our first slide. Cars came to the Hawaiian Islands for the first time in 1899. And there were two cars that came in on one day on the same ship for the first time anybody in the United States, not in the United States, but the first time anybody in the Hawaiian Islands had seen an automobile. But people knew about them because they had already been, in fact, invented. They were in use in various numbers in various places. But that was the first time anybody saw one here. Now when those first cars arrived, none of the infrastructure that cars require was in place because they'd never been here before. And in the photograph that you're looking at right here, if I can, no, these guys, no, these guys. In any case, you can tell that I'm trying to signal, I'm trying to signal to those guys to show you that this is a 1905 Oldsmobile driving through Waikiki. And this was the first extremely popular car in the United States. And this is one of the cars that really got a lot of people buying automobiles for the first time. And as you can see, it's really crude. It has no windshield. It has no steering wheel. It just has a tiller. And it can only go very, very quietly and well, not quietly, but it can't go very fast. But let's go on to our next photograph. And a lot of things had to be put into place for automobiles after they got here. Because as I said, there wasn't any of that stuff here. Well, to begin with, cars require fuel. They require gasoline. Gasoline previously had been a byproduct of refining petroleum to make kerosene, which is being used for lighting. Nobody really knew what to do with gasoline. They used it as a cleaning fluid, really, honestly. And then somebody said, hey, it's really explosive. We can put in an internal combustion engine and run an engine. So it was necessary to get gasoline out to where people with cars could get to it. And that means that the entire refining structure and the entire system of getting gasoline out there had to be put into place, as I said. So here's an early gasoline truck in 1923 or 24 taking gasoline to one of the places where it's going to be sold. Because initially, you had to just go buy it someplace and store it yourself at your home to put it into your vehicle. Well, gradually, people figured out, no, there are better ways to do it. So in our next picture, we see that, what did they do? They built gas stations. But they also had to build, eventually, a refinery, an oil refinery, which is still in place at Campbell Industrial Park here on Oahu. And gas stations had to be not only constructed, but people had to figure out how to construct them and what the best way to do it was. And eventually, they figured out that instead of just having a gas pump out at the curb for somebody to pull up and then stop traffic while they were getting gas, you built a whole separate structure that had a canopy roof over the freestanding pumps. And for many, many years, those of you who are old enough like me will remember that you didn't pump your own gasoline. There were people who did it at the gas station for you and then did the full service of wiping your windows, checking your oil, checking your water and your radiator and checking the pressure in your tires. Well, here is a gas station that used to stand on Kalakawa Avenue between, let me see, it was between King Street and Young Street. And it was the Armour Oil Company, which is just a small company that had only, I think, four or five different gas stations. This is in 1966. Next picture. And in addition to serving people with gasoline, it was also necessary for cars to be repaired and serviced. Well, again, if there was nobody was doing it originally, you had to do your own repairs. You had to repair your own engine. You had to repair your tires, which went flat all the time in the early years. And gradually people worked out to where they would, they had their own car repair places. And so here we are in about maybe 1920 with guys learning how to rebuild engines. And of course, then we've got a whole series of businesses come into existence to serve cars. Next. And one of the things you have to do if you're going to have cars is there have to be places that sell them. So car dealerships, certainly by, let's say, 1910, there were car dealerships. Many of them sold a variety of cars that you've never heard of today because most of them went out of business. This particular building, the American Hawaiian Motors, was located on the corner of Kapilani Boulevard and Cook Street. This is in 1947, 1948. Very interesting looking building because one of the things was that as the car business got more competitive and as there were more big dealers competing with each other for customers, in some cases the buildings were very distinctive looking. And as you can see, this is a really distinctive looking building to sell Dodge automobiles and trucks. And this building was in standing until, let's see, about 1990. Hasn't been here for a long time, but it was very cool looking, as you can see. Next. And in addition to selling new cars, it was also necessary to do something with all those used cars because the American car manufacturing system was so prolific and was turning out so many cars. By the 1920s, a huge numbers of cars were being manufactured every single year in the United States. And that meant that as more were being sold new, more and more used cars were on the market. And initially people didn't know what to do with them. What are we going to do with all these cars, these old used cars? Well, gradually people figured out that, hey, this is the way you get new customers into this whole car buying thing. They can't afford a new car, so they'll buy a used car. So by the 1950s and for many years after that, it was very familiar for there to be used car lots on places like Capilani Boulevard or Nimitz Highway. Lots and lots of parked cars, often with flags and other things flying during the day that would get your attention, like you see here human used cars in 1965. Or at night, there were strings of light bulbs above the cars to light them up. And there was a lot of competition between used car lots in the 1960s in Honolulu, lots of aggressive advertising, and a lot of TV ads between diamond-used cars and wholesale motors. So if you were around in the 60s, you saw a lot of these ads in which those two big dealers on Nimitz Highway were competing to try to sell more and more used cars. Next. And other car businesses or car-related businesses that came into existence that nobody could have thought about. For example, movies, drive-in movie theaters. The first drive-in movie theater opened here in 1949 on Capilani Boulevard. And in the 50s, there were a variety of competitors for that. And then there were drive-in restaurants, which came into existence as early as the 1920s. But they really hit their peak in the 1950s and 60s. In drive-ins, you could either get service in your car by a car hop, not in every place, but in some of the bigger drive-ins. And otherwise, you just parked your car, went to the window, got your food, sat down and ate it, or went back to your car and drove away. This is a picture of the Kaukau Junior drive-in, which was on Nimitz Highway. This is about 1965. And in addition to the main building, which you can see with that wonderful roof, it's also got this bouncy roof in the front where you could park your car in the shade if you wanted to sit there. So this is all oriented towards cars. There's very little building here. It's mostly flat ground for people to drive in and park. Next. Okay, when cars first got to the Hawaiian Islands, there was something that we didn't really have and that had to be built. And those were roads. Yeah, there already had been roads, but there weren't a lot of roads. They weren't paved in many cases. And in lots of places, there weren't even roads, per se. There were trails for people to walk on or for horses or mules to be able to walk on. So when those first people brought in their cars, and they were just the rich people in the early 1900s, when they were driving around and there wasn't a road, they had to try to find some place to drive. Well, in many cases, it was the beach if you were driving along the coastline and that was the only way you could do it. Well, obviously you'd get stuck. And so in this picture, you can see here's a car stuck on the beach in Windward O'ahu because there's no road. The car has sunk into the sand and the wheels have spun and it's dug itself in. The only way to get out is for the chauffeur because that man is the chauffeur to dig the car out. Next. And what this meant was that in some cases, the roads that did exist because again, they weren't paved were in terrible condition. So they were either really dusty all the time if it was dry or if it was raining, as you can see here in this picture, they were mud, it was thick mud. Well, this is 1927. That really isn't conducive to the use of automobiles. And again, it's not just for people driving around for fun as it had been in the early years when they were rich people, just doing it as a lark. But gradually, economically, it was necessary to be able to move people and goods. And so unacceptable roads wouldn't work. And that meant the government had to get into the business of building and maintaining roads next. And those roads had to accommodate cars specifically. So that meant, and here you see a picture of Kamehameha Highway under construction on Windward Side of O'ahu in the 1920s, that meant that first of all, they had to figure out what they were going to use to do all this work. They had to buy the equipment. They had to train people to do it. And they had to figure out what they're going to use. Asphalt, where they're going to use. Concrete, what were they actually going to do? Not only that, you had to purchase or condemn the land in order to build the road. You had to encroach on private property that was already there. You had to get ownership of it somehow. So suddenly, the territorial government, the territory of Hawaii, and the individual county governments of the counties, the four counties of Hawaii, suddenly find themselves taking on this tremendous new responsibility for which they not only have to pay the workers and purchase the equipment and the materials, but they've also got to increase taxes on people to be able to do all of this. So suddenly, there's this whole new realm of government activity that hadn't existed before. Next. Now, when the process was completed, as you can see here, suddenly we've got a whole new, wonderful, smooth road. And this is a concrete road. Again, this is coming in the highway in Winwardawahoe. And you can see the Mokapu Peninsula in the distance, off on the left there. The good thing is now, as I said, you've got this wonderful, new, smooth, concrete road, and everybody can drive wherever they want to. That brings on, however, more responsibilities, more costs, maintenance costs, et cetera. And the other thing that's going to happen, which I'm going to get to in just a second, is these roads are rapidly going to become outmoded, which means that you're going to have to widen them, you're going to have to do other stuff. So once you've built the road, that doesn't mean everything is finished. You've still got a lot more to do. Next. So for the almighty car, we will literally move mountains, and we have. And we will move mountains, in many cases, by wiping them out or digging them out. This is the road from Koli Koli Pass, which goes from Fort Schofield Barracks in central Oahu down into Lua Lua Le Valley and the Waianae Coast. And that is a military road that's very rarely allowed to be open to civilians. But the military in those days was, well, it still is very powerful, but in those days, extremely more so before and during World War II. So this is about 1936. And as you can see, there's this huge excavation that's been made right here just to accommodate motor vehicles. Again, these happened to be privately owned cars when people have been allowed to come in and see this new road. But this road was built for military purposes, not for sightseeing or for civilians to drive on. Next. Okay, as I said, it's wonderful to build cars. It's wonderful to build roads to accommodate cars, but that doesn't mean it's all over with because as you build more roads and as there are more people buying cars and as there are more dealers selling cars and there are more gas stations, et cetera, then your roads start to get congested. And in the middle of downtown Honolulu on King Street, which is what we're looking at here at the intersection of Fort Street, which is right in the foreground here, you can see that even by 1925 or so when this picture was taken, there was already a lot of traffic. And it's also very congested traffic because you've got traffic going in different directions. There's an intersection. You've also got two streetcar lines that are going down the middle of King Street. You've also got a whole bunch of pedestrians. And this was before there were traffic lights that had been installed. There were no permanent traffic lights in Honolulu until 1936. So there's this kind of chaos that's going on, which also had to be dealt with. Next. Well, as traffic gets more congested, there are various things that you do. And one of them is to make streets one way. And so this is Market Street in Waikumaui. And it's been made one way in the direction going away from us so that that relieves a lot of the congestion that I was just referencing. But one way streets do not necessarily solve everything because next we're going to see that the next thing you do is you build more roads. And the biggest road that's had the biggest impact here in Honolulu certainly is the H-1 Freeway. And this is the H-1 Freeway under construction in 1960, just Maoka of downtown. And I don't think people realize how much of an impact that made. People probably think that the H-1 Freeway was kind of always there. No, it was not. It had to be in through Urban Honolulu from the end by Kahala Mall up to Middle Street. All of that had to literally be bulldozed through an existing urban Honolulu. That meant hundreds of homes, businesses, churches, schools, playgrounds, you name it, got pushed aside and literally obliterated by the construction of H-1. Next. And here's that same view of what we just looked at. But this is in the early 1970s. And now you can see that there's the Freeway. Well, in the early 70s, when this picture was taken, there wasn't as much traffic. The Freeway still is in the same place today. But traffic at the end of the work day now is considerably more congested here than it was back in the early 1970s. And that's meant that not only here have they had to add two lanes on the left side of the picture. Excuse me, on that side of the picture. But they've also had to narrow the lanes. So we now have five lanes through here instead of three lanes. And it's still jammed today. Next. And this is a really good picture of what I was just talking about. This is the Freeway, an aerial view of the Freeway in the early 1970s. And all of that stuff that you see there literally had to get dug out of what already was there. There was a whole bunch of city in that place. And that path that the H1 follows, again, wiped all that out. And that was all private property, in most cases, that got condemned and taken from people. So keep in mind what we have done just for the sake of running automobiles around. Next. Even bigger than the H1 Freeway through urban Honolulu is the H1 Airport Viaduct. And I have to say, of course, as we all know, that the H1 Freeway in particular is absolutely crucial for us to be able to function. If the H1 gets shut down for some reason, it's a catastrophe. So we do, in fact, have to have it. But again, keep in mind how huge it is. This picture from the 1970s shows you how immense that Airport Viaduct is. And if you drive out there now, either on it or even more so below it, you're aware that it's a big expanse of concrete. But look at how huge that is under construction. And I have to say, too, that in comparison, the elevated train line, which is under construction right now, is only a fraction of the size of what you're seeing right here. So keep that in mind if you are troubled by the size of the train that's under construction. Look at what we've done for cars, as I've said. Next. And H1 is pow after 34 years. This was a newspaper supplement that was published in 1986 to celebrate the end, or so-called, the end of the H1 Freeway's construction, which was for this Airport Viaduct. Well, even though it was over, of course, you've still got a whole bunch of stuff that you've got to continue to do, to enlarge it, to restripe it, to maintain it, et cetera. So again, here's a really clear view of what we've accomplished, or what we've done. All right, no, that's OK. Let's go to our next picture, as we were. Something else has happened, too. We built tunnels through the Ko'olau Mountains. We've done that not once, not twice, but three times. These are the first of those tunnels. This is the Pali Highway Tunnels, which were completed and both completely opened, I think, 1960, 1961. And that made a huge change in how easy it was to get between Windward O'ahu and Leeward O'ahu, or Ko'olau-lucide, which made a big difference in development and how many people lived in different places. Next, dwarfing those, dwarfing the Pali Highway and the Riki Highway, was the construction of the H3 Freeway, which, if you were around here, then you know, was a subject of tremendous controversy, lots of anger, lots of arguments, lots of protests, lots of bad feelings. The H3 took forever to build. That's not literally it, but it did take a good long time. And here's what it looked like. And again, we moved mountains. Doug Holeson Mountains did huge amounts of excavation to build this particular freeway, among the many others that we have done. Next. So when all of these freeways and all of these new roads are built to accommodate all these cars, what happens? We have suburbs. We build suburbs, because it means you can commute from a house that's not right in the city to someplace in the city to go shopping or to go to your school or to go to your work. So that means that we have suburban sprawl. And that started in the 1950s very strongly with the increase in numbers of cars, and it's still with us today. Next. That does not mean, I mean, on one hand, yes, suburban living can be really wonderful and pleasant and enjoyable, but at the same time, it also means that we are covering up land that we might need for other things, like agriculture. It also means that you're just contributing to traffic. And so for urban planning, a lot of people would prefer that people lived in the city and use the train when the train is functioning, but also lived in more dense urban areas in which you have higher buildings or denser buildings rather than lots of small buildings on individual parcels of ground. Next. And of course, as I said, suburbs are a part of the growth of automobiles, and everything goes along okay, except if there is an interruption in the fuel supply. And we encountered that for the first time for many of us in late 1973 and early 1974 when there was an energy crisis. And suddenly all the gas stations were closed and suddenly you had to line up for an hour or more to get gasoline first thing in the morning. And that really pointed out that relying too much on the internal combustion engine is not gonna be a good thing if something like this occurs. And heaven forbid, we go through it again, but it shows you that it's a vulnerable situation. Next. Well, cars. Cars aren't being driven most of the time. Cars are just parked most of the time. But whether a car is being driven or whether it is parked, it takes up a lot of space and you have to accommodate cars, give them space either on roads or places to park them. And even back in the 1920s, if you can believe it, there were parking situations. This is the parking lot for the Honolulu Stadium in the late 1920s, which is right when the original Honolulu Stadium opened, which was on Esenberg Street and King Street in Mo'ili-Eli. Well, part of the problem with that stadium was there was never a parking lot. So going to an event there was always a problem because there was no accommodation for cars. Next. And as the car population grew tremendously, along with the human population after World War II, new buildings and new developments came into existence that had a lot of space for cars. So here's the time supermarket in Kahala just before it opened in about 1955. And if you look on the right-hand side, you see that there's a lot more space in the parking lot for cars than there is to accommodate people actually going into the store to buy food. So again, we're giving a lot more space and attention to cars than we are even to just people buying food in order to survive. Next. And because it takes up a lot of room to park cars, what do you do? You build parking buildings for people to park cars in stacks, going up vertically. The first parking building was attached to the Dillingham Transportation Building, which opened on Bishop Street in Honolulu in 1930. And again, if you look in the back of this diagram, in the front part, there's the Dillingham Transportation Office Building, and behind it is the parking building for 250 cars, and that's bigger than the building itself. Next. Next, yes. So, now, we've got, what do you do with cars? Well, you've got some, sometimes you live in a car. Well, people do today, even though you're not supposed to, this is just a camping trip. It's not really people in the car. But next, we've got, if people needed houses, so did cars. And initially, people put cars in little buildings that were like stables, where horses had lived. So they built separate buildings like this one in Waimanalo. But next, gradually, people realized that you could attach the garage or the place for the car to the house. And originally, for this 1920s house, there is a built-in garage, which is nice. But it only accommodates one car. And gradually, it became evident that next, we were going to need two car garages, as cars increased tremendously in the 1950s. And so, next, more and more houses accommodated cars as part of the construction of the house, certainly in the 1950s, as you see here, we can accommodate a Buick and a Nash underneath this modern house. Next. So it's important to keep people and cars from intermingling too much, because cars can kill people. So people had to be taught first that we'll build a sidewalk for you to walk on. Don't walk in the street where there are cars. So sidewalks came into existence in suburban areas in the 1920s. This is in Kaimuki. Next. And people had to be taught to use crosswalks, to not only not walk across the street wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, to use the crosswalk and only do it when they were signaled to do it. This took a long time for people to understand. Because before cars, they had walked wherever they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. They had to learn not to do that. And fortunately, we know to do that now. Next. And sometimes it's necessary to actually separate people physically from cars completely by building overpasses like this one, which was in Waianae in the 1950s for schoolchildren to not get struck by cars when they were going to their school. Next. Well, all of those things give you a hint of what cars have done and what cars are continuing to do. And the ironic thing is that when the car, which is the symbol of independent travel, goes out of its life and it dies and it's no longer functioning, suddenly it becomes one of our worst problems in terms of trying to deal with it as an inert trash object. And abandoned cars and what we do with junk cars continues to be a problem here. So I think that sums up just some of all of the things that cars have done, cars are doing, and cars will continue to do. The question is, how much of this do we want to continue? How do we want to take control of this? How do we want to deal with our dependency on cars? I don't have the answers, I have to tell you. But at least I can show you where we got here and how we got here to where we are today. I'm DeSoto Brown. This is the end of Human Humane Architecture on Think Tech Hawaii. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you again in just a few weeks. Until then, aloha.