 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Raya Salter. And I'm Nicole Horry. In our show this time, we'll go to the State Capital Auditorium for a public forum with some national experts on rail. The rail issue is in daily controversy and seems to be at a tipping point on both route and design. We need to follow what's going on. Of all the threads in local media, rail seems to be the most prominent. Think Tech has been covering the issues in many of its talk shows. The forum addressed was known as option 2A, street-level rail from Middle Street. The group that organized it is called Salvage the Rail. Salvage the Rail wants to modify the heart rail project to allow street-level operation for the final five miles from Middle Street through downtown, arguing that this will save money, three billion dollars, save time, it would be completed in 2021 rather than 2025 and will provide a much more environmentally friendly system that can be easily extended to Waikiki and UH Manoa. The moderator of the program was architect Scott Wilson. He's been involved in the efforts of AIA Honolulu to research rail transit since 2009. He was chair of the AIA Transit Task Force from 2009 to 2012 and chair of the AIA Regional and Urban Design Committee from 2011 to 2016. He was president of AIA Honolulu in 2015. Rail has become a real contentious issue for a lot of reasons and a lot of people are digging in on their positions and I don't think that's the way to go forward. My name is Gil Rivier. I'm the senator for Senate District 23, which is the north and wind matures of this island from Anna Point around to Kaneohe. The people in my district feel very strongly about this issue, they're very concerned about the fiscal prudence of the rail system. I think most people love efficient transit systems, things that work, things that show up on time, things that are built and managed and maintained. So I think we can all agree that it's important to build our rail system appropriately. The question is, do we continue without ever modifying a plan that was designed many years ago or with the realities that we're facing today, do we consider an alternative? I think what you're going to find today in this presentation, because I've met these three gentlemen that are going to speak and Scott Wilson, who will be the moderator here, these guys have a compelling story to tell. They have the expertise, they've seen it work, they've seen systems that work, they know what works, what doesn't work, what's misguided and they're going to bring you some information that I really hope you guys can listen with open minds and consider maybe this is what we should be talking about and then maybe let's build this into a conversation. Today's forum is sponsored by Salvage the Rail. We have a website salvagetherail.org. If you're interested in following our, in being on our email list, please go to that and sign up and you will get, you will get public announcements as we, as we continue our work. I wanted to just explain our title option 2A, but you see on the screen there. It comes from June 2016 and in 2016, the FTA, the Federal Transit Authority, notified Mayor Caldwell and Hart that according to the calculations, their project was looking to cost approximately $7.7 to $8 billion. And the current funding had only been 6.8, so there was a shortfall. And as a result, the FTA requested a recovery plan from Hart and the city. So in the process of, in order to get the remainder of the 750 million federal funding, Hart published this in June of 2016. It was meant to go to the public, it's on their website. It's just an update. And in the contents of that update, if you go to the next slide, there were six options listed for how to proceed with a recovery plan. And I'm not going to review all of the options because some of them just were really non-starters, I'm not even sure what the point was. But if you look in the middle there, option 2A was built in Middle Street as planned and continue with at-grade rail system. So that is the option that we're going to talk about today. We don't know why Hart really never pursued it. We talked to them today and they were actually very complimentary of our ideas. So let's go on and listen then, let's get started. After a welcome by Senator Gil Riviere and a history of option 2A by Scott Wilson, the first speaker, Vuken Vuchik, gave us his remarks. Dr. Vuchik is an emeritus professor of transportation systems engineering and city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He's lectured there and at more than 100 other universities. Dr. Vuchik's work has focused on urban transportation engineering, planning and policy and has been published in many books, papers and reports. He has consulted with the U.S. Department of Transportation and the cities of Belgrade, Beijing, Lima, Moscow, Naples, New York, Perth, Philadelphia, Rome, Singapore and others. The dominant mode used to be in World War II or so, streetcar or tramway. What happened with that? Well, it was systematically proclaimed that streetcars are old-fashioned, that they're noisy, they're not flexible and so on, that whole campaign was pushed by several other major interests, major lobbies of General Motors and Firestone and so on. And city after city, United States illuminated streetcars in nearly all cities, except in Boston, Philadelphia, where we have tunnels for it and so on. The, no, no, no bank. The France and Great Britain also mostly illuminated streetcars. In Spain, Franco brought a rule, got away with streetcars, no discussion about it. Now, some of the countries were different. Germany, Netherlands, Scandinavian countries and so on said, no, we do not want transit mixed with traffic and flexible and stuck in traffic. We want public transport to be separated so that it's independent of congestion. And therefore, they did not abandon streetcars, they modernized them, upgraded them. And that went through years and several stages. So that made so much difference that we, at one time, we said, we cannot call this any more streetcar, it must, it's a different mode, and we call it light rail transit, sometimes light metro and so on. Next, please. There was a, then thinking that, well, we now have so many cars, people drive and so on, we don't need a rail transit or transit at all, except for some peak hours and some people who cannot drive and so on. Well, that was, that proved to be completely wrong. With the increasing congestion, cities saw that they must not decrease and neglect public transport, they must build better and more competitive public transport. That means that primarily rail transit benefits in large cities. Small cities, buses are okay, medium cities, still okay, but we try to improve transit. But in large cities, we see that we must use much more rail transit. So in 1955, there were 20 cities in the world with metros, rail, I would call it, either rapid transit or metro is the same. So how many do we have today from 20 in 1955? Today we have more than 180 cities, not only North American, Europe and so on, but it's in Africa, it's in China, it's building about 15, 20 metros and so on. What happened with light rail? Light rail came back, the countries that said we were not abandoning it and invented light rail, they expanded it and they showed the others how light rail can be a very efficient system. So that Germany and Central Europe in general maintained light rail. But what happened in France, which abandoned all virtually all, 25 cities in France have now built new, recently built light rail transit systems. New systems in Spain, 25 new systems. Now there are some light rail systems, even in Africa and Morocco and in Algiers, in Israel, in China and all over the world. So that the several hundred cities have built also light rail transit systems. The next speaker was Douglas Tilden. He has had a 45 year career designing rail transit stations throughout the US, in Chicago, New York, Washington DC and Miami, and in the Republic of Korea, Taiwan and Greece. In 2007 and 2008, he was chief architect for one of the consultants to heart. He now works as an independent transit consultant. I was asked as a designer of transit stations, I was asked to take a look at the design of the Honolulu stations, the heart stations, and explain what would need to be done to those stations to accommodate light rail transit vehicles. But before I do, let me just say this and the reason that I, could you pop the next one up, the reason that I'm showing this. All of these big complicated projects go through various phases. And I think right now for heart, I think that you're in what I call the frustration phase. As a community, you're very frustrated that things are taking this long, you're very frustrated that there doesn't seem to be a fixed budget or a fixed schedule. We had similar problems when we did the Athens Metro project, in that we had a client that was the EU in Brussels. We were going back and forth between Athens to Brussels. We had the parliament, the Greek parliament that we were responsible to. They had a different feeling about what they wanted. And then one of the big things that we really wrestled with on the Athens project was all of the antiquities that we had to deal with in our excavations. And what that meant was that as we, even though we knew that some of those antiquities were there, given ground penetrating radar, we had to stop construction. We had to bring the Ministry of Culture's people in to clear the site. We had to pay the construction contractors more money because of what we were finding. And a lot of those antiquities ended up in museums, some in the actual stations. I was responsible for the design of those stations. And we have, for instance, out in front of the parliament building in Athens is a, we discovered a Roman bath. We knew that it was, it was pretty big, but we didn't know there was 150 meters long until we started opening it up. So right there, we had to tell the contractor to stop the work on the stations. We had to bet the people from the Ministry of Culture to come out and it took them over a year to clear the site. The reason I'm bringing this up is that every one of these big projects has frustrations, but how do you surmount those frustrations? Number one, you establish a fixed budget that you work against. The budget doesn't keep changing. You establish a schedule that you meet. And if you get behind schedule, you come up with ways of which you get back on schedule. And you start at that point because when we were welcomed in Athens by the Greeks, they told us, you're not going to get a darn thing built here. We've got a terrible history of not getting things built in our community. We set a budget. You can see that we ended up building it for two point four billion dollars. We set a fixed schedule. We had good decision making. We had patience, we had perseverance, but we moved forward and we built it and we opened it eight years later on January 2000. And since then, in the last 15 years, the Greeks have extended both of those lines. They've built a new line out to the airport and the project is a terrific success. But I want to emphasize the fact that you've got to have clear direction. The community has to know how much it's costing. The community has to know what the schedule is. And you have to move forward with those two key elements in mind. Finally, we heard from Gary Andreshak. He has more than 35 years in city planning and design, specializing in land use and transit planning, and has produced master plans concentrating on livability and pedestrian neighborhoods. His current projects include the light rail corridor and Calgary, Alberta and the high speed rail project from San Diego to San Francisco. I'm going to speak about the transformative opportunities of rapid transit on urban environments, specifically on downtown Honolulu. I'd like to add that I work on a weekly basis around North America on the design of transit systems. And one of the opportunities of doing that is I see what people are doing and I see what makes sense and I see what troubles me. So what I'd like to do is show you today what I think makes sense. I will add to that I live in Vancouver, Canada, a beautiful, livable transit city. So with that, let's go to the first slide. Now, this one's a bit cruel, perhaps, but it may well be a candidate for a liquid liquefies, believe it or not. I had a hard time believing it. Next. And this is the end of your line, and I'm not sure they need the no parking anytime sign at the moment, because I really didn't see a lot of pressure on the curb next to it. I will show you the next slide, which is the end of the line, and I call this one number two, because this is the end of the, you can go to the next slide. This is the end of the line of an elevated system in suburban Richmond, British Columbia, which, and you can see, I think I can do this without taking these fellows' eyes out. The end of the line for starters, they realized that the end only had to be a single guideway rather than a double guideway, because the double guideway is one station back. So they have the lights on in that case, but you can see immediately after building this thing, the developers came in and realized the potential of it and put the density where it should be next. Now, Vulcan spoke about the really delinear transit corridor and next slide, and Doug's talked about the stations. What I want to talk about next slide is really the context of the community that this system will go in and through, because as I said, when I started speaking, I see what we're dealing with here as an opportunity to really refurbish downtown Honolulu in a very positive manner. Next. I had the benefit when I went to grad school in Copenhagen of getting to know a professor, a fellow named Jan Gayle, who some of you may know. To my mind, he's the preeminent urbanist in the world today, and he's written many books. His latest one is Cities for People. And of course, the premise of that one is that cities should be for people and not for cars. In 1971, he wrote a similar book called Life Between Buildings. And the thesis of that one is quite simple. It's that a city is not buildings alone. It's the spaces between that matter most. And really in 1971, what he was commenting on was what we would call the emerging profession of urban design. When I started going and taking architecture in the 1960s, we had architecture, and we had city planning, and we had landscape architecture. But there wasn't a profession that really looked at how all of those pieces came together and how done properly, create to the synergy that we need to maintain the cities that we have and make them function better and make them more beautiful. Next. So, as an urban designer, when we look at transit, we look at a variety of things. We look at what I would call a series of overlays, one being the transit overlay, one being the open space overlay, and one being the buildings overlay. After they spoke, Scott Foster summarized the points at issue and called for questions from the audience. Here's some of the Q&A that followed. This seems like a great urban planner's design that looks great. But wouldn't it be really much better to just stop the damn thing at Aloha Stadium and just leave it there and leave buses to take things? I mean, it might be nice to have all of these fancy LRTs going on King Street and looping at Alapai and coming back. But, you know, that costs money. And let's take out the politics and the feds and all of that. But wouldn't it be much better off, quite frankly, to just stop it at Aloha Stadium? And the second related question is, regardless of what it is, how do we get from where we're at now to where you guys are proposing taking us? I mean, not talking about the dollar amounts, but what are the logistics? How do we get the ledge where the city council or heart or the feds to sign on to your proposal as it stands now or as it might be modified? Thank you. OK. Let's see. I think there was one question there about the sort of the one C drive question, you know, should we stop the system at Aloha Stadium? Bukong, do you like to address that? Well, that would mean that you would have a rail system where there's light traffic, very little traffic, and when you come to the main area where you have a lot of traffic, you would give it to the buses. And buses are already overloaded and they're reaching their capacity. So it would not be justified that we build that wrong line in suburbs and use that speed where there's no congestion, there are no people, and here to be with buses, right? Also, I'll ask Gary about who rides buses and who rides trains. Yeah, I was going to pick up on that. One of the things that we notice, time, can I add? Do you want an answer? Okay. We have a very hard time across North American cities converting car drivers to bus riders. They're far more interested in going from the car to the train that somehow it seems classy or a better ride or whatever. But another thing that happens, and I see it over and over again, is that we as planners, we tend to think that everybody is the same. And of course what I'm seeing is this tsunami of change from younger people, from the Gen X and the Gen Z who firstly don't want driver's licenses, don't want to own cars, want to live in downtown cars and want to be reliant on transit and on walking and on riding bikes. And if you do what you're suggesting, you're not going to play into that generational promise that you need to rejuvenate your city. All in all, this was an impressive program on an important community issue with a world-class panel of transit experts. Many people showed up to hear what was said, but the city wasn't there, and although some legislators appeared, in large part, neither was the state. After all the controversy, could it be that no one cares? We should all care and stay informed. Want to know more about Option 2A? Check out salvagetherail.org. The rail project will define our city, our economy, our way of life, and our community for many years to come. And now, let's take a look at ThinkTech coverage going forward. There's so much happening in Hawaii. Sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them, but ThinkTech will take you there. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on Spectrum OC16 to stay current on what's happening in government, industry and academia around the islands and the world. ThinkTech broadcasts its daily talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show, or if you wanna share our shows, they're all archived on demand on ThinkTechHawaii.com and YouTube. The audio is on ThinkTechHawaii.com slash radio and we post all our shows as podcasts on iTunes. Visit ThinkTechHawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links or sign up on our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows. 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For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech, visit ThinkTechHawaii.com. Be a guest or a host, a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification and global awareness in Hawaii. And of course, the issues relating to transportation in these islands. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Raya Salter. And I'm Nicole Hori. Aloha, everyone.