 Aloha, I'm Kirsten Baumgart-Turner and this is Sustainable Hawaii, airing live every Tuesday at noon at thinktechkawaii.com. Today we're talking about the potential for a sustainable land transportation system on the island of Kauai. Back in 1991, I helped the county of Kauai and its private sector partners develop an overall economic development plan in which citizens envision the island as a model for sustainable transportation, amongst other things. Twenty-five years later, then-mayor and 20-year Kauai County Council member Joanne Yukimura is still striving to turn that vision into reality. While mayor, she started Kauai's public transportation system, the Kauai Bus, which has grown substantially over the last decade. Recently, as presenting chair of the Council's Housing and Transportation Committee, she was instrumental in securing monies for the Kauai Multimodal Land Transportation Plan. The unstoppable graduate of Stanford University and the University of Washington Law School is here to tell us about this cutting-edge plan. Welcome, Councilmember Yukimura. Aloha, Kirsten, and Aloha to your audience. We appreciate you coming from Kauai to keep us all informed of the latest in cutting-edge initiatives on Kauai. And we know that this is such a hot topic for Hawai'i in general as we try to meet our 100-percent renewable energy goals. Tell us a little bit about this plan, and I think you've brought it with you. Well, let me just say that our transportation or our traffic problems are not as bad as O'ahu, and we're trying, but we do have big problems. We're on a two-lane system, basically, which was built when our population was 30,000, and now it's 70,000. So there are major delays and major congestion, at least from our standpoint and our standard of a rural community. I do remember when I lived on Kauai beginning in 1988, there was one traffic light. Yes. But that was one of the most attractive things about Kauai. There are many more and many more lanes to the highways now. Kauai is very different now than back then, and so we actually have a big problem. I would say the traffic congestion is one of the biggest problems on the island. It's linked to the economy and whether we can operate with goods and services, and it very much affects people as they try to do their daily activities, such as going to work, going to the doctors, going to plays and cultural activity. And it's certainly affecting tourism. I know that there's often commentaries on Yelp about the traffic on Kauai, as well as O'ahu, of course. So the challenge for us is how do we solve our traffic problem? When we look at O'ahu, we don't think that just building bypasses and doubling or adding lanes is going to get us to a place where traffic flows well. And so we do have a different approach. I don't know that it's anywhere else in the state right now, and so we did a plan in 2013 the council adopted this Kauai multimodal land transportation plan, and it outlines in a very thorough way another approach. And that approach is to keep vehicle miles traveled flat or stable and not see it grow. And the next graph that we'll see shows what our goal is. You can see that it shows the millions of miles per year that are traveled in vehicles on the island, vehicle miles traveled. And if we go with a baseline scenario where a business as usual, it'll go from 771 million to 914 million miles over the next 20 years. If we do the preferred route, we will keep the number of miles traveled by vehicles basically flat. And how we're going to do that is called mode shift. And that's the next chart coming up. We're going to shift the mode of travel. You can see that in 2010, the single occupant vehicle, SOV, and the multiple occupant vehicle, or actually it's multiple occupant auto, took up more than 90% of the number of trips made on the island, whereas transit walking and bicycling were much, much less. If we implement our multi-modo land transportation plan by 2035, you will see a substantial drop in the single occupancy vehicle and multiple occupant auto. Even though it's still the same, we will double our walking, transit, and bicycling. Actually almost triple those modes of travel. And by doing that, we think we can keep vehicle miles traveled less and therefore have much better flow and mobility on our island. So the multi-modal transportation plan then must involve development plans as you move forward with any new residential units or tourism units, that this would involve incorporating in that a much more walking community, perhaps the complete streets model? Create streets is an integral part of this mode shift, where we create streets that are not made just for cars, but also give fair access and safe access to bicyclists, pedestrians, and transit. And we also have to land use and transportation are inextricably intertwined. And so we will also need to place our housing close to jobs and services. In fact, our plan says you cannot do it by mode shift alone. You have to also change our land use planning and not have these long commutes, but have people be able to walk or bike to work or short car or transit trips. So it's also part of the approach of transit-oriented development so that people's trips are shortened as much as possible. And the only way to do that is with land planning. And how is this then intertwined with the general plan development on Koi? Well we are right now updating our general plan, but basically it's about where we locate our housing and we want to locate it close to services. So actually we just finished our Lihue community plan and that is seen as the main area for growth of housing. Because we know that transportation costs really affect total housing costs. You might get a affordable house, but if it's far away from where you work, that cost has to be factored in and can really affect household income. And that doesn't even mention what you discussed earlier, which is a drop in productivity as people have to commute longer. I know that that's the difficulty for people on the west side of Oahu right now is huge loss in productivity sitting in traffic. Or the families on the big island, where the parent leaves before the children wake up to go to school and come back after the children are in bed. It's not just about productivity, but it's about family, time, and quality of life. You know, on Kauai we don't have as long distances, but the long commutes and the traffic congestion do, I mean not the long or the time, the long time, the commutes being stuck in traffic do affect our quality of life tremendously. And also, so in order to do that, we have to, oh, thank you, look at this chart. That explains how much capacity of road you can free up when you shift the mode. That shows I think 60 cars with 60 people in each car. All the riders are gathered in a cluster, but those people in one in each car in the middle photo will take up a lot of road space, whereas if they were in a bus, that's 60 people outside of a bus, you can see how much road space you free up. And bicycles on the right hand side shows you also how shifting to the bike mode frees up road space. And that kind of conceptualizes the approach of the multimodal plan. And I would think that also gives a tremendous sense of relief in terms of oppressive density of space. You know, people will have a much greater sense of open space when you start rolling those cars. Well, I would call it more open roads. And I mean, that's what people are looking for, that's what we need. In order to do that, I want to say that we will have to grow the bus system actually by a thousand percent. Our plan shows that, and we can go to the transit growth chart, but it shows that we'll move from 1641 trips weekly. Those are our weekly fixed route transit ridership. In 2010, we will have to increase that by to 18,000 trips per week. And that's a major, major growth spurt that we have to do. But the good news is that we don't have to convince people to get into a bus. What we found is when we increased services such as when we in 2013, 2011, we went from, we extended bus service from six o'clock at night till 10 o'clock at night and we created weekend service. The ridership skyrocketed because now people could actually do things on the bus. They could go to work and they could come home from work, you know, things like that. And so it's not about creating demand for bus services. It's about providing services and the demands there and people will ride if it's convenient and easy to use. It's interesting. One of the things we discovered when I was helping my partner's work on the Whistler Sustainability Plan in Whistler, Canada, and similarly a very tourist-oriented economy, was that if we provided a bus service that was maximum 10-minute wait, then people would ride it and use it all the time. If they had to wait 11 minutes or 12 minutes, they wouldn't take it. So it's, again, exactly what you're saying is that as long as you're meeting people's needs, which is one of the major tenets of sustainability that we're meeting everyone's needs equally, and that applies to sustainable transportation. So that means that with the Kauai bus you're not only going to have to add buses, but you're going to have more frequency of those stops and those routes. Frequency, as you just pointed out, is one of the keys. We also need shelters. Right now people stand in the hot sun or rain and the elderly don't have a place to sit down in most of our bus stops, but we're embarking on creating shelters at 50 bus stops. I know that's small here in Oahu, but for us that's big. And the indicators, I just saw that on the screen. Let's go to that now. This plan, if followed, will be sustainable because if you look at the fourth line down, annual gallons of motor fuel consumed, and compared to the 2010 level, which is the first column, the baseline in the next column shows that the fuel consumed, if we just do business as usual, will be about 13%. And that's because of car efficiency and electric cars and that kind of thing. But if we do the mode shift and the implement the multimodal plan, we're going to reduce fuel consumption by 27%. Wow. More than double. Yes. And that's a goal I've heard nationally to reduce fuel consumption. And then if you go further down to annual greenhouse gas emissions, we will be, instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it's related to efficiency. By 13%, we're going to reduce it also by 27%. That's why this is a sustainability plan, because it's going to actually impact those sustainability indicators. And that proves the point that we often make, which is efficiency first. Before we need to have technical renewable energy applications and other things, we've got to start being more efficient and reduce our consumption. Yes. So that's without any renewable energy technical applications like more electric vehicles or perhaps sun fuel. And more renewable fuel. And besides that, there are so many more other indicators that are going to move. And if we can go back to that sheet, you will see that fatalities, it's fourth from the bottom, fatalities from motor vehicle collisions per 100 million BMT will, if we go with business as usual, we will have no drop in fatalities. But if we go with the preferred scenario under the multimodal plan, there'll be a 15% drop in fatalities. And you can see the weekday transit ridership just below that will move from 1,600 trips to 1,000% increase to that 18,000 trips a week. And what I love is below that percent of adults meeting minimum levels of physical activity. This is a health plan as well for a healthier community. And you can see that we were at 50% of adults having minimal levels of physical activity in 2010. If we go with the baseline business as usual, there'll be no increase. But if we go with the preferred plan, there'll be a 32% increase. We're going to take a short break. And when we come back, let's explore that a little bit more about healthy lifestyles as a result of good planning. We'll be right back with Sustainable Hawaii. Aloha, I'm Carl Campania. I hope you please visit us this summer. It's a wonderful summer. It's actually a cooler summer than we're used to. But I hope that you come back and visit us and watch our show, Education Movers, Shakers, and Reformers here on Think Tech Hawaii. It's at noon every Wednesday. See you then. Hello, I'm Marianne Sasaki. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii, where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law, where we discuss legal issues, politics, governmental topics, and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. Aloha! The University of Hawaii football team under Rolovic is going to kick butt this season. In case you didn't understand me, the University of Hawaii football team is going to kick butt under Rolovic this season. So be sure to follow us on Think Tech Hawaii and Hibachi Top. I'll be at every game. And remember, Aloha! Hi, we're back with Sustainable Hawaii and we're talking about sustainable land transportation solutions on the island of Kauai. And former Mayor Joanne Yukimura, current council member and chair of the Housing and Transportation Committee, has been telling us about the Kauai Multimodal Land Transportation Plan. When we left off, we were talking about the health impacts of good transportation planning. Well, the multimodal plan, which I think is the only multimodal land transportation plan in the state, is a health plan because it shifts the mode from the single occupancy vehicle to what they call active transportation, which is biking, walking and transit. Because people have to walk to the transit stops and back from the transit stops. And so it produces healthier people. And as we saw in the indicators, if we can get that back on the screen, there's going to be, oh, the Think Tech Hawaii is kind of covering it up. The last line there, the average annual household transportation cost? Well, just the percentage of adults meeting the minimum levels of physical activity is going to increase by 32%. Wow. And that's very significant. And then as you pointed out, the other really great benefit of this plan and of this mode shift that we want to do is the average household transportation cost. You'll see that under the baseline scenario, it'll go up 15%. If we continue just driving cars, and as we all know the cost of oil and fuel gas will go up at some point, there's a projected 15% increase in average annual household transportation cost. Is that if the costs remain level at current cost of running an automobile? I think it anticipates a little fuel cost increase, but I'm sure it doesn't anticipate the really high possibilities. But look at the preferred scenario. The last figure at the bottom is a 6% decrease in household transportation costs. And I want to tell the story about my friend, John, who is a park ranger for the county. He lives in Waimea, commutes to work in Lihue every week. And he used to pay $350 a month gas money to do the commute by car. Now he rides the bus with an annual pass that costs $400, which is $33 a month. So he's actually saving about $3,000 a year. Another bus rider said, that's like a pay raise. That's like a great vacation that he can take on that money. Yes, that's right. And that's the kind of savings this sustainable transportation system will bring to our people. Does that transportation plan also include allowance for more electric vehicle charging and other things? It does, but boy, I mean, I just went to one hotel on our island and I have a leaf, an electric car, and the chargers were all broken. So, you know, and there's no public charger on the west side, because there's no place with 200 cars, which I think is the requirement. So, you know, I'm watching very closely the implementation for electric cars, and I'm not sure that we can rely on that to solve our transportation problems. Plus, if it's still single occupant vehicles, we have parking problems, we have car costs, we still have the old system. That's only one slice. Yeah, only one slice of the answer, and plus that is very specific to a certain slice of the population that can afford those cars. Right. Absolutely. So, public transportation is a broader solution and a more socially just solution. So, the major problem with implementing this plan is we don't have any money. And it's going to take money to have buses coming more frequently to put up erect bus shelters, to put Wi-Fi on the bus, which is one of our plans, to have some park and ride. And so, that is the major challenge for me and others who want to see this system become reality. What is the estimated cost for full implementation of the plan? I don't know, because what we're doing right now is a short-term plan, a five-year plan, which is going to give us more money. But I can tell you, in 2011, when we went from six o'clock to ten o'clock at night and weekend service, which is every two hours, which is very difficult, it cost us a million dollars more in operating money. And that's why we need a, we can't do it on one-shot grants or capital. So, you didn't get enough revenue to cover that increased operating cost? We did. And the ridership skyrocketed. But now we have to go to the next level, which is probably every half hour on some of our really crowded routes. And, you know, oh, I had a $600,000 proposal for this year's budget to make weekends every hour instead of every two hours, and from two o'clock instead of ending at two o'clock in the afternoons to end at ten o'clock. And that cost $600,000, so, you know, more every year. So you need the upfront cost, but you have faith that the revenue will cover those costs? Well, I lobbied for a half percent excise tax because it's a regular funding source just like the city has for their rail. And to the legislature's credit, they gave all the neighbour island counties half percent the option of a half percent tax. And I'm so sorry to report that none of the counties exercised that option, which expired on July 1st a few days ago. And why is that? Why did it expire? No, why did they opt out of it? Because they're saying nobody wants tax increases. And I heard the public differently. I heard the bus riders say, we will pay that tax. We actually downsize it to a quarter percent tax, so it would have been $0.25 on every hundred dollars purchased. And it was regressive. It would hurt the poor families, but if you use it for transit, those are the families who would get the benefit. So it's actually not regressive when you look at the full impact and life cycle cost of the excise tax? Well, in the long run, as we make it more available for more families, you know, because right now just a small percentage of our families use it. So by making it more available, we will allow more of them to use it. So the rest of the regressivity will get less and less. So in other words, those people who can't use it now because of the lack of available timing, for example, those who might work at a hotel and need to get on the bus late at night or early in the morning when it's not running, would then be allowed to use it. So therefore the tax would be less regressive because they'd reap benefit once the service was put in place. Well, the thing to remember is transit, when well done, benefits everyone because it clears the road. It helps our economy function better. It has health benefits. It has household income benefits. It has fatality, you know, accident level. I mean, we saw those indicators and there's multiple benefits that come not just to the riders but to the society as a whole. That's why I think it's so justified to use the excise tax wisely for transit. So if that's not an option at least for this year, what are some of the options, other options for funding? Are there federal dollars available for this kind of cutting edge planning? No. The federal government, we just increased our road system from two lanes to four lanes between Lihui and the community college, which is two miles. And it did wonders for the traffic for two years and now it's all starting to queue up again where the four lanes goes into two lanes. That cost for two miles to widen it cost $80 million. So when you compare the cost to the taxpayer of widening the roads for a very short-term benefit to the cost of perhaps a quarter per $100, 25 cents per $100 in a rise in the excise tax, there's really a no-brainer argument for going with this kind of planning. But the federal funding still favors roads over transit and so we could have used that $80 million to have that $1 million expansion for 80 years. I mean, so we have to begin to change our policies, I believe, but also at the local level we have to use those monies well if they're made available. So what do you want your audience and particularly your constituents on Kauai to do to try and help you support implementation of this plan? What is the next step to get it funded? I don't know right now because that excise tax, I went to get the excise tax power because there aren't that many other sources of funding for this transit system. And that's why I was so disappointed when on our island we had a bill for it and it lost by one vote. And, you know, I think we'll have to go back to the legislature but it's hard to go back to them and say give us the option again when we didn't even exercise it. So one thing people can do is they can go up to their legislators and their council members and say, you know, we don't like taxes but we want a better future for our island. We need a better transportation system and we are willing to pay $0.25 for every $100 purchase to have a better system because this is going to be better for us and our children. And the generations before us made far bigger sacrifices for a good future. So please vote for a good future for us and fund this expansion because if we don't the cost to quality of life to our economy to our families is going to be huge. Well Joanne, thank you so much for coming and sharing this really important planning element for Kauai. And I hope our listeners will come back and join us next Tuesday at 12 o'clock for Sustainable Hawaii.