 Aloha and good afternoon. My name is Tim Apachele. I'm the host for Moving Hawaii Forward, a show dedicated to transportation issues and traffic issues in the state of Hawaii. And this afternoon I'd like to talk about traffic issues that pertain to businesses in the Central Business District of Honolulu. What we hope to find is not only how we look at the problems of traffic, but also try to identify solutions. And with me this afternoon is Paris Chai. She's our business owner. She's my guest co-host. Welcome, Paris. Thank you for coming. Aloha, Tim. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very excited to discuss our Hawaii traffic issues with you from my experiences being a resident of Hawaii. Well, you have a lot of experiences because you grew up here, and you work downtown as an attorney, I believe. I'll let you kind of introduce yourself, but by all means, please introduce yourself and the fact that you grew up here and how you've experienced traffic as the years went by. Okay. Well, I was born and raised in Hawaii, and I grew up in Hawaii Chai, but I attended preschool and elementary school in Kahala. So my experience with traffic started even before I could drive a car, and my mom would take me and my brother to school every morning from Hawaii Chai. And we would take them, not the straightest route from point A to point B to school. We would do this circuitous route through all the side streets of Hawaii Chai just to avoid traffic, and then we would finally hit Kalani and Olu Highway, be sitting in traffic, and get to school. So was there traffic even when you were a kid? Was there traffic issues? Even when I was a kid, there were traffic issues, and it seemed to get worse as more communities and districts within Hawaii came about through just construction of new homes. And then I attended the University of Hawaii, and so by then I was driving. And so I thought, okay, now how am I going to handle this traffic situation, getting to my first class at 8.30? So I would pick up my best friend, but then I also had to pick up somebody else who became a friend so we could just use the carpool lane in order to try and go a little faster. So you befriended someone just so you can get that third person in the car? Is that what I'm hearing? Well, I knew him a little. It was acquaintance, but we became better friends. While sitting in less traffic going to the carpool lane to the University of Hawaii, I did befriended him. And then after that, I escaped the Hawaii traffic for three years. I went to law school in California, and then when I came home, I was employed as a law clerk for the judiciary, so I worked for the state. And I had to get to court on time. And to get to court on time, I kind of relived my youth and I would take a very roundabout way to get to the courthouse. I would go from Hawaii Kai through Waikiki and down on Wada just to get to the court to avoid the traffic on each one. That's a lot of miles out of the way? Yes, it was. But I learned all the back roads. And there was also traffic on the back roads, too, so I had to be at work by 745 working for the state. Thereafter, I was a prosecutor, so I worked for the city. And the city also starts work at 745. So, again, I did securities routes, but at this time I had moved to Kailua. And one of the reasons why I moved to Kailua is because on the windward side, there were alternative routes, besides Kalaniana-Oli, to get into the downtown proper region. And I found that to be better, better flowing. However, I had to be at work at 745 again to be a prosecutor. My next job was a lobbyist. I was a lobbyist for Verizon. And we, too, started at 745. And Verizon is one of the utility companies, some of the larger private employers. So I would sit in traffic and turn on the radio or my CD. So before you had a court date or you had to be there, I mean, how often were you stressed out? I mean, did this impact your ability to perform your job? Were you stressed out? Or did you just figure out a way that you weren't stuck in traffic all that much? Well, I actually, I was stressed out because you start your day trying to get to work on time. And you either have to leave earlier or even better. Verizon was pretty flexible with me because I was a lobbyist. I was able to adjust my schedule and not have to get to either at 745 because I worked to about 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock each night. So when I would get to work about 830, I found the traffic congestion to be less than being at work at 745. So I think flexibility in work schedules would certainly help our populace in Hawai'i and so far as getting to work. I'm going to talk a little bit about that later on here. Okay. And to reduce the stress. I mean, we know that stress is not a good thing. And a healthy employee is one who has less stress and can come to work happy and just ready to go. And I think that's what every employer would like from their employee is productivity and also being happy. So now... Not an easy thing to obtain. I mean, really isn't. I mean, having your, expecting your employees that are coming from Ava or from wherever, you know, and it's an hour and a half, you know, bumper to bumper and then you arrive at work and arrive at work at happy. That's, you know, that's tough. And, you know, my whole... My whole... My objective is, you know, how can you preserve aloha when aloha is being crushed out of you, waiting for an hour and a half in one direction every morning of the day, except for the weekends? And that's difficult. And that's why traffic, I think, impairs us to a point where you don't always see it. It just slowly works at us on a subconscious level. And we don't even realize the true impact of traffic because we just, you know, we grit our teeth and we bear it and we try to get through it each and every day. It does have an effect. I agree absolutely with you, Tim. So my current job, actually it's from 13 years ago, I'm a... I have my own real estate company. I'm a principal broker of Hawai'i Realty. And as a realtor, I can... I have a very flexible schedule. I work my work hours, or coordinate my work hours around my clients' time schedule. But I can also schedule meetings when it's not in the heat of traffic, either in the morning or in the afternoon. So that has relieved a lot of stress in my life. But I do find that, again, traffic does affect the pricing of real estate. For instance, the real estate on the west side of the island is less expensive than, say, real estate in closer to town or on the windward side, again, where there's three different routes, H3, the Hliki Highway, and the Puli Highway to get into downtown. So, you know, traffic has a very expansive, far-reaching effect on our lives. Well, that's it. You know, it's true. And when we talk about transportation, it's a very generic term. And, you know, the old saying that a picture tells a thousand words is very true because I could talk about bus and I could talk about biking. And, you know, those are words. So I brought some pictures here for our show today, and we're going to show a couple of those right now and give a visual on what the impact is. And the first picture is, basically, 200 cars, or excuse me, 200 people and in 177 cars. And you can see by the picture that the entire roadway is blocked. It's bumper to bumper. So if everyone did not drive their own car, what would that look like? So the next frame is those same number of people in those same cars that look at the spatial difference. And, you know, it's a dramatic difference. So each car, basically, is blocking and basically taking up the capacity to go road space. So the next picture is what would those 200 people look like if they were on bike. And as you can see, they're all down the center lane and you see more road capacity available for other vehicles. Be nice if they were all van pools or transit bus or what, you know, or things like that or car pools, but generally it's single occupancy vehicles. And the next frame is what would people look like on three buses? And that's the capacity, visual on that. And the last, but not least, my favorite frame, what would people look like on a light rail train? And you can see how much space availability there is. But as you well know, Paris, that the newspaper has never void of articles about light rail here in Hawaii, particularly the cost overruns, the viability of it, the visual aspects of it. There's controversy that's plagued almost every front page news article, you know, be it weekly or bi-monthly, whatever. And the question is, you know, is that last visual that we just saw, is that worth the price that we're all going to pay for for light rail? Again, my background is transportation. So there's a part of me that says light rail is part of the silver buckshot to our traffic solutions. But it depends on how it's implemented. Well, my opinion on that has actually changed over the years. I've been very fortunate because I've had the opportunity to travel to other countries and cities that do actually have a rail system. And I think it's fantastic. And I respect Hawaii's leaders and planners insofar as trying to make Hawaii such a place with an option for rail. However, I do think personally that the route could have been better. I would like to have seen the rail go to the airport, downtown, Albuwana, and Waikiki, or near Waikiki vicinity. Of course, we don't want to ruin our skyline. And the University of Hawaii, you know, we want to promote education. We want our rail system to actually be effective and be helpful. And so my opinion has actually metamorphosized over the years into something different. And I still am optimistic and hopeful that, you know, we will accomplish our goals. And the people of Hawaii traffic congestion will be relieved with this added opportunity to motor transportation. That's an optimistic viewpoint. And I hope that your optimism prevails. I'm sure most voters didn't envision Middle Street as being the final destination. And as you recently, I believe the light rail was announced that it's now gone from $8.5 to $9.5 billion because there's financing involved and financing costs money. So therefore, the cost of light rail to be implemented has gone up from the 5.4 billion initially conceived. So I'm glad you mentioned downtown and light rail downtown because, you know, that probably is not going to come straight downtown, but hopefully as close as possible. We have 4,000 units going on in Kakako, 4,000 condominium units. You worked out town. Kakako is a little bit further out by the airport. But I can't imagine 4,000 units going online and the traffic getting substantially better than what it is right now because right now it's a challenge to get in and out to the airport if you're going to Alamoana than Nimitz. It's a challenge. And what do you think? What do you think is really important about the 4,000 units and traffic congestion? I think that the key to or one of the keys to relieving this traffic congestion during the interim of the rail being built is for our community to step up the plate and to work together. And what I suggest is that these, either private or public, whether it's the city or the state or, you know, large companies, private companies, even small companies, to really think out of the box and be more flexible in their scheduling of what time an employee has to be at work. And of course, we have computers and we can work from home. And I think employers and employees should explore those options. And what's your feeling? I'm going to get right to that. We're going to go to the commercial break. And Paris, thank you very much for your perspectives. And we're going to talk more about that. So this is Moving Hawaii Forward. I'm Tim Apachella with Paris Chai. And we'll be right back. Aloha. My name is Justine Espiritu. This is my co-host Matthew Johnson. Every Thursday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech, we host the Hawaii Food and Farmers series. We like to bring in folks from the whole realm of the local food supply and agriculture. Anyone working on these issues, any organization or individual that has plans or projects. What kind of people have we had on? We've had farmers. We've had chefs. We've had people from government, larger institutions. Everyone who's working to help make Hawaii's local food system that much better. So you can see us every Thursday and join the conversation on Twitter. And we hope to see you there. Think Tech Hawaii, Asia in reveal. I am Johnson Choi, the host. Looking forward to see you next month, December 15, Thursday, 11, right here at this channel. Aloha. Welcome back. This is Moving Hawaii Forward. I'm Tim Apachella. And we're here talking with Paris Chai about traffic congestion in the downtown Central Business Corps. And we're going to talk about solutions and specifically what employers can bring to the table as far as traffic solutions. So Paris, thank you. Welcome back. Thank you. I would like, you had mentioned before the break about what employers can do or the employers need to come to the table as well as with their employees. And I couldn't agree with you more because I think that's one of the things that's lacking here is a lot of employer outreach. If you look at the commute peak, our congestion hours, you know, basically seven to 10 or six to nine. You have people from all over this island going to one place. And that's usually in the Waikiki or Central Business Corps district. And why are we all on the road at the same time? Well, we're trying to get to work. So if work is the destination, maybe those that are the workplaces or i.e. the employers, maybe it's time to tap them gently on the shoulder and say, you know, what can we all do and it provides solutions since everyone is trying to get to your workplace. And I just don't think the state or the city is really doing all that much in consideration of having employers come to the table as part of the solution. I come from a state where there was actually a law that mandated employers be part of the solution. I definitely don't think Hawaii's ready for that. What state was that? Washington state and particularly the Seattle Puget Sound areas where the majority of major employers were located. And there was a law passed back in 1994 that was called the Washington state commutary production law that basically put a mandate on employers that employed over 100 employees that came to the work site between 6 and 9 in the morning that were full time. And that law dictated a few things. And again, I don't think Hawaii's ready for a legislative mandate, but I do think there should be some tax incentives for employers. I think there should be some grant dollars that we could come up with, and maybe there already is, but there's not very much of it. And so there's things that employers can do, which I'm going to kind of talk about, is the first thing is an employer can just simply appoint one person at the work site who would basically be the point person for transportation questions or traffic questions. They're called an employer transportation coordinator. Their name is posted and their phone number is posted and their email is posted throughout the work site. And it's simply have traffic questions or you have questions about our transportation program called so-and-so. And so that's really easy. And then the second thing... I like that. That's a great idea. It's a point person. I wish I had that. It costs nothing. It really costs the employer nothing to have someone in this, not going to require very much time of someone's day. Well, you could just add this to somebody's job description or just use somebody in HR. Right. And usually in front of your HR because usually that's where it comes out of. Because transportation benefits is just that. It's a benefit. So employers are finding out that transportation benefits is actually really valuable because it's a daily reminder that the employee is using something the employer gave them each and every day, whereas, you know, a lot of other HR benefits we forget about. We forget about, well, we don't forget about a health care or a dental plan, but we forget about all the other stuff that employers provide for employees. I think this would be just a real great win-win opportunity for both the employer and the employee. So can you tell me more? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I'm glad you asked. So, you know, it's an employer providing things that really maybe doesn't cost a lot of money. If there's a room somewhere in the employment site where bicyclists can come and bring their bike, they're worried about security, they're worried about locking the bike outside, you know, a building, maybe the employer would say, go ahead and bring your bike inside and we'll dedicate this room for you to put your bike in. Some employers have shower facilities. I mean, how great would that be for bicyclists to use an employer's shower facilities and lockers and encourage bicycling. So that doesn't cost a lot of money. That'd be fantastic and that's great for your health as well. Oh, yeah. I mean, we live in Hawaii. Well, and we look at most health plans, they're trying to proactively address health, not reactively, because we all know the premiums go up exponentially higher when you're reactive to health issues versus proactively trying to change diet and encourage exercising and things like that. So, you know, it's a win-win, as you said before, for employees and employers. The things that do cost money and, you know, you start off slow as an employer. Let's say I just came up with $15 that I'm going to give each and every employee that decides they're going to come in by bus or a van pool or even incentivize them for walking or biking or even carpool to work. You know, some players say, well, you have to do it, you know, five days a week. Well, that's not really realistic because everyone has days where they have to go to the doctor after work or, you know, they have appointments. But it's, you know, start off slow. You know, if you can come to work three times a week by any of those modes, we're going to help subsidize your bus pass or your van pool affair or, you know, something like that. What do you think about other entities subsidying this as well or maybe even the employee? I don't know if that... Was that an option in Seattle or in Washington? Well, what we would do is, you know, when I was working with Boeing or Microsoft or all the major employers, I would encourage employers to, you know, offer subsidies for the employees. But what I would do is I would come to the table with some federal grant dollars and say, look, let's have a private public partnership. And if you give your employee $10, I'll match that $10 for one year, dollar for dollar. But not to go down the corporate welfare, you know, road. Then the next year, the second year, I'm now going to provide 66% of that same subsidy. And then the third year, I back it off to 30... to one-third. And then on the fourth year, the combination of the employers $10 and my $10 now is $20 given to the employee and they're on their own. So it's basically a four-year or a full three-year partnership. And then on the fourth year, the employer now owns that subsidy for the employee. But what they find is that, you know, employees really value the fact that they're getting something to help them come into work. And it's really valued. So that's how we encouraged it was by entering to the discussion as a partner, not just someone who implemented a state law. I'd rather be someone who is a solution provider rather than implementing the law. You don't want to be a dictator. Well, no, we don't. But it doesn't work. It doesn't work. So you found this to be successful where both the private and the public and the employees were willing participants in Seattle? Well, not at first. Like any legal mandate, there was a lot of resistance. But over time, they realized that, look, the cities that were also mandated to follow the exact same law, they weren't exempt. The state wasn't exempt. The federal agencies weren't exempt. If you were an employer in Washington state, regardless of non-government or government, you had to comply with the same mandates. And so, you know, people just said, this is one more regulatory act that we have to contend with. And we're not happy about it. But the difference between what we did versus what California tried to do in the early 90s was that there were staff, paid staff to be part of that assistance. Not only to explain the law, but also explain how we're going to provide assistance so that you can obtain your goals. You can achieve, you know, some right, effective right-share statistics at your work site and not just have us come in and say, you did or did not do what you should have done. So this is not, I don't, there's no federal program, but this is basically a state option. Would you consider it to be more state and private in city? Well, the law actually came out of the Federal Clean Air Act. And that was Washington state's way to address some very, very strict mandates from the feds about air quality. So rather than, you know, shut down or hamper businesses, they said, well, what's the other side of the equation for air quality? Well, that's CO2 emissions from the automobile. Well, let's address reducing the number of automobiles in, you know, during these peak hours of not only congestion, traffic congestion, but air quality issues. So that's how it kind of started in the legislature in Washington state. Excuse me. And by then it grew. So it took many years for businesses to feel comfortable about, you know, what they did or what they were weren't doing about addressing this law. So we would gently kind of guide them back into compliance. We'd never use a heavy, I don't think we ever find anyone in all the years that I was working in that area to an employer. Some came close. Most of them were feds. They just didn't want to deal with it. But it took time and it took credibility and trust. And over the years, it became part of the culture for a lot of these organizations. Now, car dealership said, no, we're in the business of selling single occupancy vehicles. We're not so happy that we want to participate in this law, but they did it. They did as well. Well, I'm kind of a free-spirited person. I don't like anything to be forced upon me. So I like the opportunity to have options. There's lots of options. And I'm going to talk about a couple more. You know, what else can an employer do? You've already said it. Alternative work schedule is so important. If I can, you know, take a day off a week by working 10 hours a day, four days a week, there's my 40 hours. And take that Friday or that Monday off. If you could do a 980 work week where you take one day off every two weeks, you work nine-hour days, that helps that one day of where I don't have to drive in to the workplace. I think one of the most cost-effective and simple things to do is just flex hours. I agree absolutely. Yeah, I mean, if I can give a 15-minute window or a 30-minute window in the morning and the evening to allow people to, you know, or maybe even one hour, sometimes it's harder. A lot of employers have actually now have two-hour windows, both on the AM and the PM side of things. And if I could just adjust my work schedule and work later, just look at all the traffic that we're basically spreading out. The only problem about flex hours is that, let's say, we have a van pool or carpools that are formed in our neighborhoods that are going to the same work site. If I now am 50-my-hours away from my carpool folks or my van pool, then we don't have enough people to form that van pool. So it's a little bit, you know, it works a little bit against that. I think that another factor that we didn't raise in this conversation is children going to school. So parents, you know, they may have a flexible work schedule, but their children might not. So I think that we should also bring in the Department of Education and people from private schools to come to the table as well and to talk about it. So we can work together, employers, you know, government, you know, federal, state, city, and... They're on the road at the same time. And, yeah, they're on the road at the same time. On school officials. Yeah. Right. So that's one thing that we also were trying to do was work with basically the University of Washington. And I know that the University of Hawaii, Manoa, has a program. And the more that could be done with that, because that's a lot of traffic, we all notice the difference when school is not in session. But we're running out of time, and I'm sorry that we just barely scratched the surface. This happens every week. I want to say thank you very much, Paris, for joining us. And I appreciate your perspectives and you really helped the conversation. Thank you. I enjoyed my time. And good luck, Tim. You're going to need it. Well, I think Hawaii's ready. You know, we're at... Sometimes we don't like to change, but I think it's a good time to entertain our new ideas. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'm Tim Apachella, moving Hawaii forward. Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next week.