 Welcome back to the ThinkTek Hawaii and humane architecture with your host, Mark Dispang, on another early, beautiful Tuesday evening here in Paradissel, Honolulu, Hawaii. Since this is a critical format here, we have 30 minutes, we want to jump right in and it's based upon that certain things aren't maybe as paradissel as they seem to be from a distance and this is our situation of transportation, of traffic here. You either sit in an enclosed area that's artificially cooled with AC, running in a vehicle that's driven by AC or even worse, which I can support because I'm doing that. I'm behind these vehicles and inhaling all these exhausts and we're hitting a tragic record that we have one of the worst traffic jams actually in the United States of America. So today our guest, Nicole Hori, thank you very much for being here. Thank you, thank you. I'm happy to tell people about Honolulu Aerial. HonoluluAerial.com is a website. If you have questions about aerial cars, you might want to check it out. See how that could potentially be introduced here in Honolulu. And basically, there would be passenger cars that can hold 35 people a piece coming through the stations about three times a minute. So you have a very high rate to handle rush hour and so forth and then the ride is actually suspended by cables. So it's a tri-cable system. You have three cables supporting the car. Two of those are stationary. One is providing the force to pull the cars forward and then that is in turn floating above the trees and allows you to get above the traffic. So that's exactly how it would look like. And I have to say that you, Nicole Hori, are very used to the situation here. You've been actually sitting on where I sit right now many times and you're on the board of directors. That's where we're able to jump right in here into the topic because you're so used to the climate here. So yeah, that's how it would look like. And maybe Zuri bring up the second page here. This is a little bit about facts and numbers. Yeah, so this is a slide from the recent interim proposal that Hart just submitted to the FTA. You can see that we're expecting from Alamoana about 21,000 people to get on every day, presumably the same number getting off. And most of those people are heading to either Waikiki or UH. So in order to support the continuation of their journey, we'd like to add in an aerial system to connect to the rail. So if we go to the next slide, you can see the route. This would be extending along Kapilani Avenue from Alamoana Center to an intersection at Kapilani Boulevard and University. And then from that point, you can either take a car up to UH Minoa or go down to Waikiki. So the total system length is just 2.6 miles. And depending on exactly how this is configured, it could be anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to ride it. The expected speed is 19 miles an hour. And then depending on how many stations we have, there's also some time for people to get on and off at each station. So you can see that there's seven potential stations. Certainly Alamoana, Waikiki and UH are the cornerstones, but I think people might also be interested in a station at the convention center and then also at Pucks Alley and the Stan Sheriff's Center. So the ones in between are a little optional, but I think they would make the system even more useful for people who are riding the rail. Okay, and Zuri, maybe we can jump over the next picture and bring up picture 5, because in most cases, in many cases, the host is for the host, the subject matter is new as well, but in this case, this problem or typology is very close to me, in fact, me. In my family business, we have our beginning and our professional work as architects in public infrastructure. This is a project here that is on the screen that is also not on-ground. It's actually not above ground, but it's below ground, which here would be rather challenging because of the high water table. But this is just to introduce, this is a project we've been finishing very few years ago, the working title is urban waterfalls, and I want to stress the poetic potential of public infrastructure, making it really cool, making it really sexy. And so with that, maybe we go to the next, which is another fact sheet here, which talks about costs, probably not quite as an sexy topic, but very important to talk about. Well, I wanted to talk about the comparison between some of the systems that we'll talk about later on that are being proposed or built in other locations, and then we know that the costs are higher here in Hawaii for construction in general. But you can see that from some of these station costs, East Kapolei is only $17 million. So it's not actually excessively high compared to some of the construction costs we've had in other places. And I think since the rail is a good model for what we're looking at, you know, when we have a transit station, you have some things that are the same, no matter what the mode of transportation is. It's going to be the elevators, the stairs, the platform for people to board, and, you know, just, you know, protection from rain, et cetera. So some things are pretty consistent. These will be slightly smaller stations, since you don't have to have the full length of the train and people are getting on and off in a smaller area. But overall, I just wanted to, you know, point out that the costs shouldn't be excessively high even here in Hawaii, even with our high construction costs. And analogy could be almost like airports with airplanes, right? You have to facilitate it on ground, but once they take off, you know, they just go, right? And so, you don't have to build, you know, tracks at least when having beams, you know, bridges in the sky. It's a cable, right? That's right, yeah. You have the first wire going across with a drone, probably, and then it will pull along a heavier cable, and then eventually they'll connect those together. Since it is a detachable system, so the car is traveling along the cables and then it detaches to slow at the station while all the other cars just keep, you know, going, that is the case where you'll have different segments built independently, basically. So you'll have a loop for the segment between, you know, one station and the next, and then you'll have another loop for the next section of the line. And as you were promising already, and this is really important to show precedence, approval of evidence for that. And this is a chance to reconnect to my many affiliations to that subject matter. One of them, the first project is actually from where I come from and the city I help you out with a pronunciation, but already we rehearsed and did it really well, so it's called Koblenz. Koblenz is actually where my grandparents and parents lived and I've been there as a child quite a bit. And so a very good friend of mine here in Hawaii, who is a big fan of when we come to picture 10, which maybe Zuri can already jump to picture 10, kind of shows the very picture risk is the Rhine River and it's the bluffs along the Rhine River. So actually for Germany, not unsimilar to our conditions here, you got water in the mountains, right? Yes, and this is actually a World Heritage Site. So when they originally proposed the aerial cars for this location, it was supposed to be temporary. They didn't want to imperil their World Heritage status, so people enjoy the system so much that they decided to keep it and it's a fun ride for tourists. It's about $8 to ride across the river. It takes about five minutes in each direction and then at the top is the location where they had held the fair that was the impetus for this project. I believe about 1.5 million people rode it for the floral exhibition. It brings back the most awesome childhood memories and I wish we would have had that actually way back. We had to drive up and climb up the hills where it's good okay, but this is much better. It definitely gives people an opportunity to see things even if they aren't able to be as physically active. You can see that this is actually a system that was designed for an urban setting. So it's here kind of in a garden setting, but it has a smaller footprint than a lot of the other gondolas. A lot of the ski resort gondolas are much more designed for protection from the weather and they have more amenities that the skiers are going to use. In this case, you have a much smaller footprint of the station. It's a more light and airy architecture and then also the costs were lower. So partly because this was supposed to be temporary and because it was also a demonstration project for the manufacturer, they ended up only spending $20 million on this, which is just amazing. I think if they'd known it was going to be permanent, they would have probably put a little more money into the towers on each end. So you can see that there are some kind of functional looking structures right at the mouth of each station and those are enabling the aerial cars to get up to height so that you don't have to raise the entire station. The entire station could be one story off the ground or even sitting on the ground and then this tower at the mouth can be used to help the cars get up and get to there. And making just a quick stop in London, which would be the President-11, to then not stay there much. We're kind of on a European tour here to move on to Paris right next. Here's another system that's been built in London. It's actually sponsored by Emirates Air, so they call it an Emirates Air car. But basically you can see here the wheels and support structure for that tower at the mouth of the station again and it just goes across the Thames. Awesome. We moved to Paris here. There's a map for a proposed system here and then there are many pictures, so Zuri will walk us from 13 to 19. So this system is actually designed to connect Greater Paris to the Paris Metro and it's now in its public comment period. So they've done a fair amount of the design but they also are proposing different variations that they're seeking comment on. By the end of the month, they should be wrapping up all their meetings and you should be able to have better sense for what the community is looking for in this case. But their system is almost exactly the same length, just very slightly longer than the system connecting Waikiki, Alamoana, and UH. It has five stations, so you can see here and in another station, another picture of the Crete station, that you do have different options for where you sight the stations. In the center of the picture, there's a busway, so one thing they're suggesting is maybe putting it immediately adjacent to the busway would make it easy for people who are riding the bus. In this picture, you can see that it's actually closer to the metro side, so then there would be a sky bridge connecting back to the busway. But it's a very multimodal transportation hub and it's nice that the flexibility of the sighting allows you to put the station where it makes the most sense for the riders because you just have a lot of flexibility in terms of where you place them. Awesome, and with that thought, we're going to hold that one and we're going to be back to Niko Hori's sky driving today in about a minute. Hey, Standard Energy Man here. Make sure you tune in on my lunch hour every Friday from noon until 12.30 at least. Maybe I'll go a little long if you've got good stuff to share with you. But we'll talk about energy, all kinds of energy. My favorite is hydrogen and my other favorite is transportation and hydrogen. But we'll talk about all kinds of energy. Be with us every Friday at noon, Standard Energy Man. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Danelia, D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm the other half of the duo. John Newman, welcome. We are co-hosts of a show called Keys to Success, which is live on the ThinkTech Live Network series. Weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. We're looking forward to seeing you then. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Law Across the Sea. Please join me every other Monday to hear lawyers from Hawaii discussing ways to reach across the sea and help people and bring people together. Aloha. Welcome back to Nicole Horey's sky-driving vision here that's going to bring paradise back to paradise. So we've been in Paris, and we're going to go back to Paris for a little bit more. Yes, yes. So just to give a quick rundown of what they're envisioning for the system. Here's an angle station, one of the intermediate stations. You can see that there's different heights. So this is a taller version, and then there's another version which would be closer to the ground. Their overall system has five stations at a total cost of... they're expecting about 120 million euros. So it's... most of the cost is certainly in building the stations themselves. And I think it's actually, you know, shows the case that Hawaii might actually do even better because they're only expecting about 14,000 passengers per day, whereas if you looked at the ridership coming off the rail at Alamoana, that's expected to be over 20,000. And I think a significant number of people might also be riding directly from Waikiki to UH or, you know, getting on at Paxeli or getting on near the convention center, etc. So I do expect it to have a very high ridership, and I think the presence of the system would also really increase the number of people who are choosing to ride the rail because it just makes it that much easier for them. They don't have to get on a bus and you don't have to wait for the cars to arrive. There's just a continuous stream of them coming through the station. Definitely. People at this point, and I've been there many times, they might say, well, you know, this might all work in Europe, but we're, you know, it's debatable if Hawaii belongs to the United States. It's not always easy to imagine it. So let's go to the mainland at least to get a little closer. We're going to see three slides about Austin, Texas. Austin is also working on a system. They've allocated some funding from their transit authority to start doing the studies for this. Funding has also been allocated for a Georgetown area line near Washington, D.C. So that would potentially allow people to cross a river there too. The Austin system is proposed for more in town, just, you know, in an urban setting to get people above the level of the street. So that they're not fighting traffic. But it's nice to see that systems like this are being proposed. There are some really successful other aerial car systems. Portland is one. You know, there's all sorts of ones that, you know. And us being strategically between, you know, United States and Asia, we get one example here from Asia. Slide 24. There's actually a large number in Asia. Yeah. This is just representative for the world. The longest one in the world is in Vietnam. And you just, you know, go for miles across the ocean in between towers. It's kind of amazing. Austin, my favorite example, once we ran into each other and I got to know about this and I got hyper-excited about it. I was bouncing off you an example that I was stuck with me the most, which is in Rio de Janeiro, where there's some faveyas who haven't been connected and can't be connected unless you brutally cut through. And they were looking just for a square foot here and there to put a post. And they do this to bring the proletarians, the working-class people to work. But in the reverse, it actually had brought tourists into neighborhoods where usually you would never bring tourists. So it's a win-win situation. And, you know, Rio and Honolulu has a lot of similarities as far as culture and climate and also challenges as far as growing poverty and homelessness. Well, I do envision this foremost as a commuter route. I think it's going to be a fundamental part of people's mornings and evening commutes. But during the middle of the day, I do think tourists will take advantage of it. I think, you know, it's very likely we'll put pricing in the range of $5 a ride for tourists if you're only paying for one ride. But then there's ways to make it less expensive by providing discounts for, you know, disabled people or elderly by providing, you know, passes so you can get a much cheaper rate per ride and then also bundling it with your bus pass or your rail pass. So for the local community, it's a very cost-effective way to, you know, get from point to point. And it's also very efficient in terms of energy consumption and cost to operate. No, it certainly is. And if you could go, Zuri, is it jump to 28, please? This is, we promised ourselves we want to be a little bit more philosophical, maybe a little bit more visual and visionary here. I actually want to make a point, pitch to you, which we talked before, and you said, OK, Martin, do it for the sake of it. And I would like to be your consultant and talk to the manufacturer because I think there's one really important super potential here because as an architect, my point is, you know, it all has to work, but if it's not poetic, it's not architecture. So I think here, you know, once you elevate yourself from the ground and you're up in the sky, you fly. You're like a bird, you're like an eagle, and it just takes off. But if you are that in a hermetic, once again, artificially air-conditioned cabin, I think this is a big sacrifice on the system. And like the analogy to the heavy rail, which already is what it is and bad enough, but I think the worst thing is the cars. The cars are basically invasive, as the whole rail is. So these are basically cars that are sort of conceived somewhere else, for climate somewhere else. But at the very end, we say, oops, we're in Hawaii, so we're going to paint some waves on it so it makes it look like it's somehow local, it has to do something with us. But we're actually sort of not taking advantage of the beauty of the easy breezy environment we're having here. There's certainly easy options. So the picture that was just shown is a competitor to the picture of the car that we're riding in. Both of them have about 35 passengers. So you'll have seats for 24 people, and then you just have a lot of room to move around in the cabin, you can walk around without worrying that it's going to start rocking. You have the three cables for stability again. Usually there's something to hold on to as well, and then room for handicapped or bicycles, things like that. Some people might want the air-conditioned experience. Some people are going to appreciate just having the Wi-Fi and so forth. I do agree with you that the ability to take pictures without glass in the way might be nice. I think a lot of people will be riding it for fun and excitement. There are some other places where, like in Hong Kong, they have a system, and they basically have a few cabins set aside that have just glass bottoms for the more adventurous riders. So it's a very different experience. No, that's actually a good thought. Not every cabin has to be the same. They go in a row so you can say, choose this cabin if you're like that, choose the next cabin if you have another taste, if you feel different. The Oakland Zoo is also coming up with their safari cabins. Basically, they have got the bars across to keep people from falling out, but they're expanding the zoo so that they'll have a large, maybe 50 acres of bison and elk, and then you'll be riding over that to get to the Grizzly Bear exhibit. It's kind of a fun thing to add. Zuri, can you get us picture 29, please? I think 29, really, I stumbled upon that picture and I thought, okay, this is really it. It's about evolution. I apologize, it's a little blurry. I pulled it off the web, so forgive me for that. But everything else we have talked about is in best case, exotic, because it's not from here and we bring it here and it best phase blends in without suppressing something that's local here, whereas the heavy rail is highly invasive, how I'd like to call it. It's a foreign system. Logically, economically, not at all. But this here is local history. That's local legacy. These are the streetcars, and as you can see, they went up the mountains pretty high. You can see they are easy breezy. You can see these are almost like they want to fly, but they couldn't fly yet at that point. And of course, today, we don't have sort of the idyllic situation of not congested, not crowded streets. We have that. I really see in your proposal also the natural evolution and reconnection to a system that actually Honolulu had. And the clever part was that, which was actually then hold against them when the oil industry and they brought their buses. They were telling the city who was in charge of that, well, you actually have three systems to operate. You have to operate basically the tracks. You have to operate the cars, and you have to operate actually the power system. They even have their own power plants to come up with the power for the electricity. So they said, you know, all three things you can collapse into one system, which was the combustion engine fuel and driven car, and little did they know it was too tempting way back. They just had to say, okay, we do this. But now we know better, and we wish we could go back to that. Yeah, now we have so many cars that no one's, you know, going in every way fast. And your system is actually getting back to that. It's just elevating it. But, you know, you have a very low maintenance. You have one generator, so to speak, one energy source somewhere that's centralized and not decentralized. Just think about the other thing, you know, when I'm looking out of my privileged view that I have in my little place, but the noise pollution that we have, there is actually the air pollution that you can smell, but there's the noise pollution that you hear, because all these combustion engines are so outdated that it's just unbearable. It would be a much quieter system, I agree. It would be whispering. There's just nothing. And again, I have, this is all ingrained in me because you asked me before, you know, and my mother is Austrian, so I was born with skis on. So every winter, we, and my mom, by the way, to that regard, we went to ski every winter. So I grew up with these kind of systems. And the ski lifts, this is another pitch for my easy-reasy version of it that I would love to consult with manufacturers. And I know a little bit about structure. You need a cage, basically, the structure to hold, but that could be a frame. There were the days in America we were talking when the trains, the untracked trains were the dome liners and you had a glass roof and you could see the sky. That was awesome. You can implement that to keep the rain off, but to keep the view. And then not to fall off, you could have a very sort of densely woven, stainless steel fissure net sort of very doable things that you could basically implement. Certainly there's room for customization. There's some pictures from Chicago. I don't know if we can get those, but they're proposing custom cabins. So a lot fancier than the ones that are available off the shelf that we showed earlier, but it is in Chicago being proposed as a very tourist-oriented, $20 ride kind of route. I think it's beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful. But it's the windy city. I've been there, so it's very chilly. That's the advantage of the three cables again. You don't have as much rocking. It's much more stable. And another system which is sort of related is actually the chair lifts. I remember when I was a kid the technology was just live through it. You know, it got cloudy, the storms blew the blizzards and you just lived through it. You got bitter cold by the way you got up there. Now they have all these kind of convertible tops that the riders can choose to basically pull close. I really love the idea. We hadn't talked about that before, but now it comes to my mind the sort of diversity of cabins that every third one is an easy breezy one. Every second one is a more conventional one. So people really have the choice. And this is beautiful. It's very visual, I think. There's a lot of fun things you can do with it. There's so many options in terms of the architecture of the stations. There are options in terms of any support towers that you have. You don't need many support towers, but where you do you have design choices and then you also have a lot to consider when you look at the cars. I do have a website, HonoluluAriel.com So I hope if anyone is interested in seeing more pictures and seeing videos, that they'll take a look at that. I'm sure lots of people will. I am. I'm hooked on that. Literally and figuratively speaking, because this is awesome and you've got to make this work. I promise that. I'm excited. It has to happen. This is really an innovation for our islands. It's a good way to make that connection from the rail to where we want to go. And I'll hold you accountable for that. It's an easy breezy, exotic version of this versus another invasive one which would be still nice, but not as nice. Better than just riding in a car, more relaxing, hopefully. Thank you so much, Nicole. This was awesome. Thank you. Your vision of sky driving. Thank you very much. Thank you.