 Hey, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech, and more specifically, it's Community Matters. And today we're going to talk about whatever happens to the Interisland passenger and cargo ferries in Hawaii. We have Mike Hansen of Shippers Council to help us with that. Good morning, Mike. Thank you for appearing on our show. Morning, Jay. Nice to be back with you. So let's talk about the Interisland ferries or steamers, as the case may be. For many, many decades before statehood, we had these steamers that plied the islands, they carried passengers and cargo, and they were the lifeblood of the connection between the islands. In those days, I think we were better connected than we are today. Can you talk about that for a minute, just to get the economic environment, the transportation environment, if you will? Yeah, the ocean transportation interisland in the pre-statehood era, say from 1883 until 1947, was operated by a company known as Interisland Steam Navigation. And they operated with four combination passenger cargo vessels, and they called it many of the small ports around the islands, including ports that are no longer service today. However, having grown up in Hawaii in the 1950s, I heard from many of the older folk at the time that they were very happy that the airlines had come to Hawaii and they could now fly, rather than take a miserable ship from place to place. So it wasn't all rice and roses as it may have seemed from our perspective many years later. That was romantic, wasn't it? It was a trip out on the ocean, get out of your little house, get to see some distance, get to enjoy the environment, and talk to your friends, whatever it was. From the stories I heard, most people got violently sick. And you have to remember that they carried livestock on the deck. Oh, no. But it was cheap, wasn't it? Anybody could go. It was just a few bucks. So there was no economic barrier to people traveling among the islands. Yeah, well, it was cheap and you could take deck steerage. Yes, right. Along with the animals. Right. And yeah, there were not luxurious ships for sure. It sounds like fun. Boy, I tell you, if they had something like that now, I mean, as a forever curious person, I would definitely take that trip. So anyway, some time around the advent of inter-island air travel, which was before statehood, right? Right. That occurred after World War II. And also, inter-island steam depended not only on passengers, but also cargo. And the old steam ships were very inefficient. And they were displaced by the cargo barge service that was operated by young brothers. Yeah. So they went out. They went out. They were no longer around. In 1947, inter-island steam ship went out of business. Yeah. Okay. And so since then, we've had, I remember sea flight, remember sea flight in the 70s? Sea flight operated from 75 until 79. Yeah. And they operated, they operated with three bowing hydrofoils. As I recall, sea flight was, was a maintenance headache. And yeah, they were, wasn't really built for Hawaii waters. They were unable to keep the vessels in service due to the extreme sea conditions between the islands. Yeah. But it was fun. I took a trip on sea flight to Maui one time. I took my bicycle with me. I had a wonderful time on sea flight. It was, it was very touchy-feely. You were right out there. You could put your hand out and feel the spray. Right. Yeah. And it was basically just a passenger service. They didn't carry any cargo. Yeah. They, they didn't carry any bicycle stuff. They operated three vessels and they had a service to no willy-willy in Kauai from Honolulu. And then they operated from Honolulu to Lahaina, and then Kauai High on the big island and back. Yeah. And each other for a while, it's too bad it went out of business. So from, what did you say, 1979 until super ferry, there was nothing. There was no ferry. And the sea flight vessels were sold to a Hong Kong owner for operation on the Pearl River Delta. Where you had a basically an inland waterway type of situation. And they ran casino passengers from Hong Kong to Macau. Perfect. And the water there was probably, you know, more purpose for that home. It was flat, yes. It was an estuary. So it was a relatively calm water. Yeah. So what led to super ferry though? Now we didn't have anything. And the air tickets got more and more expensive over the years. And I'm not sure when Aloha Airlines went out of business, but you had for several years a monopoly with Hawaiian. So people were really discouraged with the cost of traveling to see their family and friends on neighboring island. But there was another important aspect to the sea flight story. And that is that hydrofoils and also hovercraft that went on a cushion of air, those have all been displaced now by the fast, very catamaran and trimaran configuration. So those vessels don't exist anywhere any longer. Yeah. So that means that we had to design a new hull. It means that we had to find a new model. Right. And that was done primarily in Australia by two companies. One is called OSTL and the other one is INCAT. INCAT is located on Island of Tasmania. And OSTL is in Western Australia just outside of Perth. And that's where all the new modern fast ferry designs have come from. Okay. So are you familiar with, can you talk to us about how the super ferry got started and why? Well, they operated from late 2007 until early 2009. And they basically operated for about a year. They operated one large, what's known as a fast ferry. The Alakai, basically from Honolulu to Maui. They built those, they built actually two vessels, one that was never delivered to a super ferry. And that cost them $180 million. That is the one that was not delivered? No, that was for both. Okay. Yeah. Then for the two ships, $90 million apiece, $180 million for the two. The cost of harbor facilities that the state paid for was around $50 million. Yeah. And that was the Achilles heel. Yes, but that payment by the state, the construction of those harbor facilities, and you can see it as you grow out. Yeah, I've spoken to Michael Lilly quite extensively on this subject. And he was the attorney general for Linda Lingle at the time that this all happened. And it's his contention that the courts went further than they ever had before in interpreting the Hawaii Environmental Protection Law. Yeah, I agree with that. And they didn't have to go that far. And what they found was that the environmental impact statement had not been obtained. Linda Lingle had given a super ferry a pass for it. And the other salient point that we were talking about. According to Lilly, it's a little deeper than that. Basically, the harbor improvements would have normally all been covered by existing environmental impact statements that the Harbor's Division Department of Transportation had already done. And that this magnitude of harbor improvements had been done previously without an impact statement. And the Supreme Court of the state found... Yeah, I know, but it's a very liberal decision. The Supreme Court of the state found that expense by the state was a trigger for the EIS requirement. I understand that. But that was... What Lilly's point is, is that the state had done this kind of harbor improvements in the past under existing impact statements and hadn't been forced to do a new impact statement for these purposes. In addition to that, the reach of the decision went beyond just the facilities. They got into the impact on the environment of the vessels operating at sea. And that was very much beyond the usual scope of these kinds of considerations. Well, there was a lot of protest. People were concerned about the whales, even though the ferry did not run in the area of the whales, and didn't have to. And then there were people who opposed it because of the... I called it the berries on the boots, that there were invasive species that were being carried from island to island, which was ridiculous because you could do the same berries on the same boots taking an airplane. Right. And they also wanted the cars to be washed, especially the undercarriage of vehicles. Even though there was no requirement for that on Young Brothers barges. That's correct. So, I mean, they piled a lot of stuff on the super ferry that other forms of transportation have not had to comply with. Yeah, it makes you think. And a lot of people do think that Young Brothers and the rent-a-car companies didn't want people traveling by super ferry, and they didn't want people taking their cars by super ferry. And so they politically stood in the way. And it sure seems like that. It sure seems like there were political forces here that pulled the rug out from under. Right. It's so hard for the super ferry to operate. They spent all their time in court for the year you mentioned that they ultimately, when the Supreme Court stopped them a second time, in a second case, they gave up. Folded, yeah. Understand. So that was, you know, in terms of public policy, that was bad public policy. Because then what happened is we didn't have the super ferry and it was radioactive. So can you talk about Joe Suki and what happened after the super ferry folded? I'm not aware of that. Well, I can tell you that Joe Suki from Maui, right, he was the speaker of the House. He was speaker a couple of different times. And he, at the time, following the demise of super ferry, he tried for a number of years to introduce bills and resolutions to try to resurrect it. You know, but the truth of the matter is, after super ferry died and Lehman Brothers lost a couple of hundred million dollars in a process, nobody was going to invest in a private venture of this nature again. And one of the officials of super ferry told me one time that if there was ever going to be a ferry again in Hawaii, it would have to be the government that built sort of the way the government builds these ferry lines all around continental United States. The government is incapable of building it here in Hawaii. Right. The investors' losses were reported to be about $85 million in capital money that they put in. And total losses are around $300 million, considering all parties. That's a big... Nobody was going back to that. Nobody was going to try to do that again. Everybody lost so much money. Then also, there was the Molokai ferry that operated from behind that. Before we go to that, I just want to talk about the public reaction, the public reaction to the ferry. I thought that was fairly remarkable at the time. People on the neighbor islands, local people, protested against the ferry. They protested because of the whales. They protested because of the berries on the boots. And I don't think the protesters understood what was really happening because they were shooting themselves in the foot. Now, after the demise of super ferry, they would pay way more on an airplane to get there. And they couldn't take their car. They'd have to rent a car at the other side. And the guys in diversified agriculture could not move their goods from whatever island they were on to any other island. So the result was that people who had protested were themselves injured by the process. I think a lot of the people that were protesting the super ferry simply didn't want any more development. And they saw the super ferry as a means of additional traffic and development. Well, yeah. And that was a very interesting statement because whether they understood they were saying or not is they didn't want people on their island. But the fact is, people were coming to their island by airplane all the time, by the thousands, hundreds of thousands. So this would not have been a problem. The people they were keeping out, and this is so interesting. It's a social experiment thing. The people they wanted to keep out were the people from the other islands, local people. Some of the people on Maui didn't want the people from Oahu there. That was really extraordinary. These were, you know, if they were objecting to tourists, they were not achieving anything. Because the tourists just took the airplane and it was only a few bucks for them. But they were successful in keeping out other local people from Oahu. This is the same kind of thing that came up in the extraordinary phenomenon about wind energy on Lanai. The people there did not want to give wind energy to Oahu. They wanted to keep the island separate. And I felt from both of those phenomena, both of them, were so inappropriate for the Aloha state. Well, yeah, but you've got that anti-development contingent out there, and they are going to be vocal, very vocal about their ideas. And I agreed that some of the opposition to the super ferry was short-sighted. Well, some of it came. I mean, I'm just repeating what I've heard so many times. Some of it came from young brothers. Young brothers did not want the competition for cargo and cars. That's very lucrative. And so they stood in the way. Yeah, that may or may not be, I'm not sure that that was a major factor. But the super ferry just simply didn't have the capacity to carry that much cargo. So I don't see it as being a major threat to young brothers, or having been a major threat to young brothers. To go on with our litany of the ferry operations in Hawaii, the Molokai ferry that operated from Lahaina to Kanakakai, that operated actually for 30 years, from 86 until 2016. They used one vessel, the Molokai princess, which was a mono hull, a conventional vessel, not a fast ferry. It took them about an hour and a half to get across the Pai Lolo channel between Maui and Molokai and into Kanakakai Harbor. And that was started with a $30,000 a month state subsidy that continued until 2012. And for the next four years, they attempted to operate without a subsidy, lost a million dollars and then finally shut down. You know, Mike, I didn't see that event as any consequence at all. I took that ferry, if you want to call it a ferry a number of times. It did not have high capacity. It did not have high speed. It did not have any cargo capability. That's correct. Tourist boat, it was a tourist boat. A tourist in Lanai paid to go to Maui and a tourist in Maui paid to go to Lanai. No, that's a different service. The Sea Link Molokai ferry was just between Lahaina and Kanakakai Molokai. Okay. All right. There was another one then. You're right. It was another one then from Lanai to I'll explain that to you. One of the problems with the Molokai Princess service is they had to cross the Pai Lolo channel between Maui and Molokai. And typically people, it was a pretty rough trip and a lot of people got sick. One of the ideas of the Molokai ferry was to give people living on Molokai the opportunity to travel to Lahaina and work in the hotels in West Maui. But most people found that they didn't have the ability to endure the back and forth because it was an expensive way to get to work. Yeah. And it's also a rough trip. Yeah. But when they had the subsidy at work, but after they lost the subsidy was gone. The service you're talking about is the Lanai passenger ferry operated by expeditions. They've got a high-speed 55-foot catamaran that operates and used to operate five trips a day between Lahaina and Maneli Bay on Lanai. I didn't think that was a catamaran. I think it was a single-haul steel vessel that I took a couple of times. Yeah. The vessel they're operating now is an aluminum hull catamaran. Okay. That was strictly tourism. Right. But there's Lanai residents that use it. But it's an example of a commercially successful ferry service in Hawaii. Yes. And they're down to two trips a day due to the COVID. But you know, Mike, these need the trip from Lanai and the trip from Molokai. Both really seem like small potatoes to me. Well, they are, but I mean... They're not carrying hundreds or thousands of passengers. They're not carrying cars. They're not carrying cargo. They really do nothing for the commerce of the state. I mean, very little. Right. And where I get off on this is that we don't have a ferry because we shot ourselves in the foot and it was tragic. It still is tragic. We need a ferry. We're an island state. We're water bound. And there is absolutely no movement anywhere, not in the legislature, not in the business community, not among the delegation, not among any officials. Joe Suki is long gone. And there's nobody even calling for it, except me. And you? Are you calling for it? In a way, but it's got to be done smartly and the right way. How do you do it smartly in the right way? Yeah, that is the question, isn't it? Do you realize that there was a major movement back in the 1950s and early 60s? For a state operated ferry system? No, I did not know that. What happened? I guess it was, it was promoted by a guy by the name of John Holton, H-U-L. Oh, sure. Holton's ferry. Sure. Exactly. And he was known as Hawaii's Mr. Ferry. He was born in San Francisco and came to Hawaii in 1950. And he began promoting the idea of inner island ferry in 1956. And his vision was he'd grown up on San Francisco Bay and had seen the ferries operating there across the bay, especially before they built the bridges, and thought that would be wonderful for Hawaii. Well, yeah, but history. I mean, it's a little bit of interesting history. My question to you is what do we have to do to deploy a ferry system among the islands? Yeah, but it's important because actually he became a state senator and he became a senate president for two sessions, all riding on the back of the idea of a ferry. So he was pretty influential at the time. He enacted a bill in 1963 relating to the Hawaii state ferry system. That's still on the books. It authorizes the state to own and operate a ferry system. I was suggesting the state could go under that statute now and it's still on the books. Okay, let me go back to my question, which you didn't answer yet. And that is how do we do it? Back in 2016, there were nine ferry bills submitted to the legislature. One bill came out, was enacted as Act 196 of 2016. And the required the Department of Transportation to conduct a feasibility study of establishing the inter-island and intra-island ferry system. That's remarkable because they already had an operating ferry with super ferry. So now they have to have a study to see. Wasn't super ferry a study itself? And the parameters work is to look at it in terms of the Washington state and Alaska state ferry systems. They appropriated $50,000 for the study. DOT submitted a report to the legislature for the 2018 session. We gave testimony at the time and we recommended that they also consider a conventional ferry known as a row-packs ferry, roll-on-roll-off passenger ferry of the kind they operate in Europe. And that they use foreign operating models rather than U.S. operating models because most of the ocean-going ferry operations in the world, in fact, are foreign. And I contacted a number of people who have done this kind of work in the past and got their estimates for consulting on a ferry study. And you'd need about a million dollars to do a proper study. The DOT submitted their report. It was limited to the consideration of fast ferries only and only considered U.S. operating models, especially the Washington and Alaska state. They have a listing of 73 previous studies that were done on a Hawaii ferry system. And those studies go all the way back to 1956 and run through 2014. An enormous amount of work. The early ones, of course, are all related to Hulton's ferry. They investigated eight different routes in response to the legislative intent. And their conclusion was the inter-island, inter-county, intra-island ferry systems are infeasible. Well, I guess that's the conclusion of our show. We have shot ourselves in the foot. We do not have a way to get around on water in the state even though we're an island state. And there is no living idea, living initiative to do this. There is no champion to do this. And after all this time, it is very unlikely we will have a ferry for so many reasons, especially including our technique of shooting ourselves in the foot. Anyway, thanks for visiting with us, Mike. Thanks for giving us the history of that. I'm not encouraged that we will ever have a ferry, but I think it's important to point out to people that we could have had a ferry. We did have a ferry for a while. We have been thinking about it for a long time, but we do not have the political will to do that. We're out of time, Mike. We've got to go now. But thank you very much for joining us for this discussion. Aloha.