 Aloha. Welcome to Moving Hawaii Forward. I'm your host, Tim Apachele. Today's title is Traffic and Gridlock or Only Words. Try living it. For those who have to commute each day bumper to bumper for one or two hours each way. For those who commute each day round trip and stop and go traffic for two or four hours traffic or gridlock, they're just words. But they're an endurance that is hard to describe but required to perform. But that's what we're going to try to do today. With me today are my guests, Leo Bright and Steven Hanaman who commute to downtown Honolulu each day. For today's show, we get to hear their story, their commute. Stephen, Leo, thank you very much for coming on to Moving Hawaii Forward. I appreciate taking the time out and willing to talk about your experience. I have to admit, it takes courage to talk about what you guys do each and every day because it's a big part of your life. It takes time out of your day and it's not always easy to talk about because there's so many impacts about traffic. The reason I wanted to have you on is because when we talk about traffic, it's just that. It's a word. When we talk about gridlock, it's just that. It's a word, bumper to bumper. They're just words. But they have real impacts to people's lives and that's why I want to thank you very much for coming on and speaking about it. So, Leo, I'll start with you first. Describe your daily commute and how far you drive, where you start, and just tell us your story. First of all, thanks Tim for giving me an opportunity to address this issue. I have been doing this for over 20 years and my day typically starts at about 3.30 to 4 o'clock to get to town. I work at the convention center and rather, even if I start at 8 o'clock, I need to be in town by 6 o'clock to avoid any fender bender. If there's a fender bender, then they'll add on another hour and that hour translates to the rest of the commuters till the next 2 to 3 hours it carries over. But typically, you need to plan your day ahead and allow yourself minimum 2 hours getting. And there's a magic time that you want to get out of town too. If you can make it out of town, buy 3, not 3.10, not 3.5, 3.05. But if you can make it before then, then you at least reduce at least an hour and a half. So 3 o'clock, you have a devotee time where Fred Flintstone slides off the brontosaurus into his car and off they go. There's this magic wand that you wave and hope that you get there. So you're telling me that you have to wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning just so you can start work at 8 o'clock. And what time do you go to bed? Well, it depends. At times I was working 2 to 3 jobs, so sometimes I would work from 5 in the morning till 10 o'clock at night and then reach home at 1 o'clock. And that's at night by the time you're at home and if you don't get pulled over by the police for weaving on the road. Because you're tired. Okay, let's clarify that because you're tired. And the police want to tell you the basics of safety and forgets to give you back your ID. You meet them at 1 o'clock. My type of job, which is I'm a chef. So in the food business, your adrenaline is going. So it takes a while to just shut off the machine. So typically I fall asleep at 2, get up at 3.30. That's wild. That's brutal. Let me ask you one question, Steve. I'll get right to you. If you get off at 3 o'clock, what time do you get home in Kapolei? Okay, if. That's if. And that's a really actually the perfect world. It's a good day. I would get home by 5. Okay, so there's a solid 2-hour one-way commute. One-way. And then you're getting up extra early, so you avoid that 2-hour. Okay, so, okay, that describes how traffic and preparing for the gridlock impacts your life. There's a lot more questions I'm going to ask you. But Steve, tell me about your commute. Hi, Tim, and thanks for having me on the show. Thank you for coming. Appreciate it. We can talk about my commute. I moved out to Kapolei about eight years ago. Things have changed drastically since then. The traffic has just compounded and gotten worse and worse. And as it goes along, I was looking for other ways. I have an electric vehicle. I'm one of those lucky people that everybody hates that gets to use a zipper lane. And that does save me a little bit of time. How much? Between Kapolei and downtown, it can save me 15, 20 minutes, which it adds up. Yeah. If I miss my window, I'm the same as Leo here. I try and get out of my house by 5.15 at the latest. It's about every minute I'm past 5.15, it adds 2 minutes to my commute. It's just every minute is 15 minutes added. Every minute is another is 2 minutes added to the trip. How long have you been doing this? Well, I moved to Kapolei eight years ago, like I say. And the traffic's gotten a lot worse. If I leave my house after 5.15, it just gets longer and longer. A beautiful day with light traffic, a holiday. I like holidays. I can get to work down at a little hot tower marketplace through the HPU campus there. I can do it in 35 minutes. And that's going fairly close to the speed limit, the normal Hawaii traffic. If I leave my house at 5.30, that can be an hour, an hour and 15 minutes. The longest it's taken me with accidents trying to get to work on time is almost three hours. And that's 24.15. I mean, if you really think about it, each and every day, every year, times every year, times another year and another year, let's make a chunk out of our lives being taken out. And that's time you're not spending with your family, with your children. There's times that you're not taking care of your own health because you could be working out or exercising once you get home. There's just a whole multitude of activities that you're sort of missing because you're basically like everyone else trying to commute downtown. And that's stuck on the same H1 roadway. Let's look at it this way. I like to do numbers. Okay. If I'm being conservative and saying I'm only going to spend an hour commuting each direction, it's a good day. That's 10 hours a week during a work week, 520 hours a year. I'm sitting in my car and I can't do anything. I'm just stuck in traffic, a minimum. Translate that to productivity and work week. That's 13 weeks worth of hours. So you probably wouldn't agree with the national studies that for Honolulu, the average time commuters are stuck in traffic is going to go from 47 hours to 50 hours a year. That sounds low then. That's misleading. And I actually heard that story and read some of it and it said time wasted in traffic. That doesn't spend, that's not time commuting. That's just slow downs as a result of heavy traffic and not all your drive time. Right. Okay. So it is kind of misleading, very misleading. That's not that. That's not a way. That's not reality. Misleading statistics. I think it was, I can't remember right now, but it was lies, damn lies and statistics. Leo, let me ask you a question. With the amount of time you commute, how has that impacted your home life? I like how he put together the numbers and the math and it really begins to dial in on the actual accumulated time that you spend in just trying to get here to there and how it affected me. I would carefully think the job that is offered, because in reality you paint to work. You put in, you look what the gas prices are versus what the wages you're going to have and the upkeep of your vehicle. And so those things had to equate to what you were earning. And so I would be more selective on the types of jobs that I would be offered. Again, I'm a chef, so my opportunities are pretty broad. I can do personal chef, I can do teaching, but along the lines that as far as jobs, there has been a lot of promises to create jobs that you can work at home. I mean, we had the Ihi Lani and we recently had the Kamakani Ali, one of the largest malls on the island. But my experience with that, I mean, most recently, I try to get in with the hotel. Reason is because they have the wage skills that I'm looking for. And they promised first pick and we had a special job fair just for us. Whereas I went there, I realized that they already hired out six weeks in. So finding work in Kapolei is not going to be as easy as I think it's DH Horton or DR Horton said that there's going to be the creation of potentially 7,000 jobs as a result of the Opa Bili project. We'll get to that in a bit. I was, what I try to get to is when you spend two hours one way or more, what's the duty you mentally, I mean, physically? Are you drained? Are you fatigued? How does it affect your health and your mental? Well, I'm glad you asked that because it became, like I told you, I work long hours and at times, because of the events, you have seven days a week you can be working. It became I needed a calendar to know where, what job I should be at. And it seemed to be one big long day, the same day repetitive. And as far as you leave work to work, dark, you come home dark, you leave work, everybody's sleeping, you come home, everybody's sleeping. So you're not getting a lot of family time? You got to send me pictures. Okay, well, that's quite a statement. That's quite a statement. Just to make it, I mean, that you can go into a whole subject of what it takes to raise a family. And what type of income would it take to support a typical family? Yeah, Steve, you? Similar to what Leo just said, but not having a family life is something that you end up with just by the fact that you have to commute. If we go back to the basic numbers of an eight-hour workday and an hour lunch, if you're lucky, plus two to three hours commute, you're looking at 11 and a half, 12 hours, you're gone from home. You have to factor that into what your wages are and say, okay, I'm working 12 hours a day, I'm gone from my house. Is this job really worth it? And sometimes on the commute home, I'll call my wife and we'll just talk on that hands-free and I get comments all the time. The only time we ever talk is when you're in the car. Mom spent into one and a half days, I should be at home sitting in that car. Well, that leads me to my next question because if you are in gridlock, bumper to bumper, what do you do to occupy your time? You can't text. You can do hands-free communications, but you leave so early, who are you going to talk to? And Steve, you leave early enough where you're going to speak to in the morning at least. Yeah, it's true, nobody. So what is it? Do you listen to radio? How do you unwind when you're being wound up? I guess is my question. For me, the radio is my best friend. It tells you what route to avoid. You need to... And a few jokes along the way, huh? Depends on what radio station you're in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. You have to have a sense of patience and I'm still working on it and trying to ignore people telling you you're number one. But what really can you do? And that's the thing I realized that we became more... we accepted this. And you know, what I talk about, people have it even harder that they live in Macau. Why not? It's longer. You add on another 45 minutes. We're going to take a break, but I want to get back to this question with you and Steve. I do want to leave one comment here. You know, they say, you know, Hawaii is really truly the land of aloha, but how can you maintain your aloha when you're being compressed in a car for four hours a day? And I guess we'll get back to that statement when we come back from this commercial break. Hi, I'm Chris Leitham with The Economy and You, and I'd like to invite you each week to come watch my show each Wednesday at 3 p.m. Aloha and Happy New Year. It's 2017. Please keep up with me on Power Up Hawaii, where Hawaii comes together to talk about a clean and just energy future. Please join me on Tuesdays at 1 o'clock. Mahalo. Aloha. My name is Reg Baker, and I'm the host of Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're a show that broadcasts live every Thursday from 2 to 2.30. We highlight success stories in Hawaii of both businesses and individuals. We learn their secrets to success, which is always valuable. I hope to see you on our next show. Aloha. Hi, welcome back. I'm Tim Apachele, your host for Moving Hawaii Forward. And with me today, my guests are Leo Bright and Steve Hanaman. And we're talking about their commutes and their daily challenges with getting to and back from work. So welcome back. Thank you. I wanted to get back to that comment about, you know, we are the land of aloha. How do you maintain your aloha when you are, you know, three to four hours in traffic every day? How do you do that, Leo? Well, I try to pick up some at Walmart. Okay, good answer. Steve, how do you do it? Deep breath. About the only thing I found that I can do that helps a little bit is to actually, when people want to change lanes, I let them. And that makes some people mad. Believe it or not, again, the people honking at me behind when I let somebody over who wanted to come over. But just doing something like that kind of relieves the stress because otherwise it's a competition. Yeah. Well, it moves traffic faster by letting people in. I spoke to a driver for the emergency truck for the state during commute hour. And he said, if people just let each other in when they see an indicator, flow of traffic would move so much faster. I agree totally. So you do that just to maintain your sanity? To maintain my sanity. And hopefully, somebody will return the favor someday, but you never know. Pass it forward. Pass it forward. Okay. Has, do you feel stressed out when you're done with your commute or before you start? Are there any symptoms of stress that you guys experience? Because, you know, that's the number one thing they cite in all studies, house studies is stress, the stress of commuting. I'm just wondering, personally, does you feel the impacts, either overtly or not? Well, I realize, even just to commute, even if you just commuted, okay, A to B, no work today, go home. You wiped out. You wiped out. Your energy's wiped out. Yeah, but. And there's nothing to do with getting older. And the older part is when you can stay in a car for three days and still have a sense of humor. But what I'm trying to say is that I think you become numb, but you're not up, you're not really, you know, you're not in the mood to go out for weeks or go do the things that starting to pile up that you can only do on your day to day. It's a really important point. I had an hour and 15 commute each day one way. And I just think to remember that is I just didn't have any energy. I just didn't feel like really engaging with my children who were very young at the time. I just wanted to sit and hit the couch and just veg out. But you know, that's the death knell. Once you hit the couch, you're done. It's tough. Pretty much one thing that it does fatigue you, and sitting in the car sounds like a sedentary thing. There's nothing going on. It should be relaxing. But you are tense the whole time. Stop and go traffic. People trying to cut in front of you or slamming on their brakes. So you've got to constantly focus on what's going on around you where you end up causing the three hour delay for Leo here. Because you run into someone. So sometimes I've called my wife and said, you've got to keep me awake. I'm just exhausted. And I'll get home. And that's it. Like Leo, you're just... Well, that's when you mentioned sleep or fall asleep, because I think they're they're discovering right now that the number one or one of the major increases for accidents, even fender benders, is the fact that people are falling asleep at the wheel. Well, after 12 to 14 hour day, I don't know how you're doing that, Leo. That's nuts. That is nuts. So, okay. Well, I'm going to hit the question. Since you're from Makakila, you're in Kapolei, I've got to ask a question about this pending real estate development that's coming online or will be coming online, known as OOPI. There's going to be approximately 11,750 new homes out there. The developer has promised that there'll be a multitude of new jobs that people who buy into the project may have the opportunity of working in Kapolei. I'm not buying that exactly, because job promise is just that. It's a promise. There's no, there's no guarantee. Mayor, Ruthie Haneman, no offense to your namesake, promised that there'd be about 10,000 jobs for the light rail project, and that is not, that has not come to be, and at best maybe there's a thousand jobs that's been created. So, given the fact that this, and it is the largest project in this state that has ever been approved, what's your viewpoint, Steve? What's your opinion about this new project? A large percentage of our traffic problems right now are caused by the price of housing in Hawaii. The closer you get to downtown, the more expensive housing is. It goes up dramatically once you get within a few miles of the downtown core. So, people have been forced to move further and further out of town to be able to afford housing. And as more people move in, more people move out. Oh, Peavey is just the latest example of what's going to happen. There's be a lot of people move there who have jobs downtown. Right. And it's going to increase the traffic. I don't, you'll probably ask a question about the rail sooner or later. Sooner or later it's coming. It's going to come out. It's coming. I'm pretty sure all those people moving into those houses in Hawaii are not going to be riding the rail. Tell me why you think that, because you know what? The council members that voted for this, they, they bought that bill of goods. The land commissioner board, they bought that argument. Tell me why you think that's not going to be the case. Well, I've been where that rail station is in Kapolei in the middle of the farm field, nowhere near the regional transportation hub in Kapolei, which is, I can't figure out that logic. But what leads me to believe this more than anything is a discussion I had with one of the planners at a rail project meeting. Okay. I asked him specifically, what are the demographics of the people that are going to ride the rail? He says, I just don't see it. I sit in traffic every day as one or two people in cars and none of them go from what I can tell to where the rail goes. And he said, well, we're not really targeting them. I said, what do you mean? You've only got three, four parking stations and you're telling me 50,000 commuters a day are going to get off the roads. He says, well, we're actually expect most of the people riding are the ones that are riding the bus. So they won't mind. They won't need parking. It's like, wow. Okay. So you're going to cure the traffic problem by taking the people that are riding the bus and letting them transfer to a train and then get on another bus. How is that going to help my freeway? I don't get it. Hoopopili is just going to add that many more cars to the road. So let's say, let's say that each house out there and Hoopopili has at least 2.1 or 2.2 on average individuals per household. I would say at least 50% of them are going to get on the road. Most of them are not going to have the opportunity to work in Kapolei at a job that pays well enough or high enough that they're going to be able to afford those houses and work just within miles of where they live. I would say most of them are probably going to have to go downtown still to find employment. Or they come from downtown and go out to work wherever they're going to work. But it doesn't matter which way they're going. They're going to be on the freeways. Okay. Leo, have you had time to think about this project and how much better or worse is that going to make your commute in your life? First of all, I wanted to keep it clean. So I'm not going to bring politics into it. Well, you can bring politics, but you still have to keep it clean. But I like a lot of things Steve brought up is buying what we're being sold by the politicians, the councilmen who voted for this. My thing that I wanted to use my time for when we're talking about Hopili, that is self-sustainability. We should be moving more towards self-sustainability. Hopili also has been the place where they produce all of our product and food right now, and it quakes out to 45% of our food immediately here without relying upon outside sources. So at one of these meetings that I went to just last week called IAL Important Agriculture Land and explaining to us how they designate land for agriculture and land for urban, as the more they explain, the more confused they got. It as if they're describing the exact purpose and the use that Hopili has, well, it's called a loon farm right now. It has a history of forming way back in the railroad days, and it has a history of being the best soil to produce this type of food. Very important point, you. And it has a history of having the only place on the island that has all this sun that you need to produce the product. So in other words, you have some of the politicians promoting self-sustainability and we should become more dependent on our own resources, and yet they're taking away something that is already working. A lady that came to the meeting brought two items. One item, a basket full of locally grown food that you can eat. And then she brought out another item, a piece of brick representing the homes. We cannot eat brick and we need to start thinking about the future. The purpose of people like Dr. Dudley and who are passionate about stopping this and has been fighting it for his first as the issue became on the table. And the biggest thing is that if we don't stop this, Hopili, the production of Hopili, we won't have a way to become self-sustained. We already have something that is working. In other words, why recreate the wheel, move it someplace else. And like I said, I was going to keep this clean so I didn't want to bring in the word money. Well, you just did. You can say money. The question is how was it used to get this project approved? Now, I am going to bring in the politician aspect here. I did ask one of the representatives in Fairness, he is a state representative of Matt Lopresti. I asked him to the show and they declined. In fact, the quote that was given as to why he didn't want to talk about this was the following. With all respect to what you are doing and the information you wish to present to the public, Representative Lopresti is hesitant to discuss this on a TV show. Okay. I understand that, but you are a constituents. You are talking about the problems. We have just heard you for the last 29 minutes. I believe that politicians who are involved with either the state or with the city county, they need to get on the show and explain it from their perspective of why the traffic is the way it is, how it is going to get better, and how Opapili is a great idea. I did ask council member Pine to come on the show. They are looking into it. I hope to have her on. Actually, it was the city and county that approved the Opapili project. In all fairness, they should be able to present their position and explain their vote. I think that is critical for everyone who lives out in your area to hear and know why and how this thing got approved. There is going to be more Opapili behind Opapili. There is going to be more projects, trust me. I only have 29 minutes, 30 minutes for the show, and I apologize. I wanted to get to rail. I wanted to get to a lot more things, but I want to thank you, Steven and Leo. I want to thank you very much for coming on the show and sharing your experience with us.