 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Absolutely. Yes, there is life after statehood. I'm Jay Fidel, and I'll be the host today, even though it's kind of Ray's program, Ray Tsuchiyama. He'll be my guest because we're going to talk about something that has been remarkable since statehood, roads and traffic in Hawaii. We're going to compare. And we're going to ask the question is, how have we been keeping up? How are we keeping up with roads and traffic here? Welcome to your show, Ray. Thank you for having me and me to kind of have myself. And as you know, statehood was going to be the best of all possible worlds after the territory of Hawaii where people look back and say it was the worst of all possible worlds in some ways. And now, of course, we're living in a situation in 2018 where people have become numb to traffic or just to take it for granted. That is the new, I hate to say this, normal. So how did it begin? You have rich memories of life on Maui. I have memories too when I arrived here in 1965, a lot different about cars then. How was it as you grew up on Maui? No, no, no. I didn't grow up in Maui. I lived there recently. But I grew up in Kalihi. And around the same time that you arrived, I arrived also in Kalihi. And of course, as we spoke before, Honolulu was much more neighborhood-centric. And in fact, Kalihi where I grew up was a very unique area. And it's a very dense area. There's currently 42,000 residents of the census tract called Kalihi Palama. That's a lot of people. But even back then, the lands beyond Red Hill were, to me, pockets of like little towns and communities. Aeya, Waipahu, Wahewa, way out to not a community. Each one was another small plantation. That's right. That's right. Or the ending of plantations at that point. And Ag was still going strong. Dole of pineapple and sugar were still being harvested in the central Oahu. But downtown Oahu was very concentrated. But remember Waikiki was just getting started. There was the Ilekai, the Moana, and Royal Hawaiian, and Haleikulani, and some new smaller hotels for the middle-class tourists to come. And of course, downtown was where everything was happening. Downtown was the retail center. But there were other localized places like, of all places, Kaimukii, Wailai Avenue, was a bustling place. And there were strips of businesses along Baritania Street and King Street. And then one day, it became both from two-way streets to one-way streets. And that wrecked retail in those areas. Yeah, it's not funny. I mean, it was for traffic purposes. That's right. When you talk about traffic. But it wrecked retail all around the central business. And of course, the other one that really, everybody believed in statehood planning to alleviate traffic was H1. And that was to bring people in and out of the central core. And of course, what that happened is that it unleashed development out there beyond Red Hill. But when you look at H1, and take a look, as you're going down H1 towards Waikiki, how the on and off ramps are designed. Okay? They're all compromises. There's a lot of places where people are getting on, where people are trying to get off. And on the mainland, you don't see that that often. It's a very convoluted, it's very short, narrow place. And that goes to a fundamental point, a legal point about Hawaii. As I learned early on when I was working for the government here, Hawaii doesn't like condemnation. Oh, really? I can tell you stories. Nobody wants to condemn land for government projects. And so the result is they don't. If they can't make a deal with the owner that works for both sides, they don't make a deal. And they don't condemn. Result is you get the freeway. The freeway is a perfect example of that. They didn't want to condemn the ramps in and the ramps off. Okay? So that you have this really odd design about the freeway. It never worked then, and it doesn't work now. And it's because they didn't condemn the land they needed to condemn to make those ramps work. And this is not only around the freeway. It's really in many other places in the state. Now, why don't we have traffic circles, because we don't want to condemn the land? Why don't we build new roads that will allow new access, such as in the Oahu area, where there's only one access in and out. We should condemn land and build new roads that will improve the access. We don't do that. And I think you have a very good point, but places like Singapore and other places that really transform communities, they provide a very good positive alternative, an option, so that you could live in a better place or have a different ... I think the state doesn't offer those a menu of very good options. So what you do is just hang on to what you have as much as possible. So there's none of that great changes or transformations. Right now, the most transformational place that they're trying to create a very artificial neighborhood where people can live, work, and play in the same area is Kakaako. But it's artificial. Well, it did happen before. It happened in the old days, as you described, down Ieya and Pearl City and Waipahu, the three plantation towns where you stayed in the one town, and this was repeated on the neighbor islands. Right. Look at Hamakua, look at Maui, where you stayed in the same town. You didn't need a car. You didn't have a car back in the plantation days. You just lived your life in the plantation town. No, you have a very good point. I said before that my father grew up in Pune in a camp, had 11,000 residents and the total Maui was barely 45,000. So I think what you're saying is that in the history of Hawaii, there were many artificial towns that were made for living, working, retail. Company towns, yeah. Right. And for a lot of people, strangely enough, they have very good memories. And when you talk to people about the plantation, they don't talk about how bad things were. I think most times they would tell you how everybody was the uncle and aunt. No doors were locked. Which is right, Ray. Which is right. Were the plantations really kind of an illusion field kind of place where everybody was happy? Were the plantations really sort of a self-deception? I think there's, I think it's both. But you add another, because compared to what, compared to the life my grandparents had in Japan, wow, it's so much better when you think about it. Or China, or the Philippines, wow. You have running water, you have bathrooms, you have food, and all kinds of things. That you didn't have an oppressive police kind of thing. Of course, there were judges and police that were really self-contained, especially on the neighbor islands. The thing that really took people out and began to transfer their minds was education. Public education. In the 20s and 30s, Territory Hawaii education was very good for the children who could go. They were teaching Latin in Maui. That's right. My high school had Latin, had proms at Julius Caesar. My father's best friend was called Cassius. That's where it came from. And they began to pursue cars. Everybody had a license. Everybody tried to get a car. People would go to proms in the car, go to a driving in the car. And really, in the pre-war period, it was very technologically aware society. I think, you see, people look at the political society as a very static, immobile society. I see the beginnings of models and a transition towards suburbs. As much as California, but this was happening on the mainland, too. It was all that period of the 30s where everybody worshiped the car. Every kid had to learn how to take apart the model, put it back together again. We were, Hawaii was trying to emulate, I think, what was going on. Exactly. And they did a good job in those days. Everybody knew about the car. Then I remember, just a short story. This is not in the 30s, but it tells you the story. So I once represented a trustee of a trust fund that had unlimited amounts of money to give to certain beneficiaries. And one beneficiary, they said to him, look, you're graduating high school. We'll send you to any college on the mainland you want. Name it. And we'll fund everything about this college. And the beneficiary said, I don't want to go to college. I want to go to automobile mechanic repair school overnight, with the dormitory and everything somewhere in Arizona, I think it was. And that's what I really care about, because that's what I want to put my career into, auto mechanics. And this is fairly recently. I think there's a culture point that came out of the 30s where people worship the car. They'd rather do that than go to a four-year college. And I think that still exists today. And the trustee said, are you serious? I give you everything, and you want to go study one? Yep. That's what I want to do. And he went there. Wow. And up till I think the 60s, there were schools for mechanical engineers sponsored by GM's and Ford's in Detroit. And that's where my father went right before the war. That was the mecca of auto engineering in the world when you think about it. So now fast forward to after the war, fast forward to a time when people were coming off the plantations, I guess that's the 50s and the 60s, to a time when they had some disposable income. Now they're buying cars like hotcakes. Automobile dealers are here in force, and they're selling cars like hotcakes. Very profitable business in those days. And people are, I mean, all of a sudden, they never had a car before. Now they have a car. Right. Now their wife has a car. Right. Now their kids have a car. Right. Now four people in the family, all four of them have a car. And that's where we are today. In fact, it might be five or six cars in that four-person stand. And then in a garage, and the only way to get a large place with a garage is out in the Kapolei area or in the western suburbs. And all this is a burden on the infrastructure, on whatever that freeway turned out to be, however many ramps on or off. And on the roads, whether they had traffic circles or not, whether they had modern timed lights or signal technology on the roads, whether they were one way or two ways or whatever. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because they couldn't handle the number of cars. What do we do about that? What did we do about that? Say nothing. Well, since that time, Neil Blaisdell, in an apocryphal story, held up the map of Manhattan, north-south. And he put it this way. That's Oahu. That's 1967. Very interesting. Very interesting. And there must have been people from Hawaii, must have gone to the Tokyo Olympics of 64 and rode in a motor rail from Haneda Airport to Hamamatsu-cho in Tokyo. They must have seen it at that time. But they didn't bring it back for some reason or another. That would have been the beginnings of mass transit back in the 60s. That would have transformed Hawaii. But Neil Blaisdell thought about it even back then. He was thinking of it. So that tells you that congestion was becoming a problem back in the late 60s. When I first started practicing law here in 1971, we would hop in one of the partner's cars. We would drive to Kaimuki. We would have a big lunch with the partner and three or four associates. And then we'd come back. And all of that was like in 45 minutes. Try that today. You know, and really, I mean, I really don't think that the city has put any significant money or planning into organizing and reorganizing the roads or the traffic systems so that you have too many cars on an aging and not an updated system. And it gets worse and worse. And then you have, and I would like to discuss this with you, Ray, you have what I call a flash jam, which nobody can predict, or at least without a computer. Nobody can predict when or where it's going to happen and how deadly it's going to be. And you're going to a place where you thought you could get there next period of time. Plenty of room, all of a sudden bang, flash jam, for no good reason. And you would think that in the 21st century, living today with the Google, Facebook, Amazon, AI, artificial intelligence, that we could have algorithms that would change the lights and everything and channel people. And this is more open, so it sends you a little mobile text. And it would be so automatic that it would be prearranged how you get from place to place. So you would think that, but I don't think anybody is really placing any research on it. What interests me is, you know, you watch television in the morning and you say, oh, this one's crowded and the traffic is really bad, or here's that accent over there. But you don't have options. It's not like, you can't do anything about that. You can't go around the area, it's the only way you can go in. It's informational. So you suffer. And the other thing is, you know, so you ask the city, what are you doing about it? We've built this really expensive, brand new traffic observation center where we know how the traffic is doing at all points around Oahu, okay? What does the traffic observation center do to actually control the traffic around it? Oh, we don't do that. We watch. It's informational. It's all informational. And it's part of this thing about, you know, lay back and enjoy it. It's the new normal. It's the way things are, you know, suffer through it. What's that word in Japanese? It means have- Gamon. Gamon. Gamon. It was in the allegiance play. Right? Gamon. Everybody sits there on the highway. Gamon. You have to suffer. You have to suffer. You have to suffer. You have to suffer. You have to suffer. You have to suffer and silence. You have to suffer. And you spend two hours a day, or more, three hours a day, you know, commuting. And Gamon. And really, we have forgotten how to try to get government to do something. We have given up on trying to get a better arrangement. And government, through our giving up, they give up. Government's not doing anything either. There have been all these plans over the years, but nothing right now. And after this break, we spend a little time coming to some kind of suggestions about what could happen to improve this, and the possibilities flood your mind will come right back. Okay. Aloha. Hi. I'm Dave Stevens, the host of Cyber Underground. Every Friday here at 1 p.m. on ThinkTechHawaii.com. And then every episode is uploaded to the Cyber Underground. That library of shows that you can see of mine on YouTube.com. And I hope you'll join us here every Friday. We have some topical discussions about why security matters and what could scare the absolute bejesus out of you if you just try to watch my show all the way through. Hope to see you next time on Cyber Underground. Stay safe. You know, maybe we're going to have, what is it, guillet jaune? That's the yellow vest. Oh, yes, that's right. They're protesting with it in France, all over France. We're going to have people who protest the traffic and the lack of government action on fixing it wear a yellow vest and have a little protest. It wouldn't be bad. That's something that may change some of the letters. But going back to your question, and over time, of course, especially in the 80s and 90s was this emphasis in Hawaii about employment centers. You have to create an employment center where people live, which is on Oahu, the west side, so that you prevent people from getting up in the morning and commuting into Nantara Waikiki. Just leave them to just walk or, you know, ten minutes away that could be at their place of work. Utterly, utterly didn't happen. Look what happened to Kapolei and all that. It hasn't happened. It's not a second city. It's not a second city. Strangely, Waikiki and downtown are even more concentrated and more dense. That's where people like to be for business opportunities. But people used to argue there could be a lot of the back office operations, right? You don't have to meet people. You just have to have your computers and the people inputting things or the state offices all moved out. And it's an interesting kind of thing. You have to have some kind of huge transformational move, like in Tokyo. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government offices used to be near the Tokyo station. But the population of Tokyo had moved out in the western suburbs. They moved into Shinjuku, the western part of Tokyo. I mean, the central demographic point of Oahu is probably pro-city today. That's where the center of- The weight. Yeah, the weight. Exactly. The weight, the balance, right in the center. So, theoretically, you should move Honolahale to pro-city. That's number one. If you do that, all the people have to go there. And then people have to go there and then live nearby or have offices there. That's number one. It's a huge transformation. Something very egalitarian about that. And then you have to move offices, headquarters. You have to move two or three huge headquarters that attracts a lot of people, banks that were to Kapolei. Well, that's what Ron Moon was trying to do when he moved the family court to Kapolei. He insisted and a lot of the people in the bar didn't like it. But that's exactly what his analysis was in moving a significant government office to Kapolei. So that, again, brings lawyers, CPAs, and so forth. But it just doesn't happen on this, you're at a higher level. That's number one. Number two, where we talked about great incentives or disincentives. And incentives in a way of what can you do to legislate brings a great advantage is taxes or money to buy an EV, for example, or not to buy a car or go on bicycles and all that. That's number one. Or have great disincentives, which is how to make a car price so high that you can't afford it. Or gasoline prices so high, $8 to $9 a gallon, which is in Japan and many European countries. And people are not riding the streets, except in France right now. But in Japan, they're not riding because they have great options for mass transit. That's what you have to give them. You have to, you make one option less attractive and another option more attractive. Now you have changed public conduct. We don't know how to do that. We have to learn how to do that. So yes, you make gas more expensive. You make cars more expensive. You limit the number of cars and you require some kind of payment to the government on every new car beyond, you know, you can set it up so that it becomes expensive. They can say that's regressive. On the other hand, it's not really regressive if you're offering alternatives. You put a lot of money into buses, Ray, make buses read. Why haven't I seen that? I don't understand that either. Because I think the city treats the buses a profit center or something when they shouldn't be. But interesting when you say that, because one of the legacies of the Frank Foster administration were the bus and parks and efficiency. When you look at the city then, the city has changed for me. There's a lot more like areas near city parks or sidewalks. There's grass growing. It looks bad. It's bad. But it was a much more efficient city under Foster. But the bus, you're correct. And when you think about a reaction against, strangely against a bus in the 80s was that a lot of Japanese tourists didn't know how to use the bus. Who has $2.75 and change when you think about it? How do you know what the bus driver is telling you in English how to get from Waikiki to downtown? You have no idea. You can't read it. So that's how the development of an independent parallel bus system developed. The Lea Lea and the Oli Oli and all these open buses that pick up seemingly only Japanese tourists. That's kind of a parallel system that they developed. Because the Japanese didn't like to ride the regular system. Well, I don't think, you know, no, they don't like. I don't like to ride the regular system either. I think it can be much better. Of course, there's many things to improve. But why put more buses when you can have, you know, one bus system? Good point. Yeah. But anyway, that was an interesting impetus for that because there are still a lot of people who do not have a car from Waikiki who would like to travel out for short rides into Ward or near downtown. So that's another area. The larger, more sustained propagandizing of people about the culture of cars and the worship of cars has to start maybe in kindergarten. And consistently through and reinforced every year, cars are bad. Take a bicycle, walk, take the bus. I mean, all these things have to be like in the minds of children. So when they graduate, they have a much more sustainable view of the world. Yeah. And voters and the legislature. The legislature can solve this problem in one stroke. The city council can solve it in one stroke. They don't do anything. And I mean, it's just as bad on the neighbor islands, terrific traffic jams on the neighbor islands. Oh, even fewer buses and a far comprehensive bus service on the neighbor islands. They're absolutely right. So it's absolutely necessary to have a car. In fact, there are probably more cars per capita per family or Maui or island Hawaii or Kauai than on the Wahu. The problem was harder on the neighbor islands because you have to have more buses to cover a lot of distance. Back in the day, I'm talking about two or three terms ago. The term before Billy Kenoi, the buses were free from Hilo to Kona for all the hotel workers. Of course. Free. This was such a wonderful thing for everybody. People don't realize how important it is to have free buses. In Melbourne, Australia, they have free buses in the central business too. And it has made the place Kona-Wai. I would write a free bus. It was free. I would just get on and get off and short stops all around downtown Waikiki. It would make my life much more easier. So yes, we'll have to spend money for that. But think of the enormous change we would have. And it would change everything. And it would make rail less important, actually. That's another area. That's another area. Anyway, it sounds like incentives, disincentives, and the big incentives is the bus offering an alternative to people here and on the neighbor islands. Very important things to have to do. Somebody has to address this. It's not informational. It's not gamon. It's actually doing things. That's right. Because you have to have a strategy and a plan. Where do you want to go? And I mean, this is so silly to mention. Is there a numerical target? Is there a maximum? This is the last car you can buy. Because after this, you have to pay $5,000 per car as a tax or something. At the year 2025, we talk about renewable energy. We're not going to get there or whatever, $2,050. But there has to be some kind of line in the sand or some number that people say, this is 700,000 cars for this little island. That's the end. We cannot have more. And then, but you see, what I told you about toothpaste or detergent, you can make it only for the people on one. People will smuggle cars. People will do anything to bring other. Because the culture is so invested in cars. Oh, they would do anything. People will spend any percentage of their income to do it. That's right. It doesn't matter what gas costs. They're going to spend the money. So again, it's back to the mind, I think. It really has to do with the mind. Even the taxes, people will, like you say, borrow or sell their grandmother or whatever for money to buy a car. I don't know. It's something that the plan obsolescence and so forth is part of it. But this branding of yourself, your identity, is like synonymous with a car. Yeah, we're still working on that. We're working on that in many ways about climate change, to sea level rise. But we have to demonstrate to ourselves and the world that we're able to solve this problem. Otherwise, we will be backwater. And this is one of the most visible things that happened when people come off the plane and they see the traffic jams. They see the potholes. They see how tough it is to get around. We have to fix this. It affects all of us. It affects our economy. So thanks for those suggestions, Ray. This is a great subject. At any time, all the people who founded the state, Patsy Meg, John Burns, didn't want this to happen. They wanted a very efficient society for all people, for all people. They didn't want an unequal society. They wanted an equal society and one that would be, again, very efficient and very community-based. But now we're in a crazy prime, I think. And we maybe, it's more of the same. Every year, it's more of the same. And we have to draw a line someplace in the future. This is it. We have to work at this goal that we are seeing for cars. Yeah. Well, we have to address it. And to answer the question, have we kept up? Answer, no. We have sort of forgotten our goal to keep up. But now, through this kind of discussion, which I hope we can do again, we will remember. And maybe they will, too. OK. Thank you, Ray. Ray Tucciama. OK.