 This is ThinkTech. More specifically, this is Community Matters. And we're talking about the best cities for living without a car and where Honolulu fits on all of that. And we have Jeff Herman. He's with Lone Starter out of Houston, is it? Or Dallas? Dallas, thank you. And we're talking about a report that Lone Starter did recently about the best cities for living without a car. Hi, Jeff. Thank you for joining us. How do we do it? So my question for you is, Lone Starter is into everything. When I looked it up, I found out that it was originally about lawns, but then it got into this, that, the other thing. And you guys are, you're very curious and you're seeking new worlds every day and you're getting grants to do it. You recently got a $10 million grant. What was that about? Well, that's to grow the company and get bigger and to go into new markets, which is what it's all about when you're a small company. Well, good for you. And good for you for doing this report. Can you tell us about this report? Why did you make a report about the best cities for living without a car? Well, in this time, we are all working from home. And when we're not working from home, we're working in our office and you have water cooler conversations. So you think about things that people are gonna talk about. And this is one of those things. What's the best city if you were living without a car? So we did the research to come up with that and it sparks the whole thing about how you get around a foot or by bicycle or by mass transit. And how would you get around if you didn't need your car? Yeah, we talk about that and think about that all the time. There are, I mean, I can think about my hand. There are a dozen people who spend their lives and careers thinking about that for Honolulu because Honolulu was a city that is in transition, if you will. The center of our transition is a place called Kakaako and we're building rail here. And we're trying to find our way and everybody recognizes that transportation is a huge part of that. And one of the reasons is that, we wanna get off fossil fuel. Most of our cars are still fossil cars. And there's a certain amount of, what do you wanna call it? Millennial pressure to get off cars. And so we have these multimodal possibilities. We have rail, we have bikes. The city is basically flat, although people live on the hillsides and that's very steep. And there's walking, of course, and the weather is good. So when you made your study, I guess why did you make it? Who was it intended for? And where does Honolulu fit in that study? Honolulu makes number six in our study. And what we were trying to do is try and plant the seed with people that, maybe you don't need your car when you're walking to the neighborhood grocery store. Don't be in your car, walk, take the bike. It's great for exercise, it's great for your legs. Just go ahead and try and get around some other different ways. That reduces the traffic, which reduces the carbon emissions, which is just a smarter way to grow. Previous to moving in Dallas, I lived in Indianapolis and I walked to and from work and they created a trail downtown, linking all the museums. It was the coolest thing to see a landscape trail to and from work. I could walk at 24-7 and it's just a, it's really wonderful to have those opportunities to get around without a car. Yeah, but that's a beautiful thing to be able to walk down the street and see interesting things and walk through a city center with museums, what have you, interesting shopping. But we're a state where shopping centers mean a lot. I'm sure that's the same thing in Texas. And so the question is, what do you need to encourage people to get out of their cars? What do you have to do in terms of other aspects of the plan and in terms of legislative incentives or dean's centers? The biggest thing that I've seen in Dallas is mass transit. I moved here and when I moved here, I picked where I was gonna live so I could take the train to work. And then three months in, they decided to move us to a rework facility on the other end of town. Well, they had another mass transit line that took me there. And then six months later, they moved me to another rework facility in Las Calinas. Then I had another train to take me there. So if you have a great mass transit system, that's the best way to be able to wean yourself off a car. Yeah. What else though, aside from rail, what else? Just having bicycle lanes because it's safer. A lot of people, there are accidents with people in cars intersecting. So the best thing to do is make sure you've got some clear lanes that work and then encourage people to take your bike, take your foot, whatever you can to be able to wean yourself off your car. Carpool, that works too. Remember when kids were riding to school to get to riding with their parents to get to school? I still remember that. So carpooling saves two or three cars. You just get in one. This all goes to city planning. And you can plan. If I gave you empty space, a city without anything in it. And I said, Jeff, make me a city that's a walking city. You could do it. You could take all these lessons that we have learned. You could make sure that there was rail, walking spaces, bike spaces, lots of spaces, public spaces are so important to quality of life in the city. And walking and spaces to do transportation, that's also important in a city. But the problem is that sometimes the city got built in another time, in another way. And it's not intended. It was not concerned with these issues and it didn't do these issues. And so if you wanna get to a place where it encourages walking and discourages driving, you have to spend a lot of money. You have to rebuild the city. That's gotta be a factor in all of this. Right, you have to reimagine the city and rebuild it and try and think in terms of the employers because the employers, if they hire younger people, those younger people want to be able to live and get around and have everything close by. So that makes it a little bit easier. They don't wanna drive in from some suburb in the middle of nowhere. So if you have employers, you have grocery stores, you have malls, you have shopping, you have restaurants, you have everything in one place. That makes it easier to get around without your car. You know, when I was in college, I studied city planning under a guy who had been in city government and he took us to New Haven. We all piled in a car went to New Haven, Connecticut. And the remarkable thing about it is they had rebuilt the center of the city of New Haven. I'm not sure they maintained, you know, the focus in the years since then, but at least at that point in time, New Haven was a beautiful place because people could live a block away from the stores, they shopped at, New Haven is dominated by three big churches in the middle of it. And you could go to church. You could, you know, you could go to the museums, you could go to Yale. If you gotta get in first, I suppose. And in general, you know, the way they built it is that everything was in touch with everything else. On the other hand, there's a lot of cities, including Honolulu, where, you know, you gotta have your big house and it's a sprawl and it's not so much vertical as it is horizontal, so you gotta travel miles and miles to get to your home. And there's nothing organic about that. I think reverse organic is what it is. How do you deal with that? I guess what you'll tell me is, is rail is a solution to bedroom communities that are distant from the center of the city, but it is nevertheless worthwhile having a center of the city. Absolutely. And then also to use Indianapolis as an example, I lived there 20 years before I came back for a second stint in the city. And the suburbs where everybody lived that first go around, now the suburbs are no longer where people live. They have migrated many of them to the downtown city, where the companies are, where the headquarters are, where the jobs are. And now they have grocery stores down there, they have shopping down there, they have restaurants. So your suburban areas in several cities are starting to, I guess, close in so that people are moving back downtown again. And it's becoming a much more vibrant area. The place where I lived 20 years ago in Indianapolis, it's kind of where you don't wanna be now because of the crime and everything else going on. When you have a concentration of people moving downtown, it really does help to change everything around. You beat the traffic, you beat the whole mess of commuting and traffic every single day. It gets expensive though to live downtown because you have this process of expensive housing and not everybody can afford to live in that kind of a neighborhood. So how do you make it available for everyone? In the case again, using Indianapolis as an example, people were first to get on the floor and they had great deals because nobody wanted to live downtown. And then they rode the big, I guess the stock market in real estate and they're doing really great because everybody wants to live down there. And then they realized that they have to make sure that everybody can get there. So that's why there are low income housing opportunities for people to buy houses that are more affordable, rents that are more affordable. And that allows you to have people who are just able to work in the jobs nearby too. Yeah, you have to work against gentrification. You have to plan out so that this is an egalitarian kind of community and society. Very important. So are you saying that we need a lot of cities that are all like self-contained and that offer all the services that the population in that area needs? Or are you saying that each residential area should be connected to a central city and that would service the city even for outlying districts? I think that what you're talking about is a hub and spoke system versus having everything all in one place. I think if you have everything in one place, you can still go to your nearby community. In a lot of our study stories, we find that it's those communities just outside of the big cities like Dallas or outside of Austin that are thriving because you're close enough to those cultural centers, you're close enough to the things that you want to drive in for, but yet you have a great quality of life just outside of downtown. So there are what you're talking about as a hub and spoke where you can get down there if you want to, you've got great airfares out of the big cities, but at the same time, you're living in your own space and you're able to get to what you want. You've got it all nearby, but if you want to go to the city, you can just trek down there on your car if you want. Yeah, or your bike or maybe rail. Where do shopping centers fit in all of that? I mean, you know this country and I'm really not sure it's still the trend because so many big shopping centers have failed over the past few years, but shopping centers in Hawaii are healthy and most of them and then they attract people from all over the place and they have a critical mass of stores. You could buy everything you want at a shopping center. Footnote to that is that is when Amazon doesn't offer it cheaper or easier and that's changing the nature of shopping centers but shopping centers have got to be in this kind of plan. So our shopping center is good for making a city to live without a car because shopping centers have big parking lots, right? How do you make a shopping center that's consistent with this higher quality of public life? In many cases in Indianapolis, in Austin, in other cities, you have Target coming in downtown, you have Whole Foods coming in, the big malls downtown, Circle Center, Indianapolis, it was booming for a while, it's not booming now, but those places that you get walk to to get groceries, to get produce, to get those things, that's what it helps. When you have rest rest that are nearby, that's what helps. If you have everything you need in your buy, that makes life a whole lot easier but concentrated with malls, malls in the bigger cities here are not doing very well now. You still drive out to a mall that you've gone to for years and years and years, but otherwise in the more urban areas, it's the bigger boxes that are downsized for the city, but that helps because you have everything you need from a Target without having to drive out to the suburbs to get to it. Yeah, that's very salient because if I want to get a gadget from electronic gadget for our studio, for example, I can order it on Amazon or B&H photo or one of the big houses and I can get it in a few days, but if Best Buy has a store near me and I can go there in a matter of five minutes, I'll soon to go to Best Buy. The price is not really as important as the convenience. And I think that plays out in the notion you mentioned of building a smaller big box inside the city. It's very interesting. So you said that Honolulu was number six. Who are numbers one through five and why? Hold on one second, let me get that for you. I've got them on the screen here on the other screen. All of a sudden everything's not powering up here for me. It's just gonna take a second here. The most walkable cities, I'm gonna try and figure this out from my head here for a second. Number one is San Francisco because it's very walkable. They have trolleys. They have all the different things in cable cars so that you can get around Portland, Oregon. Again, it's a very central city where people do live downtown and they get a lot of walking in, the colleges there, people walk to and from because they live in the neighborhood. Washington DC, again, very heavy on mass transit with the different lines getting around downtown. So that helps a lot to be able to bring people in from all over Silver Spring, Baltimore into DC. So it helps to bring people in from those hubs to the, from the spokes to the hubs and also get around within the city. Boston, same thing. New York, same thing. So now we're at six and that's Honolulu. Number seven is Oakland, which is connected to San Francisco by a rail line, the BART. So rail lines are a big factor in this but we also looked at everything from the commuting rate now, the use of rideshare services, safety in downtown and of course Honolulu won really big because of climate because there's really not a whole lot of better places to live than Honolulu for climate. No, when I was younger, much younger, I rode bike here in Honolulu everywhere. And it was okay. I could ride on a major thoroughfare and I would have the space to ride and I rode to work every day. But as time went on, I mean, I'm really asking a question here. As time went on, I found that the traffic was more oppressive and that the drivers would force me off the road and in the gutters was dangerous because your wheel could get caught in a gutter and you'd fall down. And there were a lot of accidents and actually altercations between drivers who didn't like bikes and they would yell at the bike rider and the bike rider would yell back and that's not pleasant for any city and any transportation experience. So over time, I stopped riding my bike. There's the Hawaii Bicycling League that tries to reverse that and tries to make bike lanes and the shallows and the shallow, all that, to try to reserve a little space for the cyclists. But it's slow going because from a political point of view, they are not a substantial contingency in the electorate. And it's hard for them to get an angle on it. But I mean, I see cycling in Hawaii as a tremendous opportunity, not yet quite realized. And again, that raises the whole question of, A, how do you, how do you plan it so it works? And B, how do you get the government to remember? You know, this is a great country, but we can't seem to remember what we decided we wanted to do. This is very troubling. So what did you learn in making this study about the political support of a city, you know, where you could live without a car? What was the nature of government in those cities that made them better than the others? I guess it's putting your money where your mouth is because that's the biggest difference. And, you know, I hate to get going back to Minneapolis, but that's the city I'm most familiar with. And I watched them put bike lanes downtown. So when you talk about it, it's one thing. When you actually do it, it makes all the difference. And I'm living in an area now where I don't feel comfortable riding my bike, you know, to downtown or, you know, other areas, unless it's on a Sunday morning when there's not a whole lot of traffic around. But if I had bike lanes, that would be a different thing. So bike lanes are really important, but you have to plan for it, you have to budget for it, and you have to make the investment to make it all happen. Talking about it isn't enough. You have to make sure that your bicycle riders are safe and able to ride the lane and share the lane with the cars without being run over or thrown off the road. Yeah, it's true. And it's right out there, but we don't have it yet. And for the light rail systems, you absolutely have to get money from the federal government because most of these, they cost so much money that you can't afford to build it yourself. So you have to have the lobbying capability with your legislature to be able to get the federal dollars to be able to make all of this happen. And I've seen that happen in city after city. I've never been to a city that's got as many rail lines as we have here in Dallas, but, you know, when you have that concentration gives you so much more ability to be able to get from one point to another, no matter where you are in the city without taking your car. You know, Europe has some cities that are absolutely beautiful. They're human walkable cities. They have transportation everywhere. They have areas where you cannot bring a car at all. And it makes for a better quality of life, better social experience. In fact, a better shopping experience too. One of the elements that I worry about though, especially here is that what people do is they go to Costco and they buy enough stuff to last them for weeks and months to feed a big family what have you, all the supplies you never, okay? And they put it in the trunk of a very large car or van or truck that uses a lot of gas, by the way. And that's how they live. And if you tell them they gotta go by rail or bike or walk, backpack, what have you, they're never gonna be able to have that quality of what do you wanna call it, retail life. So what's the future of that? Is there a future for the Costco kind of experience or maybe is there a future for somebody who where I go online, I buy what I want online, somebody delivers it. I don't have to get in my big car. I don't have to have a big car. It will be delivered to my door. Where are we going on that? It looks like some places like CVS, the grocery, the drug store, they are actually doing that where they'll actually deliver it to you. You order online and they'll deliver it to you. If you have prescriptions, you have them filled, they'll deliver them to you. So that makes it a little bit more convenient. It's not your car that's causing the gas. It's not your car that's causing the fuel exhaust. It's their wheels to get around. And then you just have all the services. If you buy it online, it's delivered to you by mail or by car. If you can get it by car, you get it faster and it just saves you a whole lot of time and trouble. You know, I suggest to you, Jeff, that the Amazon experience, you know, Amazon, you love it, but then you hate it too. The Amazon experience is teaching us so much. I mean, those photographs and movie clips of the way it works in the Amazon warehouse, the way it works online is really unbelievable. The way it works in their end of the online, how they take your order and fulfill it and they get it to you in record time. I mean, that's not limited to Amazon. I suggest to you that we're gonna have Costco doing that. We're gonna have all the big box stores doing that. So you never go. You never go to the store. Amazon has a grocery store in Seattle, but it's a small, small thing. It's just, they're just playing. But at the end of the day, I think we're gonna have these huge stores that are in a warehouse somewhere in distribution centers around the country. And it comes to us by UPS or by some delivery service, invest in delivery services, will you Jeff? That would be really smart because that does bring it home to you. It brings home everything you want. It makes it easier to live within your own home and your own family and bubble actually, which is so much more important now since we are all at home working from home. If you can have it delivered by the neighbors down the street and down the hall, I've never seen somebody boxes delivered to him. So it's coming from everywhere. He doesn't have to go anywhere for whatever his lifestyle is, hermit-wise. I don't know what it is, but everything, even cups come to his door. Well, you can buy a car now. They'll deliver your car to your door. You never have to meet a salesman or go to a showroom or anything like that. So there's two things we need to cover here in this discussion. One is what kind of data did you consider in developing this ranking and finding Honolulu is number six? And how did you analyze that in order to reach the ranking? Because we wanna track with you on that kind of critical analysis and see how it works. Absolutely. As you looked at with a number of walking, hiking routes, the walking score, the bike score, bike rental facilities per 100,000 residents, share of residents who ride public transit to work, share of residents who walk to work, share of residents who bike to work, share of residents who carpool to work, average commute time in minutes. I'm told that areas of Honolulu are worse for commute time than others. And then violent crime, everything from pedestrian fatalities to hate crimes to sex offenders, property crime, because if you're gonna be doing bike or everything, you wanna be safe while you're doing it. Safety category, climate category, that's cold days, which obviously you don't have a whole lot there. Hot days, average monthly precipitation and interest in inches, possible sunshine and air quality. So climate is where Honolulu just aced everybody else. But in terms of commuting and all the options that you have there, particularly with rail coming online, it seems like Honolulu is definitely moving in the right direction with all the opportunity that might be coming there finally with the rail system, maybe actually getting started. So you must have an algorithm where you put all this in a hopper and then you make some kind of numerical analysis. You assign some numerical score and make an analysis and then you find that the score for Honolulu is six to the top. But how do you reach those algorithms? How do you do that? Just so we can see in a little peek into the black box here. You try to figure out which of those factors that I just spoke about should be common as once, which should get double waiting, triple waiting. And again, climate was one that got a little bit more waiting and then all of the commuting methods got the other waiting. The crime is the one that got the least waiting of the whole bunch. But when you factor it all through and put it through a mathematical analysis, that's how we come up with the cities. What about COVID? I don't want to take you too far off the point, but we're talking before the show about COVID and about how if Uber sends you a discount or Lyft sends you a discount, you may or may not be interested in the time of COVID because you don't know who was in the car a minute before and you're not sure that your mask will help you in an environment where somebody was shedding virus. What about COVID? Has COVID changed any of this? Have you factored it in? What is the timing of the data that you've got to put in the black box for this listing? The data was from 2020, so it was pre-COVID, but if you look at what's happened to Uber and to Lyft, they've all transitioned from as many of those offers you're getting or not for a ride. They're for Uber Eats, so you deliver food to your door. So they've transitioned realizing that not as people want to get in their car, but they can bring stuff to you, which is what we were talking about those deliveries. So maybe what we'll see is Uber partnering with Best Buy to be able to deliver those things to your door as we're all stuck at home. Yeah, okay, now the most interesting question of all I would like to discuss with you. And that is, so you find that the five ahead of us, okay, we're better. They were better in the total score and they might have been better in certain characteristics too. And so that leads to sort of an aspirational analysis where we say, we're better in crime. I mean, not having that much crime, but we're not so good in, I don't know, I don't know, walking paths, okay? Or biking paths, whatever. So then what you've come out with is, well, Honolulu, if you want to be number one, then you have to clean up your act on certain characteristics. And we want your government to know this and we want your city planners to know this. And we want people to know this. That's what they should be working for if they want to have a more livable, more walking kind of city. Is there a way to get this out of the report if somebody wants to know, okay, we appreciate being six, but we want to be number one, tell us how can you answer that? I can send you the actual spreadsheet that we used to put this all together. And where Honolulu actually falls in some categories compared to other cities is actually in that crime area. So it didn't really weight everything compared to everybody else, but that's where Honolulu is losing. And then I think those other cities, they're higher up because they have rail, which you're getting. So you are moving in the right direction. Okay, well, this is dynamic, you know? I mean, COVID hopefully will be over soon that whatever influences it has had. And the social changes that it has wrought upon us and the changes that we ourselves are involved in, I mean, politically or socially, it may change. So don't you think that this is the kind of report where you have the categories, you have the algorithms, so although that you might change those, and you have a rating and wouldn't it be worthwhile for you to make another exact same, well, not exact, but another kind of rating for us and other cities, say a year from now or two, and tell us how we are doing. Did we get better at it or worse? Did we get better at this characteristic or worse at that one? That would be pretty valuable for us to have an accurate reflection in the mirror of how we are doing. What do you think? That's actually our plan is to be able to do these every year and then that way we'll be able to see how things change. And next year we'll have more COVID statistics. So you'll be able to see how things are factored over this time. Now, unfortunately, it's always a snapshot in time. So we'll probably have a little bit more COVID information as we're out of COVID. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, yes, hopefully. It's certainly dynamic right now. We're, I mean, we're in a huge transition that makes it complicated to do any kind of, you know, a follow-up, but I'm glad that you will. The other, and the last question is, so, okay, this was done by looking at the data from Honolulu, such as you could find it and looking at the common denominator data that you found for similar characteristics in other cities. And I mean, I really love to be involved in the algorithms, by the way. Then the question is, was anybody here involved in this analysis? We went to government agencies, you went to people collect data about the city, a lot of research, somebody really had to do a lot of research to find, you know, common characteristics. But was there any, were there any boots on the ground in order to do this? There was not in Honolulu or any other cities, but before and prepped for this interview, I spoke with somebody who lived in Honolulu for years, and he confirmed some of the things that, you know, helped me to feel that our study was on target with Uber and Lyft and a lot of people on bikes, a lot of bus transit. So I felt as if I had some understanding that our data actually did match what was coming from there. Now, very interesting. And then of course is the old problem which I was talking with you about before we started the show, namely the shelf problem. You make a beautiful report, and sometimes Hawaii has made the most beautiful reports by organizations that are global and so well funded with the best minds in the world, and the report goes neatly on the shelf in the back. And nobody ever looks at it again. I mean, I could actually name some reports where we have done that. And the question is, how do you make your report stick? How do you make your report, you know, effective, efficacious in terms of government awareness, public awareness? How do you do that? I mean, you publish it, it's on a website. How, what other ways do you insinuate it into the thought process of a given community? Aside from think tech Hawaii right now, yeah. Exactly, that's how you're helping a lot. But the other thing is, as we do these from year to year on the same topic, that builds a series of reports that show growth and progression and help to be able to have a whole series of material so that people can refer to that and actually act on what we're finding. So I think that's how you do it. You find something that people are talking about and then you find concrete ways to make a difference in those communities where you actually have business. So you have a stake in what that's all about. You have to make them aware and you have to get champions because not, I mean, you can quote me on this, not all legislators follow up. Right. So I just wanna, I just advise you this, that there are two addresses in our Hawaii State Legislature that are useful. One is called all reps at capital.hawaii.gov. And the other is called all sends at capital.hawaii.gov. And if you send the report to those two addresses, you will be sending it to every single member of our legislature as that would be of some benefit, I think, to all of us. Fantastic. I can go ahead and do that with a note and then that way it will help to maybe make a case for rail and all the options that you have to maybe make Honolulu a little bit more walkable city. Yeah, I don't have an address for the city, but we have a new mayor, Rick Plangiardi, who is very aware of these issues. And he has a city manager, Mike Formi, who is deep into the city transportation. And both of them would be very interested also in getting a copy being made aware of this report. So I hope you can do that. And I look forward to our next discussion and I appreciate your work. Thank you for doing this. I think it benefits not only Honolulu, but the country, because we have to achieve a public life that works for everybody. We have to achieve public spaces that give us all a better quality of life. We haven't done that yet, but with this kind of analysis, hopefully over time, we will learn enough to do it, but not be something. That would be fantastic. Thank you, Jeff Herman. Thank you, Lawrence Daughter. Appreciate you're making the report coming on the show and answering our questions. Thank you, Jay. Have a great day. You too. Aloha.