 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. All right, welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Hawaii, the state of clean energy, which is created by Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, the co-chair of which, and my co-host today sitting next to me, Sharon Moriwaki. Hey. Aloha. Aloha. Good to be here today on a Wednesday, sunny Wednesday. So here in Hawaii, the state of clean energy, we talk about transportation. And this month, we're talking about planning a path to 100% renewable energy transportation, OK? And today's show, we're entitling smart planning leads to clean transportation. And our special guest of the day is Gary Andreshak, joins us by Voip Phone from Vancouver, British Columbia. And Gary is the director of IBI Group. And he appeared a month ago here in Hawaii on the Salvage the Rail program at the state capital auditorium, which was a very valuable discussion. And you were a great speaker, Gary. Welcome to the show. Thank you. And you could tell us a little bit about how we can go from being a city that grew like Topsy to one that is much more efficient and beautiful as you have done in Vancouver and you know of other places as well. We want to know how do we plan together for that clean energy future with moving people around more efficiently goods and services. You can give us a little bit of your expertise. Sharon, that's a good segue into what I do. I'm the practice lead for our company for something called transit oriented development. It's a practice I pursue across North America. And I'm going to just take a moment to read out a definition of what TOD is. It's the focus on the integration of transportation and land use planning in support of livable communities that are compact, dense, mixed use, walkable, engaging, and resilient. And you just mentioned Vancouver, the city I live in and the city I practice in. And I think it would fit very nicely to the definition that I just read. If you go to downtown Vancouver on any evening, it's full of people knowing about people and outdoor cafes, people who are walking along the promenade along the waterfront. But importantly, people who are not driving. They're pedestrians in part because Vancouver, like all great cities, are built on a really good public transportation, transit network. And that's really the key to what the discussion I can bring to the topic of smart planning and clean energy. And the reason why I was at the forum in Honolulu last month is to my mind, your city is at a fork in the road right now with regard to how it moves forward with public transit. To my mind, the best public transit is transit that is that great, accessible. You can step on it. You can step off it. It enhances rather than detracts from or puts the wall up to your city. And I'm not sure that the focus of our conversation right now is only on the rapid transit proposals for downtown Honolulu. I did, in fact, attempt to anticipate some questions or definitions or description of what a city should be looking for when it is moving forcefully into the 21st century. I would like to focus, Gary, on transportation. And in fact, clean transportation and how that might have developed in Vancouver, because you probably didn't start off that way as most cities. And how could you get to that point? And maybe focus more on that. We can talk about transit in September when you return. And I was focusing more on transportation, the bigger picture of a clean transportation system, cleaner city. And Sharon, I'll attempt that. But of course, in speaking or describing what we've done in Vancouver over the course of the last 40 years, you can take what I'm saying and think about it with regard to where Honolulu is at present without me actually describing what those circumstances are. But I'm going to dial back to the early 1970s when Vancouver's waterfront was like most waterfronts and industrials, the Harbor City, it was a working harbor. And it was losing its impact somewhat because the rail had fallen away and given way to delivering goods and services by transport truck. So the transportation planners in their wisdom at the time decided that they were going to build a freeway into the downtown from the trans-counter highway to the east and certainly from the airport to the south. And of course, transportation planning always finds the path of least resistance. So in this case, that would have been the waterfront lands in front of the railway. And the citizens of Vancouver said, this just isn't right. It's not right to take away our trains and then block our access and our views to the waterfront by virtue of putting a freeway in front of it. And the city, farthest to their credit, held a referendum. And the citizens of Vancouver overwhelmingly voted not to build the freeway. So that was the first fight, I guess, that we won as we moved towards a transit-supported livable community. The second thing that happened, and this was somewhat serendipitous, in the early 1980s, the city of Vancouver decided it wanted to host a World Fair. And initially, it went after not an A-category fair, but a B-category fair. And it was a transportation fair. It was called A World in Motion, A World in Touch. And as part of that, they built a demonstration, or had envisioned to build a one kilometer demonstration of this elevated rail system that has emerged over time into our Skytrain system. The fair upgraded to a full-fledged World Fair and really became a window to the world. And it went when people from all over came to Vancouver and saw the beauty of the city, but saw its potential as well. And in fact, when the fair was over, the waterfront to the south were sold to a Hong Kong developer named Lee Kansheng, who decided that he would bring the Hong Kong model of dense high-rise apartment buildings. And of course, the best way to serve them would be to expand this newly envisioned transit network. Now, we have the benefit of tunnels in the downtown, so we could build a system that worked out from the center and out into the suburbs. So that was the start of a really good rapid transit network. And the line got expanded once in 2000, and then again for the Olympics. And when the Olympics were held in 2010, once again, the world came to Vancouver. And by that time, they saw a very different city, a city that has probably 120,000 new residents living downtown. And they don't even need cars because they take transit. So that's the quickest way to get to clean energy. They walk to work. And if you go to downtown Vancouver on any workday, you see thousands of people just streaming to work either on foot or more recently on bicycles. And so in one sense, and going back to what I do as a TOD planner, the best thing we can do is simply put residential and office and employment in a juxtaposition where you don't even need to get in a car or even take transit to get to work. So we've worked hard at that over the last 40 years. And I can say that the city of Vancouver has the Transportation Department has statistics with it, which they're very proud to share with everybody. Vancouver is the only city in North America that since 2000 has seen a reduction, and in this case, a 15% reduction in the number of vehicle trips into the downtown core on a daily basis. And at the same time, they doubled the population of residents in the downtown core. So the correlation is there. And it's really one that I would like to think that Honolulu could aspire to as well. So that might be too long an answer, but it is an answer. Honolulu is a very automobile-centric community. Was Vancouver that? Honolulu is a very oil-holy, very automobile-centric community. It was Vancouver that way, or did you train people to get out of their cars? No. In Canada, despite the fact that we're an exporter of energy, we've always placed it higher to our residents. In other words, driving a car in Canada is much more costly than it is in most parts of the U.S. So we try to properly price the fact that cars cause problems. And if you want to drive, you've got to pay for it. But like Honolulu, we're constrained by water and mountains and in our case, a green belt. So it makes it harder to drive just because there's more and more congestion. And I contend that congestion is good because that's the best way to get people out of their cars. Well, we're doing great on that score. This is top-class. We get 10 points on that one. In cities I work in, as soon as we can prove that public transit, and in this case, rapid transit, is faster than going by car, we've got a ready market. It's tough to get people out of their cars admittedly. And experience has shown that it's tough to get people out of their cars and onto traditional buses. The only exception to that is the younger millennials coming up, and I've got a story I can talk about in a moment. But for the most part, commuters will only make the jump from their car if they're allowed something at least as good as their car. And so to my mind, it's fixed rail, or what I would call plus rapid transit, which we describe as light rail transit on rubber wheels. The exceptions to that are it seems that millennials and Gen Z, younger kids beyond millennials, are not nearly as interested in driver's licenses as we were. And we see that not only in the US, but in Canada, too. Fewer and fewer kids who reach 16 are getting their driver's licenses. As one smart young girl said on a radio interview that I heard the other day, she said that driving gets in the way of texting, which I really like. That rather than just moniting out to don't text while we drive, her solution is quite simple. You don't drive. So I have a feeling that generationally, there is a band of transit riders who are coming up who will expect something different. And that, again, is a reason why Honolulu would have to deliver on its promise of bringing transit into play. Gary, we're going to take a short break. That's Gary Andreshak. He's a planner with the IVI Group in Vancouver, British Columbia. And we're talking about planning and transit and what Hawaii can do, what Honolulu can do to achieve the same outcome that Vancouver has achieved, which is really very remarkable. We'll take a one minute break. We'll be right back. You'll see. This is Stink Tech, Hawaii, raising public awareness. Is Steven Phillip Katz? I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. And I'm the host of Shrink Rap Hawaii, where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. Two Walker running them. Mingo, we're back. We're back with Gary Andreshak. I like that. And my co-host, we're live. We're live. We're live. And alive. And Sharon Moriwaki. Got it? Yes, yes, yes. I was wanting to hear from Gary on how you plan for these communities when most people in auto meals justify it by saying, I've got to take my mother-in-law here, my mother there, my kids here, the piano lesson up the hill. And public transit can't go to all those places I need to go. And how do you plan for that in a community? All right. Again, part of the work that I do with transit-oriented development is when I talk to cities or when I talk to citizens within those cities, I tell them quite simply that what we're trying to do is set up scenarios where our ownership is an option, not an assessment. And I say this specifically to Americans who have a very strong affinity to their car. What we're looking at here is a situation where you can use transit when it serves you best. In other words, if you're the daily commute so that you've got to rather than be stuck in the car for an hour and a half as you can get on a train and it'll get you to that same downtown destination in 36 minutes. Common sense tells me that's the best option. But that doesn't mean that you can't have a car that you take to places that aren't on the transit line. In other words, if you do have to get your mother-in-law to the doctor or whatever. One of the things that I tell the communities I work with is that an ideal scenario would be if we can get families to the point where they can get by with one car as opposed to two cars because one of the partners, the mother or the father, or the wife can get to work by transit. Then we've done that family a big favor. We, governments and planners, and I think citizens too know that they should be spending about a third of their income on housing and we work towards that. But nobody really knows that dirty little secret about what it costs to own a car. And the fact is that to buy a car, to buy insurance, to buy gas, to maintain it, to park it costs the average family about $10,000 for a vehicle. So if you have two cars, that's 20,000 bucks. Now, if you make $100,000 a year, you can say that's fine. But if you make 40,000 bucks a year and you're paying half of that on your car and you're paying a third more on your housing, you're up the creek. And so one of the things we want to do is make transit convenient so that people get by without owning that second car. The other part to that, and this is one of the things that I was advocating at the Selvies the Rail Forum, is that if we took the Honolulu, the heart system and made it at grade in and through the downtown with more stops rather than, you know, the stops at larger spacings and then having to come off of a big elevator escalated down to grade, then it makes moving around the downtown a lot easier because public transit, light rail transit at that point just means you hop on a car, you go a block, you get off, you do something, you hop back on. I was part of the initial commissioning of the Calgary-Alberta Transit line and when we put it in, we said that of the six or so stops in the downtown, they were free. In other words, once you got beyond that zone, you paid for your ticket, but transit through the downtown was free for anybody to jump on or off and that helped them move through the downtown quickly and purposefully and you know what, it did something else. Once they got on the train, people who would otherwise never get on the train, but did because it was free, said, you know, this is a nice service. I think I'll pay that two and a quarter to ride home tonight to see how that works. So it's another way to get people riding the train. So, but... You know, one of the problems that we've heard, you know, post the salvage the rail program, we've had a number of discussions about this and one of the most interesting discussions was the question of whether to go to grade such as you have in Vancouver and one fairly knowledgeable individual a couple of weeks ago, he said, you don't have enough capacity at grade. You can't possibly get enough people on there to make a difference. We intend, this is looking at it from the point of view of the developer, we intend to have a ton of people come into Central Honolulu, downtown Honolulu on this and it's going to be the Tunaville Trolley if you have it on grade. We need the capacity of overhead rail. What's your answer to that, Gary? Well, whoever said that has a predetermined notion of what the solution is. We were advocating at the salvage the rail forum and certainly what I'll be talking about when I'm next in Honolulu is that you do your heavy hauling from the west and you get to a transit terminal, a transit plaza at Middle Street. They come off the train, hopefully in large numbers. I'm sure that that ridership will be supported but once they come down they get on to grade and there again there's choice. Firstly, and the first way that you regulate transit ridership, let's say that 8,000 people an hour are coming in off the train and you get to grade and you've got a system that with cars that grade going into the downtown core that could only carry 4,000 people an hour. Well, the way that you do that is you simply up your headways. You put twice as many trains on so if the trains coming off from the elevated trains are coming in at 15 minute increments, the headways that you have at grade are seven and a half minutes so you double the capacity. But beyond that then there are other things you can do. You can have intersecting bus lines. You can have what cities like Portland, Oregon are doing and it's probably at the forefront of public transit. They're bringing in on-solar street cars now that work with this. So I don't buy that argument. I simply, I submit that the answer that was given to you was an answer that only supports this notion that you've got to, what are you gonna do once you get all of these people to L.A. Moana? I mean, where are they gonna go then? They're gonna spill out a mile away from where they wanna be and they're either gonna get on a bus or taxi or over or walk and be late to work anyway. I think that a really good transit system is one that has choice and you get choice by providing a variety of ways in it. Let me move to one other thing that I think we should talk about. I was telling you before that I was in Vancouver last week, just 10 days ago and I was so impressed because I do watch these things, especially Sharon raises my public awareness on such issues. And I saw the promenade and I saw the outdoor restaurants and the bikes and the walking and the boats all together. All these modes of transportation all together and it was like heaven on earth. It was a broigle painting of a human activity. And then you go a block away on the street and you see tree-lined streets and shops and walkable sidewalks and people having a wonderful time walking in groups and a lot of people watching going on and shopping. And then you see the transit cars. I mean, it's out of a sort of a painting of what transit and what city life should look like. It's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful city. Then all this just a little way from Stanley Park where you can do more of that in open space. So in terms of public space, I mean, I think you have achieved a remarkable city, a perfect example of the way this should be. But here's my lesson of it and I'd like your reaction. You had to deal with it, say from the 1970s or whatever it was, you had to deal with property owners who owned the property along that industrial road in the harbor, the industrial harbor. You had to make them come around. You had to get them to let that property become public space, not so easy. You had to get the people involved to get out of their cars and to use these facilities and these public spaces you built. You ought to change the way people thought. And I know you found ways to do it. Obviously it's been a great success and a great outcome. But in Hawaii, we have property owners who are looking for the biggest possible return, not taking no for an answer. We have property owners who don't give a rip about public space or the benefit in public welfare or transportation for that matter. We have, and we have a population that is endeared to its boots about driving cars. You know, there are lots of people in Hawaii who spend $10,000 or more on their car, but they only make 5,000. That's how much they care about their cars. And we have got to change those thought processes. And my question to you, given all that has happened in Vancouver and the problems we have been experiencing for years now, and Sharon has been working on this for years now, how do we do it here? What's your suggestion, Gary? Okay, well, and that was, I'm well saying, was a very long question. Well, cheer up, you can give a short answer. The city of Honolulu, and one other thing that we haven't talked about here is the fact that an upgrade system is much more readily expanded to HI and on to what life is like, but what we do, for the most part, when we design transit systems within North American cities, we like to put them in the roadway because you're not for starters, you're not fighting individual property owners because the city owns that right of way. And the other thing we like to do when we do that is we say that it's not simply an issue of putting in the track in the middle of the street or the opposite of it with regard to the elevated system that is envisioned to go to Alamoana, which to my mind, and I said this when I was in Honolulu, it's really freeway automobile or automobile freeway architecture that is being imposed onto the city. But what we do is we take that transit line down the middle of the street and at the same time we rebuild the public spaces around it. In other words, a road to me is curb to curb, a street to me is building face to building face. So we envision that corridor to make it really pleasant when you're riding on the train, when you jump off the train at a station, we like to have knuckles where we have public plazas and restaurants and things like that. And what happens over time? And admittedly, it does take time because humans seem to be slow learners, but the property owners will say, well, there's something going on here. There's suddenly a lot of people in front of my building. Maybe I should redevelop it and put in a restaurant or put in a new storefront that's got lots of glass and suddenly you get developers who wanna be part of the equation. When you talk about Vancouver and all of the fondness of attributes you saw, that didn't happen over time. But what happened early on, the city, again, to its credit, charged developers of attacks, if you like, based on square feet for urban realm public improvement. And in the early days, they wish and moaned about it because I wasn't gonna help them out any it was just a tax credit, et cetera. But today, that taxes, four times what it was before and developers hardly pay it because that money they pay goes right back into their frontage, in other words, and make sure that the edges, the streets you talked about when you walked in and through downtown Vancouver are beautifully designed in spaces you want to be in. When I was in Honolulu a couple weeks or last month and I walked to the west end of Waikiki and wanted to cross the road to get to the hotel side of it, I walked for two and a half blocks before I got to an intersection that actually let me cross the street. And it actually is. Exactly, Gary, that's exactly my point. I mean, not only do you have to design something smart but you also have to get people to understand what you are doing and why you are doing it and they should come along. But you know, the bottom line is we're out of time. Oh, no. We have miles to go before we sleep. No, I wanna hear more, I wanna hear more. Gary, we have to do this again with you. And Sharon is the co-host now. She has a chance to try to summarize all that you said and you might say. Oh, no. This is so exciting to hear from you, Gary. I'm glad we finally got to connect. I think that we emulate the great cities and we say Honolulu is a great city but we can't do it without all the pieces coming together and having some vision that everyone can do, the kinds of spaces that you talk about, not only the buildings. I like your statement earlier and not on this program where you said, you know, great communities is not just the building, it's the spaces between and how you get people around and I really would like to talk more with you about that. And Sharon, I gladly do this at another time. I've got lots of notes and lots of experience. I guess that comes with age, but this is an important conversation and we're really talking about synergy here which means the design of a city that is greater than some of its parts and we simply have to, Honolulu has a great opportunity to capitalize on that transformation through transit Well thank you Gary, we've got to sign off now. Thank you for this conversation. There'll be more to come. I'm sure we have many more questions and we'd like to hear all of what you've done and what you suggest for Hawaii. Thank you Sharon. Okay, thank you Jay. Aloha. Thank you Gary so much. We'll talk to you soon. We'll see you in September. Aloha.