 Welcome to the Dokumomohoi show. I'm the host, DeSoto Brown. This is the first of a three-part series on the history of transportation on the island of Oahu from the past into the future, and I'll be back in just a second. Hello, everyone, and welcome. This is, I'm DeSoto Brown. I am the Bishop Museum Historian here in Honolulu, and I'm about to tell you about the history of transportation on the island of Oahu. Why should there be a show on this? Well, I'm inspired because the heart, Honolulu area rapid transit rail system is about to open in a few weeks. And the first nine stations of the system will be available for the public to use very shortly. So this has inspired me to look back and look to the future as to what we've done and what we will be doing with transportation on Oahu. Now, in the photograph on the right, you can see our main mode of transportation, historically speaking, and obviously that has been the car. But there have been many other ways to get around on Oahu, and let's look back and go with our next slide. So for hundreds of years, and perhaps even more than a thousand years, there have been people living on the Hawaiian island since the Polynesians first navigated here from the South Pacific. And for most of that time, if you wanted to transport yourself around the island of Oahu, you really had no other option except to walk as these two illustrations from the 19th century depict. Sometimes those walks that you had to go on were very arduous. And in the picture on the left, you can see this is the Nuguanu Pali in the background with people walking over that trail. And not only did you have to walk on foot, you had to carry things that way too if you wanted to transport them. This meant that a trip that today for us to take just minutes could take days, literally for people in the past. And it also meant that if you were not young and strong, if you were older or if you had some kind of physical disability, it wasn't possible to get around. And that's because Hawaiians did not have large domestic animals to help them move. And they also did not have wheeled vehicles either. Next. The other way that you could get around of course was by using the ocean. And that meant traveling in a canoe. Canoes could be blown by the wind or transported by the wind if they had sails. But more frequently it was necessary for men to paddle canoes. And again, that meant that if you were going to be transported in a canoe, you probably were going to have to paddle it yourself. Or you could of course be a passenger. But this was not something that everybody was capable of doing. And even though canoes did in fact travel into Ireland, which is a very arduous trip. Still it meant that only young, strong people, preferably men, usually men, were able to transport themselves that way. Next picture. All of this changed in the early 1800s when large domestic animals were first introduced by outside people, most of the Europeans, here to the Hawaiian Islands. And so it meant for the first time that you could use horses, you could use donkeys, you could use mules to transport yourself and also to transport goods or other objects. But this did not make life necessarily all that much quicker or easier. These pictures that you see here were all taken in the 20th century. So it was not hugely long ago that people were still walking and carrying things on their shoulders. And it also was not that long ago if you look at the picture in the lower right. When mules were being used to transport materials on the Nuuanu Pali Road, this is pretty much where the Nuuanu Pali Highway is today, just a little bit above where the Pali Highway is today. And in 1913, it's amazing to me that even when there were automobiles, people were still using mules to not only get around on, but also to carry things. Next picture. So once there were horses, obviously things did get easier. And if you lived in the country, you could own a horse and keep it on your own property where it could graze for its own food. It could eat grass itself. But if you lived in someplace else where you didn't have a large field for a horse, it was very expensive to keep a horse because you had to keep giving it hay and grass all the time to eat. It also was very expensive to own and maintain a wheeled vehicle, a carriage or a cart. So a great many people did not own their own horses. They did not own their own horse-drawn vehicles. Only wealthy people were able to do that. And again, as I said, unless you lived in the country. Next. Even if you were not the owner of a horse or of a cart or some kind of vehicle that was pulled by a horse, it was possible to rent such things or be driven in such things. And these were called hacks. This is a picture of what was called a hack, which was comparable to a taxi essentially that was pulled by a horse in downtown Honolulu in about 1915. Not only could you be driven in a hack by a driver, but you also could rent a hack and drive the horse yourself. But even though these were available, again, they cost money and a lot of people still had to just rely on their feet to get around at this time in the early 1900s on the island of Oahu. Next. Okay, let's move into the mechanized world of transportation. This is a train that belonged to the Oahu Railway. The Oahu Railway was the first large public, publicly accessible and used train system on the island of Oahu. It was authorized by the Hawaiian government by King Kalakaua to begin service in 1888. And it actually did begin service the following year, November of 1889. And the first train ride went from downtown Honolulu where the depot was or the terminal was all the way out to IAI. So it's kind of comparable in a way, not quite as long, it's not exactly comparable, but it's kind of comparable in length to the system was gonna be coming into use in just a short time after I'm doing this show in a few weeks for our new rail system. Now, there are a lot of differences however between this rail system and the rail system which we will soon be using on Oahu. So let's explore a little further next picture. The Oahu Railway trains were pulled by steam engines. This meant that not only did they need fuel to run, they also needed to be refueled with water every so often at various stops along the way. And the Oahu Railway was started by a man named Benjamin Franklin Dillingham, also known as BF Dillingham. The reason being that he wanted to develop property on Oahu, particularly land that was owned by the Campbell estate. And he realized that the land was not valuable if there was not transportation to be able to reach it. And so he started the Oahu Railway. And originally it was known as Dillingham's folly because just as with our rail system today, people criticized it and said it wasn't gonna be financially successful. The Oahu Railway carried both merchandise and cargo and it carried passengers as well. So here's a photograph of the train station for the Oahu Railway in Waianae. And then on the right, you can see examples of some of the very colorful paper tickets that were used by passengers. Each ticket from a specific point to another specific point had a different color combination and had different colors printed on it. Next picture. Here's a map of the Oahu Railway system in the early 1900s. This is probably a map printed between 1910 and 1930. You can see the heavy blue line shows the tracks that were used by the Oahu Railway. And they go from downtown Honolulu at the bottom right all the way around Pearl Harbor. And then there is a spur that goes up into central Oahu to Wahiawa and then also to Schofield Barracks. The line then continued all the way along the Waianae coast around and a point, which is significant because there's never been a road around and a point. Only the railroad has been allowed to go there. All the way along the North Shore up around Kahuku. And then there's another smaller line that shows that there was another smaller railway called the Koholau Railway that continued all the way down to Kahana. That means that you could travel all around the bulk of the periphery of Oahu in this time period on a train. Just kind of amazing. People today talk about, well, can't we just reuse the train right of way that existed back then? And the answer is no, we cannot because most of that has been built on. There are some still sections that remain available but it's very little of what originally existed. Next photo. Okay. The train system ran around Oahu as I just showed you but there were various considerations that were not necessarily optimum for this particular system. And that was that train tracks and automobile roads or motor vehicle roads intersected in a number of places where there were rail crossings. These are dangerous and you will be aware of train collisions with motor vehicles that happen regularly in other places in the world. And those could happen here on Oahu as well. And this is a consideration when the train tracks are at grade, meaning that they are at the surface of the ground. So in the picture on the left, you can see one of those train crossings. This happens to be in Haleiva in 1934. And then on the right, there's a photograph of a collision between an army Jeep and a Oahu railway car in 1945. You can't see it here but the driver of that Jeep was badly injured and he is bleeding from having hit his head against the windshield. These are significant considerations for rail systems. Next photo. So when you also have rail systems that are on the ground, you have another thing to consider. And that is that those tracks are in the way sometimes of things that can dislodge them or damage them. So these are photographs of what happened to the Oahu railway tracks along the North Shore after the tsunami or because of the tsunami that struck the Hawaiian Islands on April 1st, 1946. This means that the tracks are in the way of not only natural forces like water so that this could be waves, this could be flood. It also means that if a tree falls down, if something happens to the tracks that blocks them, the entire system has to shut down until the tracks can be either cleared or completely repaired. So this again is a consideration. It's much cheaper to build the tracks on the ground at grade, but they are exposed to the problems that also come when they're in these exposed conditions. And that's something that's really relevant for our discussion of our rail system today, but I'm gonna be getting to that in later programs of this series. Next slide, please. Okay, the Oahu railway in existence from 1889 up until December 31st, 1947, when all of those tracks that I showed you went out of use, why did that occur? Why if there was a rail system in place with all of these miles of tracks and all of these pieces of equipment, the locomotives and the rail cars and cargo cars and passenger cars, all of that stuff, what happened to all of them and why did it happen? Well, the photograph on the right shows you exactly what happened and why. This is a picture from 1945. On the left is the Oahu railway train. And on the right are two different sections of Kamehameha Highway and one section going to the left, one section going to the right. And on this, you can see a number of motor vehicles. Not only are there passenger cars, but there are large trucks. That's what happened to the Oahu railway. It could not compete with private vehicles. Either passengers rode, people drove their own cars and drove themselves around or cargo was transported on big trucks. And the Oahu railway could not compete with that. Now it did not go out of business 100% in 1947 even though most of its track suddenly fell into complete disuse. It did continue to run trains just in the area around Honolulu Harbor. And in fact, I can remember in the 1960s seeing trains crossing Nimitz Highway that were Oahu railway trains that just ran between the pineapple canneries and the docks in Honolulu Harbor. But for all intents and purposes, that was the end in 1947 of the rail system that had existed, next photograph. Before I dropped the subject of trains, I also have to mention that there were small railway systems that ran on individual sugar plantations. And here is a photograph from around 1900 of a little kind of miniature train, much smaller than the ones I just showed you on the land of the Waianae sugar plantation. There were 10, at least 10 railway systems on Oahu on sugar plantations. Now mostly of course, they carry just cut sugar cane but they could transport passengers like workers and sometimes people who lived in the area could catch rides on them. They were never however, major elements in the overall transportation for the island of Oahu next. Okay, in the same year that the Oahu railway was authorized to begin its service, another system began and that was the Hawaiian tramways. This was also a rail system, as you can see in these pictures, but it was confined just to urban Honolulu. And unlike the Oahu railway, it was not operated mechanically but these little cars which were on rails were pulled by either two horses or two mules. Now, obviously two animals are not capable of pulling a very large load. So these cars had to be quite small. They moved very slowly. They sometimes came off the tracks. There were a lot of problems with this but it was a way of transporting oneself certainly faster than riding something like riding a horse on your own and certainly better than walking. So this system continued in use starting, as I said, in 1888 but next picture in 1901, it began to be outcompeted just as I just explained to you about the Oahu railway. The Hawaiian tramways were put out of business by 1903 by the creation of a new system which was the Honolulu Rapid Transit and this cartoon from the Pacific Commercial Advertiser newspaper of 1901 graphically shows you what happened. The electric streetcar system completely blasted these tramway cars out of the way and that was the new way to move yourself around starting after that time in 1901. Next picture. So this was the Oahu, not the Oahu, this was the Honolulu Rapid Transit Company and these are the examples of the first cars that they used. These are electric streetcars. They ran on rails again, which were in the pavement of different streets. They received electric power from wires overhead so they had two one or two connectors to those overhead wires. They didn't make a lot of noise because they didn't run with a motor vehicle engine. They got people around very nicely. There were, however, some problems with them in addition to their good aspects and let's explore that a little further. Next picture. Excuse me, before we get into that, however, I do want to point out that the picture that I just showed you of the open-sided streetcars, gradually those open-sided cars were replaced by more modern cars like this. These had the advantage of being much safer because the old streetcars, you simply climbed up and stepped on and stepped off any place you felt like it. You could also fall off. So while, in some cases, they might be considered convenient, in other cases, they were not safe. These streetcars, this is a photograph from the 1930s, shows that the safer system is for everybody to enter through one door at the front, everybody to exit from one door at the rear and then you have your passengers moving around a lot more under control. Next photograph. Now, one of the problems that occurred with the streetcars, well, there were several problems. First of all, the streetcars were confined to just running on tracks. If something got in their way, they had to come to a complete stop. It also meant that they sometimes had collisions because it couldn't drive around some kind of obstruction. So in the picture on the right, you see a collision between an HRT bus on the left and an HRT streetcar on Baratanya Street in 1938. But another really significant problem was that the streetcars ran on tracks in the middle of the street. So everybody who got on or off had to walk in the street to do so. And that's what you see in the two pictures on the left. Exposing all passengers to the danger of being struck by cars. This was a problem. Next photographs. Now, one of the problems that the streetcar system had for the home of the rapid transit company was that it was expensive. The streetcar system had to be run by its own electric power plant. So HRT had its own electric generating plant that you see in the picture on the right. They also had the expense and difficult problems sometimes of maintaining all the tracks. They had to maintain them. They had to install them. They had to eventually dig them out of the ground if they gave up a particular run for streetcars. And also they had to install and maintain all of the poles along the street that held up the wires for the overhead connection to the electric system. And this was a big amount of expenses. They had to deal with it. Next picture. It became obvious that streetcars had their limitations. So starting in 1937, the HRT began to install electric buses which were called trolley coaches. And here is a picture of the first one of those on the left running along Kalakawa Avenue in Waikiki. And these buses had the advantage of being able to drive from side to side so they could pull up to the curb and people could get on and off safely that way. This is why eventually the streetcar system was given up and ended in 1941 in favor of first starters, these electric buses which were in use from 1937 to 1957. Next photo. The Honolulu Rapid Transit Company had been running buses that were powered by motors. In other words, diesel or internal combustion engines starting in 1915. This picture from the 1930s shows two of those buses and they were really gonna be the wave of the future. Next photo. So starting in the 30s, particularly more and more of these buses came into use and eventually they were the only system that was in use because as I said, the streetcars ended in 1941, the electric buses ended in 1957 and from then on it was only buses like the ones that you see in these pictures, one on the left from 1953 and the new bus on the right from 1983. And it's been like that that we've traveled around on Oahu for the most part ever since. Next photograph. The bus system again has become extremely popular for a variety of reasons. First of all, it's inexpensive and second of all, it travels all around Oahu now. And so we are very accustomed to seeing lots of people getting on and off of buses like the picture at the top left which was taken at Alamoana Center. And this picture is probably over 20 years old now but it's still something that we see at Alamoana particularly which is a major hub for bus transportation. Next photo. Starting in 1971, the bus system was run by a different entity. The Honolulu Rapid Transit Company went out of business. It was no longer economically viable for a private company to run a transit system and it was taken over by the city and county of Honolulu. So this picture from the 1970s shows some of those old HRT buses which are now under the control of the city and county which is the way the bus system is still run today. Next photo. Well, this brings us to the end of this portion of the story of transportation on the island of Oahu. We're going to continue from here onwards discussing mostly what we use today for transportation and that is private cars. This is a very early photograph of what was the first really popular automobile sold in the United States. It's an Oldsmobile and it went on the market in 1905 and is referred to as a curved dash Oldsmobile because the front of it, the dashboard is curved. Well, from little sort of insignificant looking beginnings like this one was going to come the transit system that we primarily use today and that is automobiles. Automobiles have a lot of advantages for us as users but they also have a lot of other disadvantages and in our next program, that's what I'm going to be talking about. And again, I want to emphasize that we're right at a very important moment in transit on the island of Oahu because the Honolulu area rapid transit systems first segment is going to be opening just a few weeks from now from when I'm doing this program. You may be watching this program years later after I created it and the transit system will already be familiar to you but right at the moment, we're all sort of excited, interested and looking forward to seeing what that's going to be like. Thank you very much for joining me. I'm DeSoto Brown. This is a program for Dokomomo Hawaii. Dokomomo is an organization international organization that is dedicated to modern architecture of the mid-century, mid-century portion of the 20th century. While I'm not talking about architecture strictly today, I am talking about things which are very important for the urban development of Honolulu and that are pertinent to that subject overall because the way we live not only involves living in buildings that are architect designed but it also involves other aspects of urban life as I have said, like transportation. So I'll see you next time that I do my next show and thanks for joining me, everybody and until then, aloha.