 Hawaii moving forward, and the show is dedicated to transportation issues. When we say transportation, it's kind of a very generic term. So I'd like to kind of define that a little bit further. Transportation many times means mobility. And as we all know here in the state of Hawaii, specifically here in Honolulu, mobility seems to be quite an issue. And we'd like to address that. We'd like to see where we're currently at with our mobility issues. We'd like to see where we can move forward to the future. So without further ado, I'd like to talk a little bit about what I've done in the past as it pertains to transportation issues. For 17 years, I was a transportation traffic reduction manager in the city of Seattle. And spent a great part of my life trying to make the city of Seattle a livable city. And I'm sure that everyone who might be watching this show or will watch it in the future, I'm thinking that that's an interest to them as well. The lifeblood of our cities are really mandated about mobility. How do we get into work? How we get into door shopping? How do we get out of work? How do we get out of our parking lots? And I think the city of Honolulu has a lot of work to do in the future. And I'm thinking that when people think of social issues for whatever reason, transportation and traffic seems to rate very, very high because it impacts our lives. Things seen and things unseen, how we're impacted by traffic and waiting in traffic. So how do we define traffic? Well, basically it's people trying to move and we're trying to go to work. We're trying to go to school. We're trying to do our shopping. We're trying to run errands. And unfortunately traffic is at a time when we're all trying to do that at the same time. A lot of times we have to go to businesses that are open certain hours. We have to go to work that requires us to be at work at a certain time. So we're all trying to do the same things at the same time. And traffic congestion simply means it's waiting in line. We're waiting in line to get down the road. And that's the most frustrating part of traffic. I moved to Hawaii here about nine years ago and city of Seattle is very much like Honolulu. We have from topography standpoint, we have water and then we have this land strip and then we have mountains. So based on topography, it's very, very difficult to build your way out of a traffic problem. And so the two cities in many ways are very similar from that standpoint. Probably about 8.1% of peak hour commuters are taking about 60 minutes in traffic to get to their point of destination. And it's as high as 75 minutes or longer. And we know that by studies that when people take more than 75 minutes to get into the workplace every morning, day in and day out, we find that people try to make changes to their lives. They either relocate from where they live closer into the workplace or they try to alter their hours and trying to see if the employer will allow them to flex their hours. The problem is if you can't afford to move or you can't afford to move into a location closer to the work site or you have a work schedule that's non-flexible. So from our life standpoint, it can be very, very frustrating day in and day out that you have no alternatives to be waiting in line to be stuck in traffic. Things here in Hawaii are very challenging. Our roadways are limited. So unlike other cities in the mainland in the United States, there may be alternative roads to get you to your place of destination. And unfortunately, there's just not a lot of arterial parallel roads that take the pressure off of H1, H2, or H3. We have very short on-ramps, I've noticed. And a lot of times because of short on-ramps to the freeway, that traffic will back up into the neighborhoods and cause further congestion issues for the neighborhood. We have a lot of construction projects going on. I think I saw recently that the Hawaii Department of Transportation may have as many as 800 projects going on around the state. And I don't think you have to live very far to see if you live in the Pearl City area to what extent those traffic projects are, excuse me, those construction projects are taking effect. We also have out by the Cam Highway is always blocked. We have signal synchronization issues. There are projects that are trying to line up those signals so that they work in unison, but there's so many other places that need that kind of assistance from the Department of Transportation. We have 15 major condos being built, a lot of them in Kaka'aka area. And I can only imagine with all the cranes and all the cement trucks and all the workers that have to show up to the site just how tough it is to get in and out of that area and there's more coming. We have approximately 30,000 students and staff when school is in session trying to get to the University of Hawaii, Manoa. They're coming from everywhere, east, west, town. Everyone's trying to get into the University of Hawaii. And then if you add on the private schools, that number goes way up from 30,000. So it could even be 35 or even higher. So when we look at transportation, when we look at traffic congestion, there's a quote from a transportation secretary about a decade ago and his name was Sid Morrison. And he was the Washington State Secretary of Transportation and he said something I think applies whether it be in Seattle, whether it be in Honolulu, New York, Los Angeles, or the University. This quote is very poignant so allow me to read it for a second here. There is no silver bullet solution to the region's transportation woes. The best ammunition is instead silver buckshot. We need a scattergun of solutions attacking the problems with rail, bus, ferries, concrete and technology from smart cars to smart roads, from HOV lanes to hot lanes, to telecommuting and rideshare and vans and bikes. So I think what is most appropriate is there is no silver magic bullet. And unfortunately I think some of the agencies might think that what they do in this state might be the answer to our traffic congestion issues. I'm not saying that's the case but I've seen it in play elsewhere. For example, the rail, a lot of people think that that's going to really move a lot of people in and out of the, from the west to town. And that is going to really be a silver bullet approach to our transportation problems. Here's the bus organization thinks the same. Here's an example of why a silver buckshot approach is more important than a silver bullet approach. Let's say the Department of Transportation presumed that they could build their way out of our traffic congestion. And they thought all we need to do is add more roads. And by the way, I don't think the DOT believes that for one minute. In other states, they do believe that we can build ourselves out of this congestion issue. So let's just hypothetically pretend that H1 had suddenly overnight a brand new three-lane, four-lane parallel H1 right next to it. So all the traffic that was on the first H1 or the primary H1, you would see them go to the other H1. The traffic would be reduced. The problem stands that word gets out. If there's a new access and there's decreased time in commuting that the word gets out to everybody. So for those people who never took H1 to begin with and they took an alternative route. And for those people who said, well, you know, the worst time to go in H1 is between seven and nine in the morning to go to town. I'll just wait. I'll just hold off going into work or I'll hold off on running my errands until later in the morning. So there's a second segment of folks. And then there's the other folks that say, I just, you know, I just can't do it. I can't afford to have a car in the first place. Maybe I'll just, you know, I'm taking transit or transit actually seems to work best for me. So those are the three segments of people that weren't using that H1 to begin with. The problem is when the word gets out, people go, oh, there's more capacity on the roadway. You can get into town much faster than you could before. So now I'm going to get on that road with everybody else. And it doesn't take long for the second H1 now to fill up as bad as the first H1. You know, it may take a year, it may take two years, but sooner or later, the increased roadway eventually is going to fill up as bad as the original road that was enhanced. So this kind of goes to the point of, is it more roads? Because a lot of people think more roads. If they just built more roads, we would have less traffic. Or a concept which I did for 17 years, which is called transportation demand management. And, excuse me, and what that is is, well, first off, transportation demand management is more or less an academia terminology. I like the word vehicle illumination. And I think that's more descriptive of what you're trying to do. You're trying to, from the destination point where people are coming in, you're trying to persuade people that are coming to that point of destination, be it an employer, be it to the University of Hawaii, wherever. You're trying to convince them that maybe if you leave the car home once a week, twice a week, be great if they could do it five days a week. But start off maybe even with one time a week. And if you can convince people that coming in by a carpool, or coming in by a vanpool, or transit, eventually rail, that would give you that one trip, that one car that did not get on the H1. That would give you that opportunity where you didn't have to expand your capacity, but rather you got the demand or you reduced that one car. And from a cost standpoint of the use of the taxpayer's dollars, the reduction of that one car through persuasion is a lot less expensive than trying to add concrete and rebar. So the buckshot approach is a good one. We just shouldn't focus on any one methodology of trying to reduce our congestion. Looking at Honolulu, USA Today ranks Honolulu number six worst traffic in the United States. TomTom lists, let's see, they list LA as number one, San Francisco is number two, Honolulu is number three, New York, and then Seattle following. So that's that's quite a statement. I believe that no matter what you do, going back to the days where you would take far less to get into town, I'm not saying those days are over. But when I look at population growth, be it in any city, what maybe the best you can hope for or try to attempt is to keep traffic from getting any worse. And that leads me to our population growth here for Hawaii in the next years to come. So currently right now, Honolulu County has 976,000 residents. Kauai has 71,000, Maui 168,000 and Hawaii County at 202,000. So totaling about 1.4 million in 2015. The hard part to to digest here is that if you look at population growth projections, and just I'm just going to talk about Honolulu County right now, we are looking at an increase of about 67,000 people by the year 2020. We're looking at 94,000 people addition added to the to the area by 2025. And if I fast forward to 2040, we're looking probably a projected growth of an additional 153,000 people or 1 million, 1.2 million, basically. And so what I'd like to do is take a break right here and we'll be right back. I'm Tim Appachelle. This is Hawaii moving forward. Thank you so much. I'm Stan Enigaman, and I want you to be here every Friday noon. Think tech Hawaii dot com. Watch the show be there. I'll put it the full way. Please join us at Think Tech Hawaii. My program is Asia in Review. My next program is on November 17th, Thursday, 11am. This is Johnson Choi, your host. Aloha, everyone. I'm Maria Mera, and I'm here to invite you to my bilingual show Viva Hawaii on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 3pm. We are here to talk about news, issues and events local and around the world. Join me, Aloha. Aloha! Hey, Jackal. University of Hawaii football team under Rolovitch is going to kick butt this season. In case you didn't understand me, University of Hawaii football team is going to kick butt under Rolovitch this season. So be sure to follow us on Think Tech Hawaii and Yobachi Top. I'll be at every game. And remember, Aloha! Welcome back. I'm Tim Appachelle. This is Hawaii moving forward. I'd like to talk about where we go from here. What are the goals of this program? I would like to have a very informative discussion with guests that will be appearing here shortly. Specifically, we want to look at the existing problems here that face Hawaii residents. We want to look at how the impact of traffic adversely affects people that live and work and shop and renaissance every day, how it impacts their lives. I'd like to look at businesses. How has traffic congestion impacted adversely what they're trying to do? How are they trying to get their employees to work? Are their employees coming to work stressed out? Are goods and services being clogged up and not getting from one point to another? And what is the cost impact to that kind of congestion to the businesses? I'd also like to look at potential solutions. Again, we're not going to go down the road where a silver bullet approach is going to work. So what are all the pellets of the silver buckshot that's going to all come together and hopefully make a meaningful difference in how we live and how we get to work and how we shop in here in Hawaii? We want to also look at the explicit cost of traffic, as I said, not only to the businesses but to the state as a whole. We want to talk to the experts. We want to talk to those folks that are in the current discussions of how rail is going to work and how bus is going to interact with it, how other pieces of that silver buckshot are going to play in. I've talked to one person that said he's having discussions with the rail people about bikes and how do we get bikes onto the rails so that when the rail ends, they can take their bike off and use that for further mobility. We want to see all the pieces fit together. For an example, let's assume that the rail now is online and it's going to its second stop and so it's full of commuters and they all get off and they're now at station number two and then what? Now what do I do? Because my employer is still five miles down the road and so yes, the rail got me to this point but now how do I get to my employer? So is it going to be bus? Will there be enough bus routes to come to that rail station and serve it and get you reasonably close to your employer? How many bus routes would that take? How many service hours would that take? Is there a road capacity for now a mainstream load of buses to serve those rail stations? Or is there a buckshot approach? So we want to explore that as well. Some of the excerpts that we had coming on the show, not this next week but the next week after that, I believe that's up to the November 28th, we have the Department of Transportation Services Deputy Director and we would like to talk to him about, you know, bus. How is the bus going to be part of the solution here? We want to talk about what is called speed and reliability. It's great if you have a schedule in front of you but if the bus is clogged down and it's not making to its destination point, is that schedule really that valuable? So we want to talk about speed and reliability and how to improve that. We want to talk about transit and ridership numbers. Are there opportunities to increase ridership? We want to talk about service hours. Are there enough service hours? What kind of budget would be required to put more service on the road? We know what it feels like when service hours are being cut but how best to apply new service hours? And when the rail does come through, how does that free up service hours for the bus to serve new communities or add frequency improvements to existing communities? We want to interact with rail. We want to see how again, connectivity will take place, not with just bus but what about van pools? What about having car pools also utilize some of these stations? We would definitely want to talk to heart. We want to talk to the rail people. That's one of my main agendas. I'd like to see how things are going with the construction issues, where we're at with that. It's been in the paper a lot. We'd like to talk to them about the increase of budget. I guess it's 4.68 billion. 2 would a lot of people are very upset about is 8.6 billion. That's a lot of money. As a side note, the city of Seattle just passed a $53 billion rail edition package. So as much as I fell off the chair with between a $4 billion and a $6 billion, I feel sorry for my former Seattleite friends that are now going to be paying for $53 billion worth of transportation packages. If the rail does stop at Middle Street, exactly how is that going to be served? Again, I made the case that if a rail station is at point A, then my employer lives five, my employer lives, my employer works five miles down the road, how am I going to get there? So if service truly stops at Middle Street, how is it going to be served that people can find and obtain that mobility to get them to their ultimate destination? We look at planning beyond Middle Street. What if more money is obtained? What would that look like if it's going to Alamoana Center? What would it look like if rail service was going to University of Hawaii in Manoa? We will also talk to, again, those particles of the Silver Buckshot. We want to talk to the biking community. I think they have a huge role on how we get out of our, how to ease our traffic congestion, but there's things that have to be done. Right now, in Kakaako and South Street, they're proposing new bike lanes, and I want to talk about safety of bike lanes, so people will get used to the idea that maybe it is safe to get on a bike, because right now a lot of people won't get on a bike because they don't feel safe or secure. I'd like to talk to them about what a project called Safe Streets and how well that's being utilized. I also want to talk about vanpool and how that could be another addition to our transportation issues. Vanpools can carry anywhere from 8 to 20 people, and so if you have enough vanpools on the road, that can make a real dent in some of the congestion issues. It's not easy to form a vanpool, but maybe there could be policies that are developed that make it easier to get a vanpool on the road to begin with. Typically you have to start with 8 people, but maybe if there's some incentives, and I'm not saying who would supply those incentives, but maybe you start a vanpool with 5 people, and then you graduate to 6, 7, and 8, so that getting a vanpool on the road is the first step, and it's always the hardest step. I'd like to talk to the State Department of Transportation. We'd like to know what they're going to do about all their current projects and how that impacting traffic, and then talk about future projects. A classic example was the addition, not the addition, but was just the realignment of H1 and opening up the HOV lane without any major construction. I think that was a really great thing, and it's moving more people who are taking the option of transit or vanpool or carpool, and it's opening up those lanes. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about what is called ATDM. It's called Action Traffic and Demand Management. Basically, it's high technology that looks at intersections, and these intersections have the ability to count cars, either going through the intersection or cars that are on the side streets. And through this technology, what was normally maybe a 45-second or a 90-second or a red light now can be short-circuited and turn green because it's based on traffic flow and traffic counts. So that's a fascinating topic that I think I would love to see more of. I don't know to what extent it is or isn't being utilized here in the city. I want to talk to the traffic division of the city and county, talk about smart streets, talk about their work with the vanpool. I understand the vanpool is being merged with Enterprise. So how well has that worked in the past and how well can it work in the future? I'd like to talk about this thing called the legislature, the fact that the legislature has a big role in addressing our transportation issues. For example, a lot of people don't realize, but the federal government says that if you are willing to pay for a transit pass or a vanpool pass, that $255 of that each and every month, depending on what it costs, if you don't go over $255, that money is tax-free, IRS exempt. And a lot of employers do have programs for you to sign up for, and it will come right off your gross pay and it's pre-tax dollars that are set aside in the count to be reimbursed for your transit passes or your vanpool passes. So that's an example of how government can come up with policies that help us out. I'd like to talk about transportation benefits above and beyond that. There's one concept that I've already briefly talked about is transportation demand management. Well, in some states they've actually passed, the legislature have passed laws that put a requirement on employers to actually address all the employees that are coming into the work site. One in Washington state was called Commute Trip Reduction. And basically what it was is that if you were an employer that employed over 100 people, you had to come up with some sort of plan that your employees could take advantage of, whether it was a subsidy for a bus or subsidy for a vanpool or just a preferential carpool spot for you. It was an idea that the employer now is involved with trying to assist the state and assist the city with some of the transportation issues. I don't think Hawaii is ready for that, but if the traffic gets to a point where it's just stifling economic growth and deterring tourists from coming into the state, it might be something that we might ask the employer community, if not on a regulatory basis, maybe on a voluntary basis to try to help out. And I think employers are actually doing that now too. I know the city county has on their website those employers that are stepping up to the plate and they are buying transit passes. Now, to what extent and to what degree they're buying them, I'm not quite certain, but that's a worthwhile discussion. We'd also like to talk about parking management with the city. We know that electric vehicles are given preferential spots. How about vanpool? Maybe they are, and I just haven't noticed it, but if they are, that's great. If not, then maybe it's time for vanpools to get free parking in the central business corridor of Honolulu. We'd like to talk about what employers could do. Could they, again, provide subsidies? Could they provide compressed work weeks and flex time so that people can alter their schedule? So there are a lot of things that this show, I hope we have time to address. And it's my hope that we can basically explore not the silver bullet approach, but we can explore that silver buckshot approach. And it's my hope that as each week goes by, our ridership goes up in the city, but our viewership also increases. So with that, I would like to say thank you for watching the show. We hope you come back again. And if you have any ideas for what you'd like to see on the show, I'm going to give you my e-mail address. It's my last name's Appichella. A-P-I-C-E-L-L-A, 58 at gmail.com. And with that, I'm Tim Appichella. This is Hawaii Moving Forward. Thank you very much.