Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann’s commentary in the Sunday, July 30, 2006, The Honolulu Advertiser is disheartening and disappointing.

The mayor gets so many facts wrong and despite saying the contrary, he seems determined to make the same sort of mistakes that plagued the administration of Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris from 1994 to 2004.

The syndrome is sometimes referred to as "Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees" or looking at the immediate problem and solution without taking into account the bigger picture.

That is what Mayor Harris did by robbing the sewer maintenance fund and using the money to build fountains and other water fixtures and bronze statues in Waikiki. His diversion of important money for Honolulu's infrastructure for projects that were not necessary, led to a 48 million gallon sewage spill in the Ala Wai Canal that closed the beaches in Waikiki and Ala Moana for more than a week.

Mayor Hannemann is, unfortunately, doing the same thing with the rail project while ignoring his own dictum that was instrumental in getting him elected, “Do we need it? Can we afford it? Can we afford to maintain it?”

Even if you ignore the first of those premises, the second two are a definite “no." And Mayor Hannemann is simply glossing over that fact.

First, three times in his commentary, Mayor Hannemann calls the transit project “light-rail." Let’s be very clear about this. Light rail, heavy rail and commuter rail are very specific terms defined by the federal government. A rail line that runs on street level, like a street car or the rail in Portland Oregon is “light-rail.”

A rail that is either underground like a subway, or elevated above automobile traffic is “heavy rail.” What is being proposed for Oahu is “heavy rail” and having the mayor continually term it otherwise doesn’t make it so. If the mayor is going to push the project, at least he could be truthful with the people.

Second, there is no guaranteed federal funding as Mayor Hannemann suggests in his commentary. He says “we have assurances for transit money.” The Federal Transportation Administration has been abandoning funding rail projects right and left the last decade as federal bureaucrats realize that rail transit does nothing to relieve traffic congestion. In fact, by wasting money that could be better spent on other projects, rail transit actually makes congestion worse.

Third, Mayor Hannemann conflates the idea that because Honolulu has a high population density this equates to having a high job population density that justifies a centralized public transit system.

Comparing Honolulu to Los Angeles as he does in his commentary is a bad idea because rail has been an extraordinary failure in L.A. The more miles of rail the government builds there, the smaller percentage of the commuting public it serves.

The same thing would happen here. The idea of the "second city" on Oahu was to create a second “job center” so that people wouldn’t have to commute to work from Downtown Honolulu from West Oahu. The fact that our elected officials didn’t follow through on this plan and provide the tax breaks and infrastructure to service Ewa Plain residents doesn’t mean that we should now compound the error by building a multi-billion dollar boondoggle to shlep them Downtown.

Where are the tax breaks for businesses to move to Barber’s Point so that local residents can have local jobs? What happened to the plan for a “second city.”

Isn’t the whole, “heavy rail” plan an admission that we have given up on the second city idea? We can give ethanol producers a 100 percent investment tax credit but nothing for businesses that will save the City/County of Honolulu billions of dollars in transit dollars if they could relocate to the Leeward side of the island. What part of this doesn’t make sense?

There are many such errors in the Mayor's commentary and as mentioned previously there is no way of knowing if they are intentional or accidental, but they are there. And if someone examines them very carefully it becomes obvious that there are better solutions for our traffic congestion problems than a hugely expensive rail boondoggle.

Someone took me to task this morning via email because I haven’t mentioned jitneys in quite a while. I plead guilty. The problem on Oahu is not a lack of government programs and public transit solutions but the maintenance of a government monopoly that is called TheBus.”

This prevents private enterprise from entering the “rush hour” “traffic congestion” field with private enterprise solutions. This is what creates the demand that we are now trying to solve with rail.

Mayor Hannemann in his column said he didn’t want to spend billions of dollars for highway expansion but is perfectly willing to spend the same dollars for “heavy rail.”

The difference is if we would legalize jitneys and allow them to run regular routes through the Ewa plain and then jump onto a High Occupancy Toll flyover it would handle far more commuters, in a shorter period of time, that rail ever could.

Anyone with an open mind can review the numbers and see rail is not cost effective, is not efficient and doesn’t contribute less to pollution. A fully open, legalized and privatized jitney program would service far more commuters, at less overall cost, than any subsidized rail monster. The key here is having an open mind about the issue.

The other issue that is not being considered is that by the time the rail is built, the population increase on this island will have already made it obsolete and we will be looking for new solutions.

Rail will solve nothing. The questions we need to ask are the ones that Mayor Hannemann ran for office on in 2004. “Do we need it? Can we afford it? Can we afford to maintain it?”

The answer to which is; "No, No and No."

We don’t need it, because we can legalize jitneys and build HOT lanes.

We can’t afford it because we’ve already had one tax increase to fund this boondoggle and that isn’t near enough.

We will have to increase taxes yet again. And we can’t afford to maintain it because we need to maintain the roads and sewers before we take on anything else.

The last one is the most important. Until we can do that should we really be taking on anything else?

Reference:

http://tinyurl.com/lgz7f

Don Newman, senior policy analyst for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii can be reached at: mailto:don@grassrootinstitute.org