The all-elevated rail transit system pushed by Mayor Hannemann, which will carry passengers on a concrete track above existing streets and communities, will have a number of effects, some obvious and some less so, according to a University of Hawaii architecture professor.

Besides placing the elevated concrete track and station in front of Aloha Tower as a visual barrier between downtown and the waterfront, something other cities on the mainland have worked to avoid, the elevated system remains aloof from the communities below.

William Paluch, associate professor in the UH School of Architecture and Studio Director for the Honolulu Office of Eight Inc., asked his students to consider the redevelopment of Kakaako, an exercise which led to the conclusion that trains running at street-level or “at grade” through downtown and on to Waikiki “is absolutely the right solution for our city.”

Unstated but implied is the conclusion that the proposed all-elevated system “is absolutely the wrong solution”, at least within the urban core.

Paluch, in an analysis circulated to members of the American Institute of Architects, first describes the rail segment through Kakaado which climbs from about 40 feet to a height of nearly 100 feet when it hits Ala Moana Center at Nordstroms.

Roller-Coaster was the first image that came to mind. However, the larger question had to do with whether this alignment was seriously attempting to activate the future redevelopment potential of Kakaako’s unique characteristics. To me it underlined the fact that the rail alignment is ‘passing through’ Kakaako rather than engaging the communities that already live there and will come to live here in the future. Quite frankly, all of the Kakaako alignment is in the wrong place and at the wrong elevation.

“In the current plan,” Paluch observes, “most of the relationships articulated between community and transit appear to be treated as incidental and/or undesirable.

So I came to ask myself the obvious question that all of you have already asked, ‘Why isn’t this thing at grade when it comes into Honolulu?’. To me, it is absolutely the right solution for our city. It is not so much a question of available land area, or traveling 20mph vs 30mph along the 2.0 + mile stretch within the city. It is a question of actively engaging our existing and dynamic pedestrian experience of the city with transit options at that level of this experience; grade. It cannot be overemphasized that experiencing our city ‘through-it’ versus ‘above-it’ carry two entirely different understandings of our community. The latter places additional emphasis on our already well established destination nodes and economic engines. The former continues to tie these destinations to one another, but also allows the areas in-between to prosper.

Paluch also questions the city’s decision to press ahead with designs and even initial contracts while the environmental impact process is still underway.

By its very nature, an EIS should not facilitate ongoing design of a system as complex as this one. I believe the process is intended to be utilized as a full-disclosure document to seek meaningful and valuable information and resources in the attempt to minimize impacts and optimize benefits. How can the system continue to be designed while we are still in the process of assessing the impacts? How can anyone reasonably argue that it is too late to raise any issue related to environmental impacts while the EIS process is ongoing?

It is “definitely not too late” to address these issues, and Paluch suggests the city slow down long enough to issue an RFP for a more robust planning phase.

Has the City really addressed planning in a robust enough manner? Based on the letter I read from the Mayor to Peter Vincent, I would argue no. In that letter, the Mayor accused the AIA on multiple occasions of being late to the party. And this was in January of 2007! It appears you were late before you even had the opportunity to comment. If proper planning had been an objective of the administration, then we should not have had to invite ourselves to the discussion. As recognized stewards of the built environment, Community Planners, Urban Designers, and Architects should have been invited to participate from the word go.

The robust technology for an at-grade, street level, “through-it” solution didn’t exist back in the 1980s, when Honolulu first proposed what is essentially the same system being pushed today. However, in the intervening years, a combination of light rail technologies has become by far the most frequent choice of cities across the country, and it seems the obvious choice at least for the in town segments of our proposed transit system.