I saw this bumper sticker on a car in Kaimuki this week, and it reminded me that there’s an important voice that has been lost in the rail debate. Hawaii’s architects stepped forward to challenge the city’s design choices, but somehow their “third way” message failed to gain traction in the back and forth between rail supporters and opponents.
It seems to me that their perspective remains eminently sensible. It’s too bad that political forces have left us with Frank Fasi’s Revenge in the form of his 40-year old rail plan.
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Here’s a trip down memory lane to see how we got here in 2008: http://youtu.be/uLnepSgrXP0
Just two questions on rail and Transit Oriented Development and oil prices that I think have been overlooked….
The City has always admitted that even with rail used at maximum capacity, traffic will still get worse on the west side of Oahu. That is, even the City and County of Honolulu has always taken the position that a rail system would serve at best as a way to limit the inevitable increase in traffic that is expected on the west side of Oahu with the plans out there for further low-rise suburban sprawl.
The big fly in the soup for the City seems to have been the sudden realization by former Mayor Hannemann that rail will not run at full capacity if people do not live or work near a station. Here’s a quote by pro-rail urban planners:
http://www.apta.com/resources/reportsandpublications/Documents/weyrich_does_transit_work.pdf
One problem might be that there do not seem to be any real plans to develop serious high-density infrastructure on the west side along the rail route. Critics of the rail project often claim that it is a conspiracy by developers to build apartment buildings all over Oahu, but this does not seem to be the case. Instead, there is talk of building “mixed medium density” housing in places like Hoopili (mixed with quasi-agriculture). To me, this seems like greenwashing. Developers seem instead to be using the rail project as a pretext to build more low-rise suburbs, the occupants of which probably won’t really use the rail.
Another problem with TOD that TOD is not just apartment buildings at rail stations, but office towers near other rail stations. If white-collar jobs are not created for rail commuters, they will probably not be inclined to ride the rail system. The population of the west side is generally blue collar in nature, and they are generally not heading toward office work in their commute; they are headed in their trucks toward blue-collar jobs all over Oahu.
There is talk that in the future the west side of Oahu on the whole (not just at rail stations) will evolve into the kind of high-density living that we find in Waikiki. Again, there is no evidence of this. In fact, one would expect such a development to imply a huge increase in Oahu’s population base that would probably exceed its economic and natural resource base.
Not only that, but the historical trend now seems to be away from commuting, with people moving out of the suburbs into the urban core, and for each suburb to develop its own semi-urban core. (There is much talk throughout the US of a “pent-up demand for housing”, especially among young people living with their parents and saving for a place of their own. But recent statistics show these young people, when they do make their move, to be moving into cities and renting apartments. ‘Housing’ no longer means buying a house.)
Now, for my first question, which is:
1. “What if the best case scenario for rail actually happens?”
That is, what if massive new apartment complexes rise up for twenty miles deep into the west side of Oahu? What if the inhabitants of the TOD areas all use the rail to go to a massively re-developed downtown district of Honolulu, which has transformed into a global urban center?
What would happen to traffic on the west side in that case? The people living in the TOD apartments and working in the TOD office towers would not be from the west side of Oahu. The people of the west side of Oahu would still live in their houses — with ever new houses being built — and driving cars and trucks.
Now, the City has always admitted that traffic will only get worse out there, and the rail exists only to lessen the inevitable increase in traffic. But this might not be true. Even with a thriving rail system, the people in houses on the west side will not use it and there will be no limiting of the increase in traffic.
So the City’s claim is false. Rail, even if it is used optimally will not limit the inevitable increase in traffic as the City says it will. In fact, it would be expected that the new people on the west side in the TOD apartments will also own cars and use them outside of their daily commute to and from their downtown office jobs. This could mean that not only will traffic get worse anyway with the rail — which the City always admitted — but it will get much more worse than it would have without the rail. Unless there is an actual reduction in houses on the west side, rail will not limit the expected worsening of traffic; and in fact, TOD means an increase in traffic outside of peak traffic times.
My second question is:
2. “What will happen when gasoline is $8/gallon?”
The notion that the cost of oil will inevitably rise has become accepted as an article of common sense. My impression is that this is valid. There seem to be plenty of oil sources in the world, that’s not the problem. The problem is that it’s becoming more difficult and expensive to extract. We have come to the “end of ‘easy’ oil”. Oil production peaked in the US in the 1970s, and globally it is peaking right now.
The right question is: When will that decline in production of ‘easy oil’ accelerate? A graph of global oil production is like a bell-shaped curve: it accelerated dramatically in the 20th century, plateaued in the early 21st century (now), and will decrease dramatically in the future. Again, the question is when will the roller coaster take the big plunge? Production was expected to really plunge in 2015 (by most of the estimates I’ve seen), but the global recession pushed that off into the future by a few years.
Another question is how much will production plunge when it hits that point? During the lead up to the Gulf War in 1990, Saudi Arabia claimed that it actually had twice the oil reserves that it had originally claimed. That was probably not exactly true, just a way to get the West more interested in going to war against Iraq in order to protect all that oil. Not only that, but the original estimates were perhaps faulty, like the estimated productive capacity of the Ghawar field, the most productive field in the world. So the production of ‘easy oil’ could in five years time drop off dramatically, perhaps more than current peak oil models estimate. What then?
In the oil price hikes of 2008, people were abandoning their cars just when governments under strain were cutting back mass transit. Now, that was oil at $4/gallon; imagine it at $8. Our debates on public versus private transit might be stuck in the 1970s. Perhaps we need to imagine a post-transit society. For instance, how could a place like Kailua be retrofitted into a walkable community? I personally cannot imagine it. Also, how could a place like Hawaii Kai be altered to give it a semi-urban core where many of those who now commute would find employment? I don’t have the slightest idea. Cars, buses, ferries and trains will become too expensive to operate in that scenario of post-peak oil, but no thought has gone into alternatives.
As oil prices rise, so will the cost of jet fuel. In 2008, there was also less tourism in Hawaii. People still went on vacation in 2008, but closer to home. What will happen to the airline and hotel industries? What about the cost of fertilizer and thus of food, and the cost of importing food? What will happen to the value of houses in the suburbs when people cannot afford to commute? How will this affect foreclosures?
I don’t know. But what is usual is that even though most people seem to accept that dramatic oil prices hikes are inevitable, it seems that no one, including those in Hawaii’s elite, has even thought about this.
I suspect that we should have school teachers and professors to ask their students for solutions to this, since younger people are not stuck in the assumptions of the past.
All of this also raises a third question:
3. “Can one have a functioning society in the 21st century without an educated middle class?”
That is a dead serious question. It seems to me that the answer is a resounding ‘No’. However, this is complicated by the realization that even many educated people are in big trouble nowadays.
But at least educated people know how bad it is. My impression is that less educated people think that things will eventually settle back into the good old days … if we just build more houses and create rail jobs.