8.12.05
Made it home for a week, so far its been a good break from the rat race that I’ve become accustomed to for the past couple of years so far. Its good to be reminded on the differences in culture and perspectives that this country has from border to border. I suppose growing up here I am used to the island mentality in more ways than one. Watching CSPAN and the morning news programs at midnight HST was kind of neat thinking about how everyone at work was just getting up and starting their commute.
Coming home again gives you a lot of observations, how Hawaii is constantly changing, a lot quicker than other places, I think. There seems to be a lot of little eateries opening up everywhere, first ground levels of buildings, and walk-ups. There are also some huge condos going up by the ward area, all of which I’m sure will be going for a crapload of money.
Hot button topic on people’s minds lately is the 4.5% excise tax increase scheduled for 2007 to fund Honolulu’s mass transit initiative, namely a rail system that will aim to alleviate the traffic congestion. I have to say that I think this is a bad idea for many reasons. Simply put, Honolulu is not zoned in a way that mass transit would have a significant effect on the number of cars on the road. Just driving around this past week reminded me about how spread out everything is relative to what the rail plans are proposing. Unless they had an extensive rail system that mirrored H-1, 2 and 3, then it really wouldn’t have much of an affect on traffic. Any rail plan in order to be affective would have to include the University of Hawaii, Downtown, Kaneohe, Hawaii Kai, and all of West Oahu/Kapolei. Right now I’ve heard that they are only planning a short rail for about 5-10 miles downtown.
The biggest hurdle with the proposal at this point is that there is no proposal on the table yet. The city and county has just approved the rate increase with no clear plan on how the money will be spent. Additionally, the schedule set up by the city is to have a consultant come in and do a multi-million dollar environmental impact statement, work will not start until 2009 at the earliest, and then the first rider on the rail wouldn’t be until 2012. For some reason this doesn’t sound very good at all for the average taxpayer and/or consumer.
It almost seems like Hawaii’s neglect of a public school system and lack of affordable housing in town has had an unexpected externalities in terms of traffic. Logically kids would go to school in the districts that they reside in, instead of going to private schools in town. This goes for people with jobs in town and in the service industry which also feeds into the problem.
Besides, it seems that high gas prices are here to stay.