Honolulu Recycling Guide

The proper way to recycle household solid wastes in Honolulu is explained in this installment of my O'lelo show PANOS 2050: Solutions for a Sustainable Hawaii.

This subject was also covered in a pictorial guide a few months ago in this blog.

Handicapped Stalls for a StairMaster Trail!

I am sure you've heard the ironic saying "I am from the Government and I am here to help."

Here is proof of "I am from the Government and I am here to waste your tax money."

Koko Head trail is very demanding. "I'm 25 and in decent shape but this hike nearly killed me. It's short but super intense," said Heatherab87 on May 9, 2013.

I hiked it on May 21 and counted 1,115 tall steps. Hardly any hikers on this trail are overweight or over 50, or both (like me.) Many are fitness nuts.

In this case a couple handicapped stalls would be two too many, but ADA code requires six. So six of them with wide access isles were built. For over $100,000 expenditure these stalls are unlikely to see an annual occupancy of 1%.

Chinese Straddle Bus -- Take 2

It appears that the developers of the Air Bus or Chinese Straddle Bus have read some of my concerns with their concept.

The new animation of China TBS Ltd attempts to take care of several of them such as accidents on the road and overhead obstructions that are difficult to remove.

This urban transit options is likely better than light rail and BRT, particularly for large cities with long, straight and wide arterial streets. Developing Asian cities should be a prime market for this concept.

Have We "Solved" the US Energy Crisis? Update: No!

In the last couple of weeks I stumbled through some blog articles (e.g., These Charts Better Not Reflect The True State Of The US Economy) that describe an astonishing development: Gasoline consumption has collapsed! (... Not really: See update at the bottom.)

• Feb. 1993: 57 million gallons per day
• Feb. 2003: 61 million gallons per day (+7%)
• Feb. 2013: 28 million gallons per day (-54%)

See the data for yourself at the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I captured the graph below.

If this is not a hacker's job, we are witnessing momentous changes in the energy field. No wonder that Tesoro-Hawaii cannot find a buyer for its refinery at Campbell Industrial Park for over a year.

Also, the implications for the Highway Trust Fund and State DOTs are enormous. Their funding has been cut in half.

If this pattern is sustained, then all climate initiatives need to be shelved... "2040 targets" are already met!

The following reasons may explain this trend in part. I guestimate that the factors I list below can cause an one third reduction but I am not convinced that they can cause a staggering 54% reduction:

• Gas price: A 10% increase in fuel price may cause a 2% to 5% reduction in trips and/or trip length. High gas prices reduce discretionary trips but do not reduce trips with an important purpose such as work, school, trips to doctor and grocery store, etc.
• Persistently high gas price may lead people to change location; they move closer to work or school and they may replace a low efficiency car with a high efficiency car.
• Unemployment in the US is much higher than officially reported since people who have given up looking for work are no longer counted as unemployed.
• There is some evidence that ties with unemployment that younger Americans drive less.
• Hybrid cars, electric cars and cash-for-clankers cars replaced thousands of low MPG cars so roughly speaking the same thousands of vehicles now consume less than half that their predecessors did.
• HOT lanes (that promote carpooling and provide uncongested travel) and transit may have caused a marginal reduction. 

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UPDATE: Colleagues on the mainland and I are still investigating this because the data shown above are suspect. This EIA dataset of gas consumption is much flatter. Using these data, the annual consumption differences are as follows:

• 2002 to 2012 = -1.6%
• 2005 to 2012 = -8.2%

2005 was the year with the highest consumption, according to this set.

Better MPG across most light duty vehicles classes, Hybrids, EVs, Cash-for-clankers and a little less driving did cause a drop. An 8% drop is much more believable than a 54% drop. We still do not know if these are "data we can believe in."  

Why Aren’t Younger Americans Driving Anymore?

The nation's congestion problem has lessened largely due to youth unemployment and high fuel prices. Read this interesting Washington Post blog for more details.

One has to be careful to not overreact to the sharp change in the trend of miles driven because the graph is population adjusted. It shows the rate of driving per person. The rate is dropping but population is growing, so the next effect is likely a 1% to 5% reduction in traffic, depending on the area.

Do Europeans Use Transit a Lot? Perhaps, but Only in the Central City.

Recently I stumbled on an analysis of commutes in the second largest city in Germany, Hamburg.  It's an old and interesting city that I had the chance to visit it in the late 1980s when there were two Germanys, West with capital Bonn, and East with capital (half of) Berlin.

Germany is a country with substantial use of rail both in and between cities.  Hamburg is the second largest city in Germany. The county where Hamburg is situated has a population of about 1.8 million and the six surrounding suburban counties have a population of 1.5 million.

Unlike US cities which are characterized by very high (employment) density in the downtown and medium-to-low (population) density in areas surrounding the downtown, Hamburg and most old European cities have high (population and employment) densities over many acres. This makes the development of multiple rail lines meaningful and productive.  Their rail lines are compact in length and are supplemented by bus or tram. As a result, transit use is moderate.

Their suburbs have a low use of transit. Let's look at the shares in the image below.

In the city of Hamburg, 33% use car modes, 19% use transit and 38% walk or bike.  What's the largest difference between Europe and US. Is it transit use? No! It's Walk and Bike.

Walking and biking to/from work is more than 35% in Europe and less than 5% in the US.

In the suburbs of Hamburg transit drops to 7%. TheBus in Honolulu has a 6% share. Again the main difference is that even in the suburbs Europeans do a lot by walking and biking: 28% compared to less than 2% in US suburbs.

Some dense American cities like Honolulu look a lot like old European city suburbs. Like in Europe, the share of transit in the suburbs is rarely if ever over 10%. Investing on rail transit in suburban Europe or US cities is a poor decision both financially and for transportation productivity.

State of the Art Transportation and Other Technology

A conversation with IT guru Peter Kay on my program Panos 2050: Solutions for a Sustainable Hawaii.

Honolulu Officials Praise Ansaldo Rail Deal as Washington Metro Dumps the Cash Strapped Italian Company for Kawasaki

Grabauskas and the HART Board will say anything to excuse the inexcusable decision to buy troubled rail cars from a troubled rail car company in a troubled country on the other side of the planet, Prevedouros said.

Sierra Club Used Wrong Population Projections in Support of Honolulu’s Rail

If one wants to keep things simple, then it could be said that the base of Sierra Club's support for rail is simply a case of garbage in, garbage out.  In other words, garbage data were used to come to a garbage conclusion.  However, I believe that data were sufficiently twisted to support the underlying car-hating philosophy of "environmentalists."

In this case, the bias is clear because supporting rail (to kill auto) causes huge damage to prime agricultural land. The Sierra Club simply cannot have it both ways.

Explanations are provided in my article in the Hawaii Reporter.