Rearview Mirror: 5 Vehicular Tunnels Were Built out of 14 Proposed

Quoted in Bob Sigall's article Rearview Mirror: 5 vehicular tunnels were built out of 14 proposed

Pali Highway to UH
Panos Prevedouros, professor of transportation engineering at the University of Hawaii, proposed this tunnel in 2012 to alleviate H-1 congestion. One tunnel could provide two lanes in each direction, he said.
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I was surprised that Bob Sigall discovered this tunnel proposal I studied with James Tokishi (a UHM CEE graduate) for HDOT. As far as I know, it has not been published anywhere. It was supposed to be a low clearance double-decker single bore tunnel (like A86 in Paris*), roughly from Pali Hwy. at Kuakini St. to Wilder Ave. at Dole St.

* https://tunnels.piarc.org/en/system/files/media/file/appendix_2.08_-_france_-_paris_-_duplex_a86.pdf

Honolulu to Ewa Beach

In the late 1960s a tunnel under the entrance to Pearl Harbor was proposed by the state House of Representatives to help leeward commuters get to town more quickly. It could shave 30- 40 minutes off their commute, some felt.

DOT Director Fujio “Fudge” Matsuda said the tunnel would be 7,000 feet long and cost over $750 million (in today’s dollars).

High maintenance costs, vulnerability to tidal wave inundation and Navy objections sank the idea then, but it gets resurrected every now and then. [That's right! See below]

Pearl Harbor Tunnel is a reversible 2-lane relatively short tunnel under the entrance of Pearl Harbor with cut-and-cover sections through the Honolulu International airport, priority lanes along Lagoon Drive and direct connection to the Nimitz Viaduct. Nimitz Viaduct is a 2-lane reversible “flyover” from the Keehi interchange to Iwilei.  Drive times from Ewa to downtown would be reduced from 65 to 11 minutes and the traffic reduction on Ft. Weaver Road and H-1 Fwy. would bring those commuter times down from 65 to 40 minutes.

Hawaii’s Infrastructure Gets D+ in 2019 ASCE Report

From a timely article in the Honolulu Star Advertiser: Panos Prevedouros, a transportation engineering professor at the University of Hawaii, said a new federal infrastructure plan “is very realistic,” but “I don’t know how much of this chunk will come down to us, because at 1.5 million (people), we’re really a very small state.”

He also takes issue with some of the grades given by the ASCE. “I believe some categories were doing even better than what is stated, and some others are probably worse,” he said.

Energy and solid-waste management are better than their C- and C grades, he said, “but then some areas such as roads and bridges — we would probably be below what is reported there.”

Panos on TV

Long time ago I had time to keep track of my appearances on TV... 2003 to 2008.
Then in 2008 I run for mayor (try 1 of 2) and lost count... 

Randal O’Toole: Poor and Young People Are Fleeing Public Transit

Transit ridership has been declining now for four years, and the latest census data ... reveal that the biggest declines are among the groups that you might least expect: young people and low-income people. These results come from the American Community Survey, a survey of more than 3 million households a year conducted by the Census Bureau. Here are some of the key findings revealed by the data. …

The largest declines in transit commuting, both nationally and in the Washington DC urban area, are among younger people. Commuting forms only a part of transit ridership, but to the extent that declining ridership is due to ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, those services are disproportionately used by people under the age of 35.

Although transit subsidies are often justified by the need to provide mobility to low-income people, the reality is that transit commuting by people in the lowest income classes is shrinking while transit commuting is growing fastest among people in the highest income classes.

Transit commuting is increasingly skewed to people who earn more than $75,000 a year. Even though only 19 percent of American workers were in this income class in 2017, they made up 26 percent of transit commuters, an increase from just 14 percent in 2005. Both the average and the median income of transit commuters are higher than those of all workers.

Source

Honolulu Traffic Relief?

Quoted in three recent articles on traffic congestion relief authored by Marcel Honore in the Honolulu Civil Beat.

• Want Real Traffic Relief? Give Oahu’s Students And Workers Flexible Hours (Feb. 8, 2019)

"Occasionally, I’ve heard locals lay the blame on the University of Hawaii Manoa, with its approximately 24,000 students, faculty and staff.

Officials there point out that the campus already staggers its start times. On average, less than 20 percent of the student body starts classes at 8 a.m., according to Dan Meisenzahl, the university’s spokesman. It’s the “poster child” for staggered hours, added Panos Prevedoruros, who chairs the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering there.

The problem, both Prevedouros and Meisenzahl said, is the parking."

• How Many More Cars Can We Cram On Oahu? (Feb. 1, 2019)

Panos Prevedouros, who chairs the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Civil Engineering Department, further suggested tolls and pricing schemes to discourage drivers from using the roads when they don’t have to.

• What Would You Pay To Drive During Honolulu’s Rush Hour? (Jan. 9, 2019)

“Theoretically this can all be done, but the devil is in the details,” said Panos Prevedouros, who chairs the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Hawaii Manoa.

Prevedouros supports congestion pricing. It could take hold in Hawaii with the growing local concern over climate change and interest in ways to reduce its impacts, he said.

“It’s a win-win,” Prevedouros said. “Put some costs to the congestion.”

2018 Was a Disaster Year for Hawaii

... We survived all these:

• Ballistic missile threat
• Kauai floods and new US record for 24 hr rain
• Aina Haina floods 
• Big Island earthquakes 
• Kilauea eruption and Fissure 8 crater
• Six hurricanes; Lane, Olivia and Norman hit the state
• Same old, same old election results
• Record pedestrian deaths
• Rail continued to burn a couple million dollars per day

Hawaii News Now got most of the story right.

Viral 2019 Ten Second Fireworks Video

A few seconds into 2019 I took a short video of the private (illegal) aerial fireworks that are so typical of new year's celebration in Honolulu, Hawaii from our Pacific Heights house lanai. About ten minutes later I posted in Facebook.

Next morning at 9 AM the video had about 8,000 which was more than any other video I posted in the last several years on Facebook. I thought "good going" and that's about it. But at about 11:30 AM the video had 33,000 views and KHON television station called with a request for permission to use the video in their news story. They did and their link of my video has over 60,000 views.

At 5 PM on January 1, my video views surpassed 100,000 and the viral run continued. Hawaii News Now also included my video in their January 1 coverage of fireworks in Honolulu.

24 hours later, at 9 AM on January 2, the video had 278,000 views and about 1,300 Likes. The viral run of this video is shown below for views and likes:

As of this writing on January 8, the video has 346,000 views and over 1,500 Likes.

Not a bad start to 2019. Happy New Year!


[For a comparison, my most viewed blog post is listed below; it has 8,100 reads:
Making the Most of the Rail Fiasco, posted in mid-2016]

Researchers Hope Distracted Driving Study Changes Policies

KHON's Sara Mattison covered our recent research endeavors on driving distraction tests. It was a win-win for UH students and Charley's Taxi which provided the advanced driving simulator and 230 drivers. This was a public-private partnership for success.

"UH Professor Panos Prevedouros says this study is significant because they collected data from more than 200 professional drivers. That's bigger than most samples of this type of research. The information also shows just how bad distracted driving can be."

Driverless Vehicles: Two Radically Different Visions

I concur with Bob Poole's commentary published as follows:

Surface Transportation Innovations

By Robert W. Poole, Jr. Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow and Director of Transportation Policy October 2018

There is no question that personal transportation will undergo significant changes in coming decades. Three such changes will be the advent of affordable electric vehicles, fully autonomous vehicles, and mobility as a service (MaaS) in which people opt to rely on shared vehicles rather than individually owned vehicles. These are separate changes, which may well arrive on different time scales and with different degrees of market penetration.
Several times in recent months, various people have sent me a report that links all three together via a dramatic scenario. The report comes from RethinkX and is called “Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030,” released in May 2017. Its headline claims include the following:

• Fully autonomous vehicles (presumably SAE Level 5) will achieve regulatory approval and be on the market in 2020.
• By 2030, those AVs will provide 95% of all [surface] passenger miles of travel.
• Those 95% will all be in shared vehicles (Mobility as a Service), rather than in personally owned AVs.
• These AVs will all be electric, and will last 500,000 to 700,000 miles on their initial battery pack.

These assumptions are shared by virtually no one actually working on AVs, whether at technology companies or traditional auto companies. The past year has seen a growing number of articles explaining that full autonomy (on all kinds of roads, in all kinds of weather, etc.) is turning out to be a much harder problem than many researchers expected. Most expect gradual introduction of AV features in the next decade, with full Level 5 not being likely until at least 2035 or beyond.

As I wrote in a recent column for Public Works Financing, there is no necessary connection between electric propulsion and autonomy: neither one depends on the other. The current generation of EVs costs nearly twice as much as comparable non-EV vehicles, seriously limiting mass-market appeal.

Likewise, as of now, autonomy itself requires a large array of costly sensors and very complex artificial intelligence software, Hence, RethinkX’s idea that electric AVs will be cheaper than conventional cars by 2020 looks to me like a pipe dream. In addition, the idea that the original battery pack will last 500,000 to 700,000 miles (a key to Rethink’s lower ownership cost estimate) is unproven. (The Toyota Prius battery pack has a 10-year or 150,000-mile warranty, while the Tesla Model 3 warranty is for 8 years of 100,000 miles.)

A far more realistic assessment of future mobility was released in May 2018 by S&P Global Ratings, “The Road Ahead for Autonomous Vehicles.” S&P’s analysts conclude that “mass adoption of driverless autonomous vehicles (AVs) [is] still decades away.” By contrast, they expect a faster penetration rate of electric vehicles (EVs), especially if there continue to be government “incentives” (subsidies) for those purchasing them. (S&P’s EV projections are somewhat exaggerated by including plug-in hybrids.)

S&P developed three scenarios (low/medium/high) for AV penetration, depending on a array of assumptions about technology, the price premium over conventional cars, extent of government “incentives,” growth in ride-sharing/ride-hailing (Mobility as a Service), etc. For the 2020 to 2030 period, the fraction of AVs in the total light-vehicle fleet by 2030 is projected at <1 2="" and="" av="" be="" fleet="" fraction="" high.="" in="" low="" medium="" of="" p="" phase="" scenario="" the="" vehicle="" would="">
I find the assumptions underlying the three scenarios to be reasonable, and a number of implications for highways and travel emerge. First, even in the high (“disruptive”) scenario, only 35% of the light vehicle fleet will be AVs by 2040. So that means our roadways and highways are going to have to deal with a mixed fleet for many decades. That is far different from popular media visions of a near-term all-AV future. Second, S&P suggests that the early impacts of Level 5 AVs will be felt most by transit agencies and parking enterprises. Between 2020 and 2030, S&P expects an increase in urban traffic congestion, due partly to the continued growth of ride-hailing. (Incidentally, a new paper by Alejandro Henao and Wesley E. Marshall, “The Impact of Ride-Hailing on Vehicle Miles Traveled,” projects that “ride-hailing leads to approximately 83.5% more VMT” than would have existed had ride-hailing not emerged.) As connected AV market penetration increases beyond 2030, S&P expects “lane capacity could increase by 5% to 7% by 2030-2035 [due to] an increase in platooning.” That would partially offset the impact on highways from increased VMT due to ride-hailing and increased personal travel by those who cannot drive today (very old, very young, and disabled).


These are still early days for EVs, AVs, and MaaS. The sober analysis from S&P is a far better guide to thinking about the implications of these developments than the blue-sky vision of RethinkX