The Jones Act Is Irrelevant to Merchant Marine Shipbuilding

A picture is worth a thousand words and in this case even more.

So much is being discussed about the value of the protection that the Jones Act offers to U.S. shipbuilding.  What shipbuilding?  U.S. shipbuilding is less than 1% of the world share!

This is clearly illustrated in the picture above from an article in The Economist. The graph clearly shows that after 1985, the U.S. shipyard merchant marine building supply is practically zero. Japan, South Korea and China provide almost the entire ship building supply.

U.S. shipyards are kept busy with U.S. Navy work and the occasional small order by a U.S. shipper.  Like the recent one by Matson Navigation who in order to comply with the U.S. built requirement of the Jones Act agreed to pay $418 million for two modest container ships that would have cost less than half this amount if they were built in S. Korea. As a direct result of the Jones Act, the people of Hawaii received a direct punishment in the order of $200 million on this transaction alone.

Ho'opili Development on the Island of Oahu--Comments to DPP

This is a picture of today (left) and the proposed development of Ho'opili (right.)  DPP is poised to issue permits for Ho'opili to begin construction on prime agricultural lands on Oahu.

I sent the following comments to the Department of Planning and Permitting of the City and County of Honolulu.  The bottom line is that with or without rail, the Ho'opili Development will be a traffic impact disaster for Central Oahu and no meaningful road capacity accommodations are planned, therefore no permits should be granted. My main comments against the (untruthful) assessments of Ho'opili's traffic impacts are as follows.

• The traffic models used to assess the impacts of the Ho'opili development are too limited in scope relative to the size and regional impacts of this very large development. Most outputs in the TIAR are unacceptable underestimations.
• In Ho'opili-related traffic analyses, the H-1/H-2 freeway merge which is a critical bottleneck in the region was completely ignored and no mitigation to the existing severe congestion has been proposed.
• Most analyses I have reviewed present year 2020 projections with only about 1/3 of Ho'opili developed. Comprehensive analyses with the full 100% of the project developed are not available. This is an obvious “salami” tactic and under-representation of the development’s full scale of impacts.
• The Ho'opili TIAR claims that the OMPO model allows them to take an up to 30% trip reduction in trip generation by the development due to the “integrat-ed character” of the Hoopili community. However, there is no proof that this is a valid or prudent assumption. I cannot think of a more integrated community than Kalilhi with its rich mix of light industrial, services, offices, storage, retail, food, school and residential land uses. Arguing that Kalihi folks make 30% fewer trips than the rest of Oahu is wrong. At any rate, there is no proof, so Ho'opili taking such huge “discounts” in traffic generation is wrong.
• Ho'opili’s generation of trips by transit is not large. For example, the number of trips made by rail is the equivalent of a few bus loads in the morning peak. Regardless of whether rail is fully operational by 2020 (which is unrealistic in my opinion,) Hoopili’s traffic impact will be immense with or without rail. Well over 90% of the commuting trips generated by Hoopili residents will be made by auto, bus or bike, all of which require lanes. Only localized but no regional lanes are proposed to be added, therefore Hoopili will cause huge increases in traffic congestion in the region.

The Incompetence of HART. Cheapest Bid for 9 Stations Comes 75% Over Budget!

Here is good coverage of the situation in the Hawaii Reporter.

Some additional comments:

• The pain in cost overruns and construction congestion will be severe. The only thing we can do now is kick the people responsible for rail out of office.  Six are out already (Mufi, Peter, Linda, Neil, Stanley, Rida*)
• These nine stations are the relatively easy ones to build... A couple of them are in empty fields. Imagine the cost of remaining 12 stations in Kalihi, downtown, Kakaako near the water...
• The next traffic calamity by the elevated rail is the passing of the guideway over the H1/H2 merge.
• After that is the partial loss of Kamehameha Hwy. in Aiea for a year or so.
• After that is the debilitating impacts at and near the airport (Hawaii's tourism economy lifeline.) 

 So far we've been talking about politics, trials, concrete poles, contracts and money. We have not seen much of the rail's traffic congestion. The real suffering should start early in 2015.

Recall that the geniuses at HART purchased miles of steel rails in 2010 and since then they rot unused at Barbers Point Harbor.  These rails won't be put in service for about ten years!

(*) ex mayor Mufi Hannemann, ex mayor Peter Carlisle,  ex governor Linda Lingle, ex governor Neil Abercrombie, ex council member Stanley Chang, ex representative Rida Cabanilla.)

Gas or Electric Car? Website Estimates Fuel Costs

The Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California-Davis has a tradition in researching alternative propulsion systems for light duty vehicles such as cars, vans and pickup trucks.  They recently unveiled an interesting website called EV Explorer.

People can input various types of cars and their point to point trips such as their daily commute. The EV Explorer uses Google maps to find the best route and then calculates the annual cost of round-trips depending on how many times a week a person makes this trip.

The website also allows for comparisons that take account of the local cost of living. In fact the user should include his/her local cost of gas and electricity instead of using the default national averages.

Not surprisingly, the results are startling for Honolulu compared to the average U.S. city. Not because Honolulu has expensive gasoline (it does) but because it has outrageously expensive electricity (almost three times the national average!)

I used a popular family car, the 2014 Toyota Camry in two versions, one with the standard 4-cylinder engine and one with the hybrid powerplant.  I left unchanged their two electric vehicles, the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf. The trip I used was from the UH-Manoa where I work to Kailua where I used to reside. An even 30 mile round trip.

Using average U.S. prices with regular gas at $3.8 per gallon and electricity at 14 cents per KW-hour, the electric vehicles have a clear advantage in terms of money spent on fuel. Just for this trip over a year a Nissan Leaf could save be $500 over the regular Camry.  But wait!


I need to adjust the prices for Honolulu where the price of regular gas is $4.1 per gallon and the price per KWh is 40 cents (including the fixed charges added by the utility.).

The picture changes dramatically.  The EVs cost almost as much to make these trips as the regular Camry! For Honolulu, the Camry Hybrid is the right choice.  I run similar numbers about 15 months ago and indeed I got a hybrid version of a sedan that offers a 30% better city mpg compared to the version with the same gas engine alone.

If you are in Hawaii, drive an EV and brag about fuel cost savings, I am sorry to say, but your savings is a figment of your imagination.

Highway Funding: Do Roads Pay for Themselves? No Because of "Theft"

Here is a brief analysis by Jack Mallinckrodt,  PhD in Electrical Engineering, Stanford University who made U.S. transportation planning his retirement hobby and has developed a series of well thought out articles at his website www.urbantransport.org:

"
The current intense search for additional sources of highway user revenue is grossly misdirected.

Based on FHWA “Highway Statistics” data for 2004 (typical), “highway user fees”, defined as all tax payments by highway users paid as a “necessary condition of their use of the highway system”, are already yielding revenues of $245 billion/yr (2004).  That’s enough to easily pay the full current annual costs of right-of-way, planning, building, maintaining,  and operating, and financing  the entire U.S. highway system, with a surplus (in business called  a “profit”) of $98 billion/yr.

 The fact that they don’t do so is due entirely to:

1. An arbitrary (not rational) redefinition of “Highway User Fees” hs that counts only about half of the ACTUAL highway user fees paid, and
2. State and federal politicized congressional misappropriation of those  surplus revenues, (“Diversions) to earmarked political favorites (street cars, bullet trains etc.) that provide little or no congestion reduction capacity at 90 or more times the net the cost per passenger-mile.

As someone might have said: “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a revenue distribution problem.”. The revenue distribution process is a leaky sieve. The revered “Highway Trust Fund” initiated long ago as a solution to highway funding, with its latter day revisions has become instead, part of the problem.

No conceivable additional revenue collection mechanism, not increased fuel taxes, not tolling, nor mileage charge system, will resolve this funding gap until we fix the real highway fund leakage problem.  Our first priority must be to fix the highway user fee receipt distribution process. Otherwise we will simply be spinning our wheels faster. There is much more to this story, derived and explained in “Highway User Fee Surplus.”
"