Look to teleworking as traffic solver

Planner Leonard C. Moffitt, who helped to design the "new city" of Irvine, Calif., was executive director of Oahu’s Windward Regional Council in the 1970s. He said a community could choose whether to focus on communications or transportation, and the choice would shape its future.

Forty years later, Honolulu is poised to throw its treasure into heavy rail mass transit — a train to run on an elevated, fixed guideway for 20 miles from Kapolei to Ala Moana. I think Moffitt would say it’s too late for this choice.

With smart phones, tablet devices and "the cloud," location does not matter. People do not have to travel so much. They can travel flexibly. They can tap information from anywhere. They can bank and shop online. Leading universities — Stanford, Harvard, others — offer free courses online, in an experiment that may blow the doors off the way higher education is delivered.

So why haven’t we seen a serious examination of telecommuting as a present and future alternative to sitting in traffic in Honolulu?

At least 34 states offer telework programs, wrote columnist Mike Meyer ("Telework worth exploring before rail work jams roads," Star-Advertiser, Tech View, May 3, 2011). Six states offer them in all agencies throughout state government.

If Hawaii’s larger companies went to telework — a "Results-Only Work Environment" (http://www.gorowe.com/) — government would follow, wrote columnist Cliff Miyake ("Telework has to be part of long-term transit answer," Star-Advertiser, Tech View, July 18, 2010). This could engage 70,000 state and county workers. Many federal workers already can work from home, if their supervisors approve.

High-tech traffic controls also are reducing congestion. Columnist Jay Fidell wrote about Code for America, a nonprofit that helps cities write the software ("Los Angeles’ system shows how tech can beat traffic," Star-Advertiser, Think Tech, March 20). Los Angeles wrote its own software and has reduced travel times by 14 percent. It now licenses the software to others.

Will young people use the train? In nations with many Internet users, the number of driver’s licenses issued to people under 40 has dropped markedly. A reverse migration of college-educated young people to cities also is reducing commutes. Listen to National Public Radio’s June 12 report on this trend (http://www.npr.org/ 2012/06/11/154740024/a-comeback-for-downtown-cleveland).

Oahu taxpayers could reasonably expect the city to surf these trends and deploy flexible fixes that would reduce traffic congestion. Instead, we are about to spend billions on an elevated train so a few privileged people can leapfrog congestion.

Coincidentally, the year 2018, when the train project is nearing completion, is the target date for statewide access to affordable, ultra-high-speed Internet. It’s called the Hawaii Broadband Initiative. Senate Bill 2236, authorizing issuance of $100 million in special purpose revenue bonds for its development, was just signed into law by Gov. Neil Abercrombie.

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote that communities with the fastest broadband connections will be the job factories of the future. What would "communications- oriented development" look like on Oahu, compared to transit-oriented development?

The federal court is scheduled to hear arguments on Aug. 21, in Honolulu on rail opponents’ lawsuit to postpone the rail project. Their case is about the city’s failure to adequately examine alternatives before pushing heavy rail mass transit.

The iPhone was unheard of five years ago. Google is testing driverless cars. Even Hawaii libraries and McDonald’s have Wi-Fi. Who can say what’s ahead? Oahu taxpayers should be terribly afraid to commit to spending billions for construction — and added billions for ongoing operations and maintenance — of a train system that might soon be, if it isn’t already, obsolete.