Lee Cataluna: Messaging on rail project changing

At this point, when the numbers change for the city’s problem-plagued rail project, no one is surprised. The cost estimates have jumped up time and again over the years, promises have been made and forgotten, timelines expand and it is widely accepted that the project was started without any realistic or earnest budget in place.

But recently the messaging about the rail project has changed, and that is disconcerting. It is one thing to not know how much the dang thing is going to cost. It’s another to not know if anybody is going to ride it.

Did we not come to believe that folks from the west side through Kapolei and Waipahu and all through Pearl City were begging for this thing so they didn’t have to drive in gridlock every single working day of their lives? Were we not told that the rail was going to help out the folks who live out west but work in town or send their kids to a school in Honolulu?

Aren’t the people for whom this uku-billion dollar project is being built clamoring for a train to save their weary souls and give them back hours of their family lives?

OMG, maybe not.

There was a portion of the HART board meeting last week (helpfully televised live by ‘Olelo) devoted to talking about community engagement and buy-in. The discussion included how many “likes” and social media hashtags resulted from the recent show-and-tell public open house that included tours of a rail car, and details on a poster contest for high school students with the theme, “Welcome Aboard Next-Gen Riders,” where teens are encouraged to create art that conveys how cool and hip riding the rail system will be, the idea being that teens will have to persuade their parents to take the train because, well, grown-ups don’t want to give up their cars.

One of the questions that came up was, “Can the poster contest be expanded to include younger students?” Another question was, “Can the poster contest be expanded to include adult entries?” Suddenly, the marketing of rail is sounding a little desperate. Like, free-hot-dogs-and-balloons-for-the-keiki desperate.

Last week, a top administrator from the state Department of Transportation, in responding to an interview question about the impact rail will have on state highways, said, “At this time, rail will not be a transportation solution. … When I talk to people about rail and ask them, ‘Do you support it?’ they say yes. When I ask them, ‘Are you going to ride it?’ They say no.” He did add, however, that in the long run, transit-oriented development would keep more commuters on the west side.

Perhaps the most jarring change in messaging has come from Honolulu’s own mayor, who took office promising to do rail right and is closing out his tenure by distancing himself from the mess that he could not fix or mitigate. Kirk Caldwell is accusing HART of making false promises of an artificial starting date, blaming the demise of his Blaisdell boondoggle on HART budget troubles, trying to step away from podium promises of rail-righteousness and slip into the crowd with the rest of the voters saying, “What the heck is going on here?’

Part of this week’s HART meeting was a section called “lessons learned,” a feature better suited to a 10th grade class project that was supposed to be awesome but ended up with epoxy glue in the electrical sockets, a couple of trips to the school nurse and a working model of Vesuvius that didn’t work. But this is a multi-billion dollar project employing experts and professionals who should know most of the lessons as a prerequisite for getting the job.

Good that they’re reflecting on mistakes, but at this price and with this scope, one would think there would have been fewer.

As for the people who are paying for rail, the “lessons learned” are to meet every promise with skepticism.