Column: Why serve on rail board? Equity, housing, climate

“Why on Earth would you join the HART board?” a friend recently asked, “it’s a thankless job.”

Why indeed? As an investigative journalist who spent hundreds of hours researching a documentary about rail, I’ve followed every twist of the project with its monstrous cost overruns, engineering snafus and ethical lapses. I’m as outraged as everyone else.

The question is, what happens next? Before answering, I go back to basics: Why did we opt to build the system in the first place? Three reasons were paramount: social equity, affordable housing and the environment.

Social equity

West-siders typically have the longest commutes, the least spending power and pay more for transport than everyone else on Oahu. When we decided, decades ago, to relocate our “second city” from Kaneohe to Kapolei, we promised transit infrastructure to ensure a decent quality of life. That infrastructure is rail. It’ll help people avoid the average $13,000 annual cost of owning a car and reduce development pressures in every other part of our island.

Earlier this year I drove from town to Waianae dozens of times for a project I was working on. COVID restrictions were in place and we typically drove in the opposite direction to rush hour commuters — yet traffic was still a nightmare. The number of people who spend three hours or more commuting every day rose by a whopping 81% over the past decade. The commute robs west-siders of time with their kids, their physical health and their well-being. They deserve a better option. It’s a matter of justice.

Affordable housing

For years I helped lead — and lost — fights to stop huge suburban subdivisions being built on our best food-growing farmlands, but the urgency of the argument to build more affordable housing could not be denied. The only alternative to sprawl is to build taller and denser where we’ve already built: along the Leeward Coast. And the only way to do that — given that the H-1 is already one of the most congested freeways in the nation — is to have an efficient mass transit system around which to build affordable, livable neighborhoods. It’s called transit-oriented development, and it’s finally paying off.

Look at Kamehameha Schools’ plan for Kapalama: it’s expected to produce 4,000 to 5,000 units in a vibrant new pedestrian and bike-friendly urban community, built around a station close to downtown. Plans for the Waipahu Station area call for 3,000 housing units by 2030. Pearlridge Station is expected to generate 3,440 new units.

The Ala Moana Station area could produce 5,600 units. All these plans call for more bike paths and safer pedestrian walkways — for a Main Street with small shops and local businesses to create distinct urban villages where the next generation of homebuyers will live, work and play. All this is possible only in the context of rail.

The climate crisis

New climate catastrophes make daily headlines. Hawaii has committed to be carbon negative by 2045.

We can only do so by integrating and electrifying all transportation. And rail will help us recover from disaster: Sooner or later a hurricane or rain bomb will topple utility poles and flood streets, while elevated rail — eventually, I hope, powered by its own solar and batteries — will still be able to ferry supplies and workers overhead unobstructed.

Rail will be a source of resilience and a vital piece of infrastructure to help dense coastal neighborhoods raise themselves above the flooding.

Given the honor of serving, my role as a community member on the HART board will be first and foremost to bring more transparency and accountability to a system in need of reform; to work constructively with all sides, and ultimately to help rail achieve its full potential.

Anthony Aalto, a documentarian and producer of Green Island Films LLC, is a nominee to the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Trans- portation board.