At 11 a.m., the Kahala McDonald’s is filled with moms with little kids and the little old ladies from Kaimuki. These are folks who get hungry before noon and don’t have to wait for a company-sanctioned lunch hour to eat. The construction workers come in later.
One morning this week, a small gathering of Kaimuki ladies sat at a back table laughing at two boys who, for some reason unimaginable to them, had their hair dyed in crazy colors — one bright pink and the other bright blue.
"How you wash hair?" one lady wondered aloud. "Going stain the towel!"
These are the concerns of their generation: practicality, sensibility, necessity.
When the last member of their party showed up — late — the conversation turned to the city bus cutbacks and route changes, which soon turned to a discussion about the rail project.
"That choo-choo train, that thing cannot come by my house. Cannot go up the street pick up my friends. That’s only one track, that thing. Billions they spending on that thing and cannot go where I need it to go, but then they cut the bus service. I can make it to the end of my street catch bus but I cannot go more far than that. They need the money, raise the bus fare! People would pay! I cannot drive. I no need go Kapolei. No make sense, dat."
All that money, millions of dollars, thrown at public relations contracts to manage opinion on rail and none of it convinced the Kaimuki kupuna, who are pretty much representatives of the demographic needed to win an election on this island.
When it comes down to it, all the TV ads and blog posts and whatnot will not get Auntie Ethel from her house in Kaimuki to Longs at Kahala Mall. She’d probably be OK with that if things weren’t getting harder for her with the bus cutbacks and if she wasn’t reading stories about people getting paid so much money to make the rail project seem better than it is.
One of the latest pro-rail ads has construction workers and a receptionist thanking the rail project for their jobs. The folks who were billing hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with ad campaigns and PR messages were not depicted. That’s the money that is most troubling to rail detractors: They’re OK with paying the guy who is pouring concrete, paying the lady filling out forms, but they don’t want to hear about big money going to bloggers and flacks.
Honolulu’s rail project is shaping up to be another exercise in, "It ain’t what you do but the way that you do it." Lessons should have been learned from the Superferry debacle. Like Superferry, rail is basically a good idea that would help a lot of families. The people who drive into town from Pearl City and Kapolei and points west have a deplorable commute.
But the way the project is unfolding, at exactly the same time people are being strangled by skyrocketing sewer bills and stranded by bus cutbacks, has created doubt among some of the most important members of our community — the ones who have seen it all and don’t like it when they have to bear the burden for others to get rich.
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Reach Lee Cataluna at lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
