The winning formula is that you have to have a high density of population throughout the route of the kind that doesn’t exist anywhere in Honolulu, no mtter how much they try to deceive us that is so. So basically they’ll be running empty rail cars most of the day — which is true even of the rail projects in Seattle, Portland, Sacramento. There’s nowhere for people to go — and during off-peak hours, driving is the fastest, preferable way to get there because there is no congestion problem then.

We only have a congestion problem for a couple of hours each way, everyday — and the rest of the time, the raods are basically uncongested and underutilized. So the real solution is managing the congestion around those hours — and not adding more capacity that will be unederutilized at all other times — just as the freeways and highways are presently.

It’s a traffic management problem and not a lack of capacity. The preferable solution is ride-sharing — because that’s what the people would be doing anyway, with a rail system. In the age of the Internet (communications), that would seem to be an ideal use of the technology to manage a ride-sharing bulletin board.

Honolulu would be an ideal community to do ride-sharing because most of the people are fairly stable. The rail solution is just empty cars moving around so the people at City Council can say, “We’re world-class too,” of which the rail devlopers are skilled at exploiting those inferiority complexes and sense of inadequacies.