Dash of Calabash

We don’t normally think of Hawaii and Puerto Rico as all that similar. Sure, both are islands, both have restless anti-US segments of the population, and both incorporate a lot of pork in the regional cuisine. And then there’s there’s the whole mass transit thing. Hawaii may get a rail system, Puerto Rico already has one. As Randal O’Toole explained in a recent ‘Grassroot Perspective,’ the experiences of our Spanish-speaking cousins should make us think twice before embracing a similar system here:

The Honolulu City Council is determined to spend billions of dollars on a ridiculous rail-transit line in Oahu. State Rep. Marilyn Lee happened to visit Puerto Rico and came back gushing about that island’s new Tren Urbano in Honolulu’s leading paper.

“There are many similarities between Hawaii and Puerto Rico,” says Rep. Lee. “We must proceed with our scheduled plan to build transit — our sister island state has shown it can succeed.”

There are so many fallacies in Rep. Lee’s column that it is hard to know where to begin. Needless to say, Puerto Rico is not a state. Further, Honolulu rail proponents have a nasty habitat of calling rail transit “transit,” implying that Honolulu doesn’t have mass transit because it doesn’t have rail transit.

In fact, there are lessons that Hawaii can learn from Puerto Rico, just not the ones that the apparently innumerate Rep. Lee learned. As Honolulu rail skeptic Cliff Slater has noted, far from showing that rail transit can succeed, the Tren Urbano is just one more rail disaster…. (click to read more)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 8:10 am and is filed under Rail/Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.