Aug
15
Since the Zipper Lane went HOV-3, the daily vehicle count from 4:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. has usually been above 1,500. On two days — Wednesday, July 16, and Thursday, July 31 — the count topped 2,000.
The Zipper Lane had been carrying more than 3,000 vehicles a day before the state Department of Transportation changed the requirement from two occupants to three.
By my reckoning, 1,500 cars carrying three people yields more commuters than 3,000 cars carrying two. but Brennan Morioka, who is running state DOT these days, is looking ahead to another number not yet achieved: 3,000 cars carrying three occupants.
If that can be achieved, he says, those 3,000 cars will carry fully 25% of morning commuters on that corridor. Even now, 6% of the cars are carrying 14% of the commuters, and another 19% of the cars, the ones in the regular HOV-2 lanes, are carrying another 29% of the commuters.
My concern with the change was that some people, unable to find a third rider, would be driven back into the regular lanes, and say, screw it, I’ll at least get my time flexibility back, and split up to take separate cars. But there does not seem to have been much of this yet. The other lanes used to carry 19,000-20,000 cars in the 4:30 a.m.-9:00 a.m. period most mornings and this is still the case.
More later.
Aug
15
The nonexistent Gray’s Beach
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9 | Leave a Comment
Kyo-ya Corp., owner of the four Sheraton/Westin in Waikiki, has decided to move forward with a plan to restore what it calls Gray’s Beach.
There isn’t any Gray’s Beach. But there used to be. It washed out to the reef long ago. If you stand in the hallway at the back of the Sheraton, the one you take to get to the smaller meeting rooms, all you see is a sidewalk, a railing, and the ocean.
Kyo-ya announced last year it was thinking about this but hadn’t decided whether to go forward with it, possibly wanting to see how much opposition there would be. Surfers expressed concern about possible changes in surfing conditions, and environmentalists said they wondered if the plan would actually work. But all sides were muted and measured in their remarks. This week, Kyo-ya confirmed it will proceed. Most of the next two years will be spent seeking the necessary permissions.
The plan is to build three Y-shaped groins sticking out into the water to calm the wave actions at the base of the hotel. If they do no harm they might actually be pretty.
It’s right to be skeptical about any attempts to engineer a solution to beach erosion, though, and I suspect even Kyo-yo is constantly re-evaluating whether an expensive project like this will accomplish the desired effects.
Engineers are notorious failures at constraining the movement of water. For generations they dammed and dyked the marshy shores of the Mississippi, only to find that they had built a river that floods more disastrously than previously.
Not only that, but they sped up the current so the mighty river spews perfect growing soil farther and farther out in the Gulf of Mexico. It takes all day to drive from New Orleans to the end of the river in the outer Mississippi Delta and back — I have done it — and beyond the end of the road is 100 miles more delta. (And a million pelicans.)
Another unintended consequence of all that is that a third of the water in the Mississippi now crosses unstoppibly over into another river that carries it more directly south to the Gulf, and it is possible that one day the Mississippi will simply become that other river, forsaking New Orleans.
Here is Hawaii, beach mitigation efforts of the past seem to have done little but put more sand onto the reef. Engineers say they know more now and will do better, but they have said that over and over for more than a century without yet demonstrating that they actually have figured out how to control water.
In this sense, Kyo-ya has — and its executives know it – a more profound challenge than any opposition there might be — making it work if they actually get to do it.
Aug
15
Octogenarians remember a time when it took Scriptural scoldings to get people to take Sunday off. Most people worked six days a week and it wasn’t unusual to work very, very long days.
Somewhere along the line, people rebelled against this (I remember telling a colleague on the mainland 30 years ago that I loved my work and would never retire, and the colleague, older and wiser, replied, “Man was meant to walk on the beach, too”) and the 40-hour, 5-day work week took hold.
Having nights and weekends off made many people into more active consumers and boosted the U.S. economy in a number of interesting ways. The move to shorter hours coincided with more extracurricular activities in schools, since parents were more able to chauffeur kids to such events.
Today, new factors are in play, which make it economical to consider whether workers can squeeze their 40 hours into four days rather than five.
For the worker, and for the city planner, there is the matter of traffic congestion. If you’re wasting an hour or two a day in commuting, there is something very attractive indeed about going from 10 commutes per week to just eight. The savings is actually greater than one fifth of previous commuting time, because if you’re working a longer day, you very likely will be commuting in slacker periods when traffic is lighter.
Suppose you commute from Ewa to Honolulu and it takes an average of 60 minutes each way each day. You switch to a 10-hour day, four days a week, and because you are driving in earlier and leaving later your average travel time is reduced to 50 minutes each way each day. Just 10 minutes difference. You don’t save two hours by being off Friday — you save three hours and 20 minutes because of the shorter travel time on the other days.
And the truth is, even if you saved only one hour a week, it’s still worth it, when you consider that you’ve got a whole extra day to run errands and make doctor appointments. You can move all the work you do for yourself on weekends to Friday, and have a “real” weekend.
Even if your household finances are pressed and you need to work a weekend job, having Friday off takes off a lot of the pressure. After all, when you work seven days a week, when do you get your teeth cleaned? When do you take the car in to be fixed? How many months has it been since you saw a movie in a theater?
Erwin Hudelist of Hagadone Printing has put his production staff on a four-day work week. And the Lingle administration has begun an experiment with it in the state Department of Human Resource Development, roughly 100 people. Hudelist kept his delivery and customer service people on a five-day week, but still found savings in building operation expenses. Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona says the state experiment puts everybody on four days, since people can still interact with the office online on Fridays.
Hudelist and Aiona both say the biggest issue for employees who are struggling with the new system seems to be day care.
Aiona says the savings from the state experiment are limited by the fact that the HR employees are in a building with other people who are still working five-day weeks. To recoup real building operation savings, the four-day work week should be tried in departments that have their own buildings.
As state tax revenues ebb, this could be a good way to identify cost savings without actually laying off state employees.
The state government is proceeding prudently. It chose a non-union shop for its experiment (the HR people are non-union because they deal with confidential personnel files, the moral equivalent of being management) because there’s no point in negotiating with the union until both sides have some idea of how this works.
But one thing both sides know already is that a large number of state workers would really like to have a three-day weekend.
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