To Rail or Not?
That is the Ballot Question. The biggest ballot question in the Sept. 20 primary isn’t for mayor, but the rail plan pushed by Mayor Hannemann. MidWeek asks him and leading mayoral candidates Panos Prevedouros and Ann Kobayashi about the various transit plans they favor. Mayor Mufi Hannemann’s bid for a second term should have been easy.
Del.icio.us
By Alice Keesing
So, who is Panos Prevedouros?
Son of Greece, engineering professor, race car driver, tinkerer, artist, cook, soon-to-be-father. And, of course, rail opponent.
It was the debate over the city’s rail plans that prompted the university professor to launch himself into the public spotlight by joining the race for mayor. Standing outside Honolulu Hale, he told television cameras that he would take on the role of David and pit himself against the Mufi Goliath.
When you look at campaign money, it certainly is a race of mismatched foes. While incumbent Hannemann has around $2 million to play with, Prevedouros is hopeful he will raise something in the neighborhood of $100,000.
But his is a campaign for the people, he says, and he hopes to fight on the issues rather than money. We’ll get back to those issues in a bit; but first, who is Panos Prevedouros?
He was born in the Greek port city of Patras, a seafaring town where the ferries leave for postcard destinations like Corfu and Ithaca. His family apparently has engineering in its genes - it’s a profession he shares with both his brother and sister and other extended family members. So it was perhaps not surprising that the 4-year-old Panos started tinkering. He liked to assemble and disassemble kits. He also liked to paint with watercolors, but he laughs now that, while he may be a first-rate tinkerer, he’s only a second-rate artist. Still, he keeps his artistic interests: His Diamond Head rental displays an eclectic collection of art including paintings by university students and work of a then 8-year-old niece, along with gallery prints and wood lamps by local artist Mark Chai.
But it was into engineering that Prevedouros went, studying first at Aristotle University, then earning his master’s and doctoral degrees in transportation engineering at Chicago’s Northwestern University, one of the world’s top 10 engineering schools.
While in Chicago, Prevedouros met a woman from Moanalua Valley who regaled him with tales of the magic of Hawaii. Intrigued, he arranged a stopover in the Islands while he was traveling to Japan to present a paper.
“I fell in love with the place,” he says. “It’s like Greece, but greener, cleaner and more organized.”
Prevedouros moved to Oahu 19 years ago for a position in the civil engineering department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He initially intended to stay only a couple of years but, as many Island stories go, he met a local girl on Kailua Beach and ended up marrying and staying. Prevedouros has since divorced from his first wife and is now engaged to Radford grad Katie O’Donnell. The couple lives together with O’Donnell’s daughter, Lesna.
Prevedouros’ work at UH has focused on transportation - his particular expertise is in forecasting the demand for transportation solutions, how best to operate them and how to design intelligent systems that ease congestion and avoid bottlenecks.
In his years at UH, he has advanced to tenured professor and is considered one of the pre-eminent authorities in his field. In the last 10 years, he has been invited to give his professional opinion in 10 countries and 33 large cities worldwide, including Beijing, Paris, London, New York and Washington, D.C.
“I consider him to be a very productive and valuable member of the department,” says chair Ron Riggs, who describes Prevedouros as someone who is passionate, energetic and enthusiastic.
Prevedouros chairs the university’s civil engineering graduate program and is active at the committee level of the national Transportation Research Board, but he says he has been largely untouched by leadership aspirations. Still, he has a quip about Greeks and politics.
“There is a saying in Greece that if you topple a rock, under it you will find either a snake or a president,” he says with a laugh. “Most Greeks have political aspirations. In small or large ways, they want to be in charge. Actually for 46 years I’ve never sought to be in charge.”
That changed in May after he completed a survey that showed only 16 percent of those surveyed in the proposed rail corridor would use it. After lengthy discussions with O’Donnell - after all, they are expecting their first child around the same time as the primaries - he entered the mayoral race.
While it was the rail issue that propelled Prevedouros into the race, he does not describe himself as a one-issue candidate.
“I am the infrastructure candidate,” he says.
What Prevedouros is offering is a fix-it mayor. His supporters clearly enjoy his straightforward talk and his deep knowledge of how things work, how traffic flows, how to handle sewage, trash and potholes. Prevedouros himself knows that he doesn’t like what he sees in Honolulu.
It’s an embarrassment, he says, that Honolulu languishes in the worst 1 percent in the nation for sewage treatment. We need to build secondary treatment facilities, he says, and stop dumping into the ocean. And Honolulu’s reputation as a pothole capital continues. We need to stop the costly Band-Aid approach, Prevedouros says, and spend $1 billion to completely rehabilitate city roads, building them to last.
Recently, Prevedouros took his silver Miata for a drive up to the Manoa campus. His Miata is a modified racer that can get to 130 mph in about 10 seconds. Prevedouros likes to race the car on the track, but on this day he was taking stock of the city streets. In the 20-minute drive, he saw unreadable signs, rough roads and crosswalks where paint has worn off.
“It’s indicative of what’s going on in the city, indicative of what’s going on in the state,” he says. “There is no lifecycle maintenance and management ... it’s totally catch up, totally reactive.”
This is where Prevedouros marks the first strike against the rail project: The cost, which he says will be in excess of $6 billion, will crush the city budget and suck money away from other island-wide projects that need urgent attention, he says.
“The rail alone is over two times the full budget of the city with its 10,000 employees and a lot of other important projects,” he says. “So it is colossal. And that is only the construction cost. Then we have a $150 million-a-year maintenance cost. So we are talking about a significant black hole of taxes.”
Strike 2? Prevedouros says his own research shows that only 16 percent would use rail. Rail, he believes, doesn’t give the flexibility that people need during a busy day when they are dropping off children, running errands and attending meetings.
Strike 3? Fixed rail does not curb traffic congestion, Prevedouros says. The ticket, he says, is HOT lanes, or high occupancy toll lanes.
Prevedouros proposes building two elevated lanes above the H-1 - the same pathway that would be used by a rail system. The two lanes run from the H-1, H-2 merge to Iwilei and would be reversible, running either ewa or diamond-head, depending on the rush hour.
Buses, vans and high-occupancy vehicles can use the express transit way for free. Other commuters can use the expressway for a toll, which fluctuates with congestion levels. A system in Denver charges 50 cents during low-flow traffic and $3.25 during peak flow, he says.
This supply-and-demand-type system would keep the express-ways moving at freeway speeds, Prevedouros says, while also doubling speed on the H-1, which remains free of charge.
“It’s a win-win situation,” he says.
He’s also seen it work. Prevedouros has consulted with the Attica Toll Way Operations Authority in Athens. Longer than the H-1, H-2 and H-3 combined, the toll way has decongested a wide corridor in the dense city and won an international award as one of the safest freeways in the world.
Back here at home, Prevedouros would continue his proposed system with a single elevated ramp taking city buses from Iwilei to Hotel Street. He would then create rapid transit bus lanes on King and Beretania.
“The whole enchilada, along with non-polluting fuel cell buses, should be about $1.2 billion,” he says. “And what did we achieve? Kapolei to UH in 45 minutes. If you take the train, because of the 30 stations it has to stop at no matter what, it’s 75 minutes.”
And this can all be achieved, he says, with local know-how and without sending millions of dollars off-island to buy technology and expertise.
Prevedouros is a practical man. He knows he’s a long shot for mayor. But the odds improved, he says, when former councilwoman Ann Kobayashi entered the race, something that he says he encouraged her to do.
“It would be rather presumptuous of me as I sit here, only two months to the election, as a university professor, to expect that I will win over a very established candidate with 50 percent plus one vote in two months,” he says. “It would be almost close to a political miracle. It is possible, but the probabilities are not in my favor. Now with Ann, it is wonderful, the pie now is split three ways ... it will take a miracle now for Mufi to make it in September.
“I think I have a chance,” he says. “I know we have the platform that we should win.”
Page 2 of 3 pages for this story < 1 2 3 >
E-mail this story | Print this page | Comments (0) | Archive | RSS
Most Recent Comment(s):
