Everyone, here's a message I just sent out to the Mayor's Adivsory Committee on Bicycling - the spearhead of the public discourse in support of the Young St bikeway.

 

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Hi everyone, the Young St. meeting on Wednesday was dramatic.  The
city/consultants did a great job orchestrating the meeting.  They
provided detailed hand outs of the plan and a list of each complaint
and how it has been addressed.  Nevertheless, the Young St. Coalition
is still quite vocal against the plan for, as I gathered, the
following reasons: 

1) parking; every space is too valuable to lose
2) the plan will not solve the traffic flow problem turning onto
Piikoi and cutting through the McDonalds
3) there is too much uncertainty about the rest of the corridor; they
can't support it until they can visualize the entire project
4) they're worried that if funding can't be secured for the remaining
project, we'll be stuck with a single block of bike lanes, which does
virtually no good but has cost a lot of money
5) trees produce too much rubbish

For these reasons, they will still call for an EIS to be done and ask
the City Council to overturn the Mayor's veto of the proviso.  Rod Tam
is still a champion of the EIS and the overtuning of the veto.  Those
of you who attended the meeting might disagree, but I feel that we're
going to lose this battle if we don't make an eloquent case against
the EIS and if we don't find a champion in the city council ourselves.
Here's what I propose:

1) We should argue that these public meetings ARE WORKING to bring the
two sides together, and we shouldn't waste our time with something so
formal, time consuming, unnecessary, and expensive.  If we can detail
what exactly is unnecessary about the EIS (i.e., what will the EIS
require us to do that even those most in favor of an EIS will find a
ridiculous waste of time and money), then we will have a stronger
case.   
2) Mike Gabbard was the sole vote against the EIS in the public works
subco mmittee a couple weeks ago.  Can we urge him to champion our
cause?
3) The Academy of Arts representative came over to our side - he now
suppports the bike way.  Can we get him to testify at the next city
council meeting?  What about some of the others, like Lester Inouye,
who have seen the meetings progress in a positive way and may be
persuaded to not support an EIS?
4) Call personal meetings with Tam and Kobayashi.  Both are paying a
lot of attention to the Young St. Coalition because of personal
loyalty to friends and businesses.  We need some of that personal one-
on-one time. 
5) Have the consultants put together a sketch of the remaining
corridor and present that to all those worried about the rest of the
project.

Remember, not only do we have to come out of this still breathing, we
really need near unanimity in the city council and the community to
have the rest of Young St. , and additional parts of the Honolulu
Master Bike Plan, implemented in a timely fashion.

One last comment, I had a few moments with Tam after the meeting.  I
urged him to think seriously about his proposal to fully fund adult
bike education, possibly making it mandatory when one applies for a
bike permit.  I think he will run with it if HBL can work with him to
develop a curriculum and lobby support.  We should publicly point out
to him that $200,000 is much better used for this purpose than for an
EIS.

Aloha,
Aaron

 

>>>>>>[end of letter]>>>>>>>>

 

We're going to need numbers to testify at the next meeting on the 14th.  Linda counted 26 members of the Young St. Coalition and we only had 7 or 8 at this last meeting.  I'm writing a note to Chuck from HBL to see if he can get HBL members to testify.  As soon as I find out the meeting time on the 14th, I'll let you all know.

 

Aaron