I was initially skeptical, but seeing Mokulele Airlines (an airline serving Hawaii) flash by on the carousel made me consider that this might have at least some real-world uses.
It's insane to me that the vast majority of inter-island travel in Hawaii (an archipelago where generally each island is visible from the next) is via jet aircraft. You have to spend hours (especially if you're checking bags) getting to the airport early, going through security, waiting at the gate, taxiing, etc ... for a 20 minute flight.
A light electric ferry service like this, directly between say, Ala Wai and Lahaina harbors, skipping airport/TSA nonsense, could be a very successful premium product. I just hope from there it could be scaled up so that it wouldn't remain just a niche offering for the rich.
Hawaii is notoriously difficult to do business in, Hawaiian Airlines has become entrenched in protecting these routes, Southwest has been moderately effective but it's at a significant cost, and mokulele has had some serious negative press over the safety of their aircraft.
Part of the super ferry demise wasn't just NIMBYs' but entrenched politics and money.. glad you folks are brining some innovation and wish you luck on some much needed disruption.
I recently flew between Oahu and Molokai. My return flight was delayed seven hours. I literally could have paddled a canoe home faster. Mokulele deserves all the negative press it gets.
Are you working here? I would like to be involved in work like this when I get done with my masters… I was a pilot for many years and we need more sustainable air travel to rural and coastal communities.
This is a perennial favorite of transportation NIMBYs.
Where I live extending the light rail the last little bit over the river to Washington state is a no brainer, but it's been paralyzed by decades of opposition from suburbanites in Vancouver Wa. My friend's dad is/was one of the key activists. He'd stand in planning meetings and no joke scream about how "criminals" were gonna ride the train up, break into someone's house, steal their tv, then ride the train back. Lots of saying "crime train" over and over again.
We have solid data that building transit lines actually decreases crime. This man is a credentialed civil engineer. He rejected that evidence without consideration every time we put it in front of him.
I have zero respect for these people. If you talk to them for just a few seconds it becomes readily apparent the root is just straight up racism, but they don't wanna own it overtly.
In my city you can definitely tell a difference in the demographics that frequent places that have train access vs those without. The malls for example:
Malls with train access tend to bring a lot of kids strutting around flexing (as kids are expected to do). This has side effects of petty larceny and shootings. All of the mall shootings are groups of these kids that have beef with each other. It's mostly harmless to shoppers but there's always a chance you could get caught in crossfire or become the target of a malicious youth prank.
It's just your typical youth angst but you can avoid it simply by going to a mall without train access.
The question comes down to whether train access brings more benefits than drawbacks. When talking to anti-trainers you have to address this issue. You can't just hand wave it away as they're perfectly fine with the car status quo.
However, I'm sure most people will ignore everything in this comment and just shout "gun control".
> This has side effects of petty larceny and shootings. All of the mall shootings are groups of these kids that have beef with each other. It's mostly harmless to shoppers but there's always a chance you could get caught in crossfire or become the target of a malicious youth prank.
As an outsider (from an European country): I don't think train access is the cause here :O
It's like saying "We should seed rain clouds because nice sunny weather correlates with mall shootings as nobody wants to go out in a storm". I mean, yes, the facts check out (sunny weather = more shootings than during a storm. I guess?) but the "solution" (don't provide public transportation / seed rain clouds) is.. ugh..
There's a bridge in stockholm that isn't getting opened because people in the rich neighboorhood on one side don't want people from the poor neighboorhood on the other side to come there.
They don't want the poor people to come over, or are they merely against "criminality and delinquency" coming over? Surely it's possible to to separate the people and the behavior (of the few, mind you).
Trains bring more "these kinds of kids" to the mall vs private cars.
Nice weather brings more "these kinds of kids" to the mall as well (compared to stormy weather).
Now, where we do seem to disagree is the question of where the actual problem is. In my opinion, the problem is _not_ that kids are at the mall. The problem is that, apparently, these kids start to shoot each other while they're at the mall (!?! what the fuck)
Looking at _all_ the other countries that have nicer weather and / or better public transportation, we don't see kids shooting each other at malls. So I'd say that's a good indicator that the _actual problem_ can't be solved by restricting public transportation (or sunshine) but there has to be a different issue that needs to be tackled here..
Not building something because it will allow poorer people to move around our cities more easily is just wrong no matter what the consequences. There are also criminals and kids who strut around and flex from rough areas of town that have cars. Should we get rid of roads that connect those neighborhoods to the rest of the city?
These issues just reveal deep problems we have as a society and the solution we have had so far of trying to avoid it at all costs only making it worse.
It's interesting to me that you've figured out that people bring up gun control whenever you talk about this, but you haven't made the next logical leap.
Which is to say, there may be a _reason_ people bring up gun control. As you say "You can't just hand wave it away".
> We have solid data that building transit lines actually decreases crime.
Do we? A cursory Google search revealed a couple of papers, one of which showed a slight increase in crime after the addition of a bus line[0] in Cleveland, and another which showed a decrease in homicides but an increase in property crime[1] in São Paolo. I'm not cherry-picking; these were the first two PDFs in the search results. I would love to see the evidence that you presented to your friend's dad.
> If you talk to them for just a few seconds it becomes readily apparent the root is just straight up racism, but they don't wanna own it overtly.
This may very well be the case as you exhort downthread, but I just want to point out that besides the obvious (that we are all internet randos who don't know your friend's dad), racism means different things to different people. I know people who think that if a white author writes nonwhite characters, it's racism. I also know people who were disowned for marrying "outside the race". My personal definition of racism is a lot closer to the latter.
Sometimes a concern for crime is just that; other times it can be a code for a race-related pretext. Here's a thought: if you're concerned about female genital mutilation, which is virtually only practiced in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and the Muslim countries of South Asia, are you concerned about the women being mutilated, or are you just a racist?
I don’t completely follow, this is people living in a Portland suburb lobbying against getting a public transport connection? How is less infrastructure better?
This isn’t uncommon in suburbs. Some people care more about preventing easy access to their community than they do about having easy access to other communities.
Every time when I think I kinda sorta figured out American culture, I read a comment like this. To me this is batshit insane. I’m so happy my suburb has regular bus and train service!
In Chicago there are neighborhoods that actively blocked subway access so they could be car suburbs and not get the change that comes with mass transit access. Same for the famous Robert Moses parkways on Long Island.
There is some validity to the idea that preventing mass transit insulates a community from a certain type of change but it comes with major costs.
In Dublin, there was some lobbying at the time against building a light rail line (the green Luas line) through some affluent areas on the basis that it would somehow reduce property values (a perennial Irish obsession). In fact, in practice, it increased property values (as you'd expect, really; the already existing heavy rail rapid transport had done the same), and 20 years later the same residents' groups and so on had a fit at the idea that service might be temporarily curtailed as part on an expansion plan...
(However, everything old is new again; there's widespread annoyance at plans to make the bus system actually work properly now...)
A lot of the time it's a race issue. I live near Atlanta, where white suburbanites have spent 40 years voting to cripple public transportation, because they're afraid black people will use it to come to their neighborhood.
That is not an exaggeration. One of my coworkers did a historical study and read town hall transcripts from the last couple decades. People were extremely clear why they were voting down mass transit.
The racist joke I was told as a kid was that MARTA stood for "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta." I was so young and naive, I said, "Really? Why would they name it that?" Ugh. The racism of anti-transit people is really inescapable.
Yeah, there was an article in Baltimore about stupid people worrying about crime on the light rail in the suburbs. Racism rots the brain. Just put a cop at the train station if you're worried. A better solution to crime would be to ban cars, which any competent criminal is going to use to haul off their goods.
> I have zero respect for these people. If you talk to them for just a few seconds it becomes readily apparent the root is just straight up racism, but they don't wanna own it overtly.
It also becomes readily apparent that they also want to be patted on the back and told that they're good and noble people for "protecting the community" from the scourge of undesirables potentially riding public transit near them.
this is so blatantly wrong that i loose every respect for these people. It really makes me angry. It's just so selfish. I really don't understand how you can make things worse for everyone, just because you don't want things to change, "city-people" invade you precious suburb or something. In the end gas-guzzling cars pester the environment and use up the precious few emissions we have left in order not to get wrecked by climate change.
If he can show any occurrence of that ever happening, then you come off as dishonest and disinterested in the needs of the community. Is it really so difficult to cater to his needs as well? There’s surely a better compromise than “Everyone who disagrees with me is a racist”.
In the text you shared, you imply that other readers should come to the conclusion that he's a racist because he's against public transit due to fear of crime being imported. But you made no connections as to how his claims of crime import were related to a race component. So it's understandable that readers might not find your "racist" labeling justified based on the facts that you shared.
He might be a racist but based on what you said, it's not clear what may make him so.
No, that is explicitly not what I said. I said if you talk to this person even briefly, you will quickly realize the actual basis of his objection is racism. It is not subtle.
What is your expectation of me here, to pull out some sort of video proof to convince you, the skeptical hnews reader?
Sometimes this place is extremely tiresome.
Just go do some googling and you'll realize how common this sentiment is. And it's nothing new. Read about Robert Moses and why he made bridges too low for buses.
> Read about Robert Moses and why he made bridges too low for buses.
On that suggestion, I just went and read the wikipedia article on Robert Moses. It mentions that buses and commercial vehicles do in fact go under those bridges today, and that the accusations of racism are disputed.
"I only learned about this today and just read a wiki article and that convinces me you're lying" is pretty much the problem with this place in one shot.
You complain this place is tiresome, and then invite us to go read about Robert Moses and his racist bridge policy. So we go read a bit about it, and note that a somewhat more authoritative source than rando-on-HN suggests that the accusations are in dispute and lack good supporting evidence. And now -this- is in fact the problem with HN?
Seriously? Has the bar changed from "Google it" to "Read through several research papers and books" for someone to comment on how true something is generally accepted to be? And you're saying that the person who looked something up on Wikipedia is the problem?
This comment and your other one above don't really add anything to the discussion here. They comprise an attack on an individual and, as you say, we can't have an informed opinion because we don't know the individual. So it just boils down to you calling someone you know a racist based on a one-sided anecdote.
Not at all. It seems they suspended it because of neverending lawsuits regarding environmental impact. Chopping up whales was apparently a big concern, so I suppose a ground effect service might alleviate some of those concerns(just kidding, I'm sure the environmental lawsuits were really just about control and not a genuine care for the environment)
That’s a great point, and also kind of insane to think about.
The area around Maui has TONS of whales part of the year… many of them breaching.
I wonder how high these things fly vs how high a humpback can jump out of the water. I think the rule is 1/2 of your wingspan to be in ground effect, but it has been a long time since I’ve studied the exact numbers.
The wikipedia article on Moses claims buses (and commercial vehicles, which were another alleged target of his architectural decisions) do pass through those bridges to this day.
> It's insane to me that the vast majority of inter-island travel in Hawaii (an archipelago where generally each island is visible from the next) is via jet aircraft.
Why jets? In the Caribbean, where distances are longer, turboprop aircraft are standard for island hopping and I thought these made more economic sense for short distances.
Throughput. There’s enough people going from one island to another, that is cheaper on pilots to have one bigger plane than several smaller ones, and it’s easier to fit into the limited number of slots for take off and landing.
> The protesters' concerns were that a ferry of this size could strike and kill whales during its voyages despite this never occurring during the years the faster Seaflite interisland ferries operated.
NIMBYs ruin everything, I doubt they were really concerned about the whales.
Read on - what they were really afraid of was the dirty/smelly poors coming onto their precious island.
You see the same BS with bike paths through residential neighborhoods. Despite studies showing that bike paths increase property values, residents bitch and moan about safety/crime. They basically figure that poor/non-white people will bike into their neighborhood and rape/pillage/burn everything.
So you get a bunch of environmental concern-trolls funded by wealthy people who don't want to admit that, really, it's about race/class.
Is it really extraordinary or unbelievable? Easier access to infrastructure which is quiet and environmentally friendly should reasonably not decrease property values?
I would definitely be more interested in a property with bike infrastructure, although that is just one tiny sample with no control variables:)
> Is it really extraordinary or unbelievable? Easier access to infrastructure which is quiet and environmentally friendly should reasonably not decrease property values?
Well, yes, when you're talking about residential areas. Home owners don't want a wall of strangers around their home all the time - it makes it difficult to spot the ones with ill-intent.
I mean, if that wasn't true, homes in gated communities wouldn't be more expensive than standalone houses.
> I would definitely be more interested in a property with bike infrastructure, although that is just one tiny sample with no control variables:)
You'd think that (I certainly did), but the price for homes in gated communities are far far higher than the equivalent in non-gated.
Which is why I want to see this hypothetical study that shows that residential areas closed to non-residents are cheaper than residential areas open to the public.
Because, a simple look at home prices shows this to be wildly untrue.
I'm not sure how we've got from the claim the poster actually made about designated bike lanes improving property values [over regular street/sidewalk access to the property, and possibly highway-only access to town] to the almost entirely unrelated claim you've invented about the relative value of residential areas closed to non residents.
The majority of people do not live in gated communities and even gated communities have access routes outside the gates.
> I'm not sure how we've got from the claim the poster actually made about designated bike lanes improving property values [over regular street/sidewalk access to the property, and possibly highway-only access to town]
That wasn't the claim the poster made. The specific claim was that bike traffic through residential areas by non-residents increase the value of properties in that residential area.
>> Read on - what they were really afraid of was the dirty/smelly poors coming onto their precious island.
>> You see the same BS with bike paths through residential neighborhoods.
GP could not have been clearer in his implication that having public traffic pass through the residential area increases the value of that property in that area.
Which is complete nonsense when you look at residential property prices in area which has a through-flow for non-residents/the public and compare to areas which are effectively gated off for residents only.
Buying a house in an area that is limited to residents traffic only is damned expensive.
GP could not have been clearer that residents in somewhere that Maui, which is an island with a population of about 200k, were daft to object to the idea that easy connectivity to other islands because they were more worried about visitors from the neighbouring island than interested of the greater employment and commercial opportunities that connectivity brings. I'm not sure how you got "gated community" from that.
I'm not sure that your own implication that property prices are inversely proportional to the ease of commute to where all the people and jobs are is well evidenced by representative studies either. Even if the GP was talking about gated communities, which he wasn't, they're still usually nowhere near as expensive as being cycling distance from central San Francisco or London.
> You see the same BS with bike paths through residential neighborhoods.
I'd invite you to take a look at the Springwater Corridor in Portland. It is plausible that ubiquitous bike paths would not have the same problem, but it is difficult to fault someone for taking one look at that disaster and wanting it to come to their own quiet neighborhood.
Crime does seem to center around heavily developed public transit corridors, but it is difficult to tell if economic or transit accessibility are the primary drivers of increased crime (probably a bit of both).
One case where they don't would be commercial roads with small shops that rely on street parking. But the comment you're responding to was talking about residential, and I haven't seen enough dispositive data on that one way or another. Like anything, it's probably a mixed bag.
Nope. There too. It turns out that foot traffic and bike traffic do a lot more for small shops than cars do (because drivers go fast enough that they don't pay attention to 90% of the small shops).
Evidence for bike lanes in the US comes from very methodologically suspicious studies (e.g. the Portland State one) that were heavily influenced by hyper-local effects and neglected to look at nearby businesses.
Some of the more honest studies found the opposite effect. E.g. the LA study has shown that the non-sabotaged section had more revenue growth than the road-sabotaged section.
This would really be relative to what kinds of shops, and the layout of the street parking (if any) after the bike lane is put in place. You're assuming that bike traffic is sufficient to make up for car traffic. But if it's a market, a bicyclist or pedestrian might only buy one bag worth of goods, while someone driving up with a car might be there to buy three. Similarly, you're assuming there's increased foot traffic; but the foot traffic doesn't increase just because parking is replaced with a bike lane, so that's basically static.
Really? My street was recently turned into a greenway / bike street, and it's brought me nothing but an endless bike parade of smug white people in silly clothing. Just a couple hours ago, I was having to get my car towed and the tow driver was 3/4 into turning slowly back into the street when two women on bikes zoomed right in front of him, causing him to slam the brakes. One of them then shouted "Thank you!" over her shoulder. I can barely open my car door without some sanctimonious guy in spandex flying by and screaming at me.
Lots of folks on your street are getting around town with zero emissions and you're moaning about that while talking about the troubles of fixing your polluting vehicle? Have you ever paused to think how inconsiderate it is to pollute the air people have to breath? I'll take smug white people in silly clothing over polluters any day.
Nothing. At least half the people I know fit that category. I was just bringing it up as a counterpoint to the "poor/non-white" statement by the parent comment.
> I can barely open my car door without some sanctimonious guy in spandex flying by and screaming at me.
You are supposed to yield to traffic when opening your car door into a lane. The "sanctimonious" cyclist is justifiably mad because you violated his right of way and placed him at risk of severe injury.
To skip TSA nonsense you just need to skip TSA nonsense. Outside of the US airtravel is still relatively similar to rail. You have to be on time, you have to handle the baggage, but you can walk through xray and security within minutes and only need to show the ticket on your phone.
An electric wing-in-ground-effect aircraft still looks like an airplane and might still fall under the same regulations as any other airplane.
In any case TSA objectively does not add much security[1] and does cause issues e.g. for people who have names with similar spellings to those on a no-fly-list [2].
But that aside, the technology is great for short distance travel. Climbing to 2-5 thousand foot to travel some 50 miles is clearly insane.
> Outside of the US airtravel is still relatively similar to rail.
I live outside the US and this is laughably wrong.
How can you collapse the entire world down to "outside the US".
Israeli airports are exactly the same as Zimbabwean airports in your worldview?
I live in SE Asia and no country around here has air travel "like rail". I cannot get through xray and security in minutes. I cannot just show a ticket on my phone.
In Australia domestically,you can show your QR code on your phone or print the ticket at home (or even use the kiosks at the airport to print it out). You still need to pass through one set of security screening, but expect the queue (away from holidays and peaks ) to be around 15 minutes.
> Outside of the US airtravel is still relatively similar to rail. You have to be on time, you have to handle the baggage, but you can walk through xray and security within minutes and only need to show the ticket on your phone.
Same if you have Pre and Clear. I usually get to the airport 30-40m early.
That said I'm usually at the train station 10m before departure with bags.
Clear doesn't let you skip security. It basically just allows you to cut to the front of the line for a fee. You still have to go through the x-ray machines, etc.
TSA Pre actually does reduce security requirements (e.g. you can keep your shoes on...) in exchange for, I've always assumed, a mini-background check when you apply for the program.
> mini-background check when you apply for the program.
You'll get fingerprinted, etc., and while it's nothing like a serious security clearance, they do look you up rather thoroughly.
Note: my only direct knowledge comes from applying to Global Entry, which is a pickier program, but Precheck does collect biometrics (at least facial and fingerprints). Global Entry was around 15 minutes for the interview process (both formal and informal; I knew the two guys outside the interview and fingerprint room didn't really just want to talk to me to pass the time), but that was a decade ago.
One interesting anecdote from my interview is that I was told that the #1 reason Global Entry applications failed at the time was that one of the questions was whether or not you had ever been arrested - not convicted - and people would say no. Not an auto-disqualifier to have been arrested, but lying about it was.
> Outside of the US airtravel is still relatively similar to rail.
Not China, I usually try to get to the airport 1 hour before take off. But for the train, 10 minutes is enough.
While I agree it's nonsense, I'm curious what would change without harming the personal security of everyone involved? I mean this system has many flaws but no one can steal a plane again and crash it into innocent people right?
In the past quarter, TSA intercepted an average of 16.8 firearms per day, 93% of which were loaded. I'm quite happy with that many less guns on my flights (imagine what it would be like if there was no check - this is just from people who forgot that carrying onboard is not allowed).
People forgetting they are carrying a loaded firearm into an airport feels like a pretty US specific problem, and there are ways to screen for guns without the massive inconvenience that is TSA. Other parts of the world still have security checks at airports, just a lot more efficient.
Even if that’s true, which I’m very skeptical of, the TSA has little to do with that. The armored and locked cockpit doors? Sure. Air marshals? Possibly.
But the TSA has absolutely no bearing on whether or not a plane gets hijacked. It is far too easy to circumvent.
As someone who carries a 20 cm metal rod through airport security every time and has not seen a single warning light ever popping up because of that, it is quite difficult for me to understand how the airport security is supposed to add safety against anyone who is willing to spend any time working around it - and who is motivated.
(For the curious, there is a titanium plate in my body due to an accident)
Most roller bags have 20cm rods built into the handles.
The TSA explicitly allows hand tools up to 17cm (7 in.)
I think that at this point the TSA is more interested in explosives since hardened cockpit doors, and passenger willingness to intervene have pretty much killed takeover style hijackings.
That's why they use the full body scanner at most airport security now. One of those detected a small piece of scrap paper in my back pocket that I had to pull out and show to security. They showed me the image and even the shape of the paper was clear. For sure those scanners can distinguish between metal in your arm and taped to your arm.
The wiki page doesn’t have a section on perceived environmental impact, do you have more info on that?
From the description of the ship they tried to use environmentally-friendly tech (despite it being a bit of a behemoth), but I know nothing about the local ecosystem. I imagined the area would already have heavy boat traffic from cruises and the military.
Why not make an electric Superferry? Presumably addresses the environmental issues, more forgiving on battery weight and volume than a plane and won't ever need to make an emergency landing.
Fun fact: The current ferry vessel between Bar Harbor, Maine and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia is literally the Hawaii Superferry vessel repurposed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HST-2
It's insane to me that the vast majority of inter-island travel in Hawaii (an archipelago where generally each island is visible from the next) is via jet aircraft. You have to spend hours (especially if you're checking bags) getting to the airport early, going through security, waiting at the gate, taxiing, etc ... for a 20 minute flight.
There used to be a ferry between Oahu and Maui but it got killed due to real and perceived environmental impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Superferry
A light electric ferry service like this, directly between say, Ala Wai and Lahaina harbors, skipping airport/TSA nonsense, could be a very successful premium product. I just hope from there it could be scaled up so that it wouldn't remain just a niche offering for the rich.