Hawaii's Thousand Friends

PEOPLE, GROWTH AND CARBON

Apr 02, 2001

One of the easier things to get city planners to agree on is the need to coordinate the distribution of population with the location of transportation facilities. What is harder is to figure out is how to do this for all the kinds of activities engaged in by people - residential, industrial, educational, recreational, commercial, and just visiting other people. We all want mobility and freedom to go where we want to at what ever time is convenient, and we all want to enjoy pristine scenery, fresh-air, and peace and quiet. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in crowded neighborhoods, masses of concrete buildings, bumper-to-bumper highways, and long commutes while at the same time we breathe air polluted by car exhaust and chemical and industrial pollution.
Planners keep trying to find ways to avoid this. Nearly a century ago the zoning movement started to separate land uses so that in our homes we did not have to endure the odors of meat packing plants nearby. Large apartment buildings were not allowed to overshadow our little homes. Shipping facilities had to be separated from where we lived. Schools, hospitals, other institutions had to locate somewhere else. We worked in factories, office buildings, or other centers where many people had to be by 9:00 am and desert by 5:00 PM.
We all know the result. Millions have been spent on streets and highways, billions on private automobiles, more for buses, streetcars and commuter rail - and we still couldn't get where we had to be except at heavy financial cost and unacceptable time expenditure. The fact was that we didn't want to give up our freedom of movement, whatever the cost, difficulty or impact of carbon emissions by cars.
The 1992 Environmental Impact Statement for the City and County of Honolulu's rail system proposed for Oahu analyzed the probable effect of building the system, which in full operation by 1995 would carry 300,000 daily passengers less than 10% of the total daily island trips. This, it estimated, would reduce air pollution by between 2% and 3%. Actual rail
systems built since then in Los Angeles and American cities did better.
In August 1999's Environment Hawai'i editor Pat Tummon's published a succinct summary of how "Urban Sprawl Works Against Efforts to Limit Emissions." As she points out, "Hawaii's Land Use Law, Chapter 205, was intended in part to prevent urban sprawl" Yet, proliferation of isolated large-lot subdivisions, and the counties allowing small-lot subdivisions under county zoning on agricultural land, have blurred the distinction between urban and agricultural lands. The "sprawl" we have seen has been a key factor in the carbon emissions. In many places permission has been given for thousands of additional homes to be built without making the link between land use regulation and emissions.
Last November the State Climate Change Action Plan, published by the State Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism recommended that "land use planning be used to reduce fuel use by curbing the need for trips."
To date land use regulators have not made the connection between patterns of sprawl and increasing emissions and dependence on fossil fuels. To keep Hawaii's air clean the state Land Use Commission and county planning commissions, councils and agencies must make carbon emissions from new development part of their routine review of applications.

Astrid Monson Founding Member