The headline this week is $300,000 for lawmakers and state staff to fly somewhere and study transit-oriented development. Nobody knows where the trip is going.
Readers will see that headline and file it under government waste. That’s the easy reading, and it’s usually right. But it doesn’t have to be.
The appropriation went to the Hawaiʻi Community Development Authority, which voted two weeks ago to transfer the money to the Department of Health. I chaired HCDA’s board until June. The vote came after I left.
Coordinating big infrastructure is one of the few things government exists to do. State and county governments own the ports, the airports, the highways, and the bus and rail networks. Those systems decide where housing can go, how much of it can be built, and what it will cost. A rail line is a housing policy whether anyone calls it that or not.
And these decisions are close to permanent. A rail line reconfigures a community for generations and costs billions. The price of getting it wrong is not only the money spent. It’s the century of consequences that follows. $300,000 is a small price to pay for better decisions. Sen. Chris Lee, who used to chair the Senate Transportation Committee, said the state shouldn’t be penny-wise and pound-foolish. He’s right.
Lawmakers should fly coach, sleep in modest rooms, and skip the room service. But reporters are already on the story, and I expect they’ll follow the receipts. The question isn’t whether the trip should happen. The question is where it should go.
The biggest fight in Hawaiʻi government over the last decade has been Honolulu against the state, and the fight has been about transportation money. The counties want more of it. The state thinks the counties spend it badly. It wants proof of return, either in tax revenue or in something the public can point to, like affordable housing. Rail sits at the center of that fight, with a slice of the general excise tax feeding it.
Critics are right that ridership is low. Skyline carries 11,000 to 12,000 riders on a weekday, against the 84,000 the city hopes for once the line reaches Ala Moana. They’re also right that development around the stations has barely moved, more than a decade after the route was drawn.
Why? Zoning at the county level came slowly. Some areas lacked the sewer and water capacity to support redevelopment. Nobody had the capital to build at scale. And Hawaiʻi has almost no firms that know how to redevelop whole districts around a transit line. Those four gaps are the whole story of rail’s disappointment.
So the trip has to answer four questions at once. Which country zones well? Which one matches its transit buildouts with the infrastructure to support them? Which one has capital looking for a home? And which one has companies that specialize in redeveloping around stations?
Sen. Stanley Chang has long admired Singapore’s public housing, and he’s also fond of Vienna’s social housing, much of it built under socialist governments. Both are worth understanding. Neither is a model Hawaiʻi can copy. Our state leans toward overreach, but it has neither the ideological unity of Red Vienna nor a leader with the standing of Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore also runs on a civil service whose professional culture rivals its best companies, and it pays accordingly. The prime minister’s salary was recently raised to $2.8 million. Nobody at the Capitol is proposing that.
Go to Japan.
Japan lives with the constraints we live with. Scarce urban land, earthquakes and typhoons, imported food and energy, an aging population.
It has one of the best zoning systems in the world. Small urban parcels can be rebuilt fast, which is why its cities feel alive in a way few others do. It’s a slow-growth economy sitting on enormous capital that needs somewhere to go. A delegation could come home with investors, not just design notes. And nearly everything standing in Tokyo was built after 1945, because the war leveled it. Few countries have more recent experience rebuilding cities.
Anyone who has hired a contractor knows the fear. What if he takes the deposit and vanishes? What if he goes under halfway through? That fear shrinks when your partner has been in business for a century and is counted among the best builders in the country.
Consider Tokyu Corporation, which has run commuter rail across greater Tokyo since 1922. Tokyu doesn’t just operate trains. It masterplans the districts around its stations and develops them. Shibuya, home to what’s often called the world’s busiest pedestrian crossing, grew up around a Tokyu terminal that once served about a dozen passengers a day. Projects like Shibuya Scramble Square and Shibuya Sakura Stage remake entire neighborhoods by the time they open.
And Tokyu is already here. Its transit-development expert has sat on the governor’s advisory committee since 2024. Last October he walked the committee through 83 slides on the Skyline, including a fix for something HART never designed: passing tracks so some trains can run express. The state is now negotiating a memorandum of understanding with the company.
Japan and Hawaiʻi share a love of baseball. For years Hawaiʻi has refused to swing big. It bunts. It settles for singles. That habit shows up most clearly in infrastructure. The state rarely attempts real masterplanning. When it does, it can’t manage the work over time, so projects drift and die. It parcels out work through RFPs and gets piecemeal results. Playing small yields small returns, when it yields any. But there are teams that play big and win big in development, and Japan has several of them.
You don’t meet those teams by reading. Gov. Josh Green learned that on his first trip to Tokyo after taking office. He thought he was going to talk about tourism, he said, and “was actually talking about partnerships.”
If the goal is to learn how transit networks work, buy a book. If the goal is to actually redevelop Honolulu around its rail line, you visit the people who build cities around theirs. And you build relationships that outlast the trip. Hawaiʻi has spent years counting the cost. It has even sat down with people who have finished the work. Now it’s time to take them seriously.
Relationships in Japan aren’t made by one traveler with a per diem. Seriousness means a full delegation, receiving the hospitality of hosts, and returning it here. That will cost more than $300,000. It’s still cheaper than another decade of empty lots beside the stations.
That’s how you tell a partner you’re ready.
Is Hawaiʻi?
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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