The Makuu Manifesto
Monday, October 2, 2006 at 10:45AM I know the "online daily" promise is nipping at my heels again. Putting filler in like this is little problem, but the substantive stuff simmers awhile first. No slackin', of course, but house guests have temporarily reordered my priorities. You might also notice that some of the weekend was spent tidying up the right column of this blog.
Meanwhile, the reverberations from Thursday's Makuu meeting are still being felt. People are rising up, speaking out, and taking the initiative in the wake of the off-handedly patronizing manner state officials displayed toward local transportation problems.
Maybe the Makuu meeting finally will spark a movement that will give Puna the voice it needs. Quiet for too long, Puna has become a county and state step-child, taken for granted and taken advantage of, ultimately resulting in meetings like Thursday's. But maybe those days are over.
Here's the conclusion of a draft letter James Weatherford is circulating:
"While lots of the Puna residents at the meeting, organized by the Hawaiian Beaches Action Team, did not know each other before the meeting, they did not waste any time exchanging email addresses after the meeting.
"Since that evening, the emails have been flying and the community has been organizing. Within the coming weeks elected officials will be contacted and this time the message is going to be, 'We vote, we pay taxes, and we’re here to tell you what you’re going to do with those taxes to stop the carnage and maiming in our community.'"
The citizens' first shot across the bow. The Makuu Manifesto.
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Reader Comments (3)
Anyway, about the dismal performance of that certain public servant last Thursday at the meeting of the Governors East Hawaii Council of Advisors: as has been widely and deeply agreed, he was clueless...or, at least almost so.
Amid the arrogant and patronizing display of contempt for community input, the man, inspite of himself, did make one valid point: RIDE SHARING is an important component of solving our traffic problems.
Does anyone know anything about the "Van Pool" program?
Has anyone seen a successful model for the facilitation necessary for ridesharing?
I'm so behind that I had to use the links on the right side of the Blog page to find out what I might have missed in the days after the Maku`u meeting. In the commentary I noticed a discussion about ride sharing. I could not help but remember when I lived in Mexico City where the traffic is just about as bad as city traffic can get.
There, they took the bull by the horns and solved, in part, the ever present problem of how to get people moving without a lot of infrasructure, bus, and taxi improvements. The solution was very smart. People needed to share rides, but the vans were not practical. Taxies were too expensive, and busses were full. On the other hand, many people needed work, many people needed rides, and everyone needed a quick cheap way to move up and down the Paseo De La Reforma (the grand boulevard of Mexico City) to get where they needed to go in a hurry.
The answer was the Pasero. One peso is not much to pay, and everyone who needed a ride could just get into the specially marked private cars. For one peso, you could travel as far as you needed to go, sharing the car with the other folks in the Pasero.
Anyone who needed a ride just held up their hand along the Paseo De La Reforma (and a few other dedecated roadways) and the first Pasero to come along would stop for you. If you could fit in, you had a ride for just a peso! When you wanted off, you just told the driver to stop. Anywhere along the line you could get in or out of a Pasero for just one peso.
Today I know that they must be a little bit more than a single peso, but the idea is that there is no meter, and anyone who got the special permit could use their family car to have a job and to work providing a service to help move people along Mexico City's busy main street. My spanish is long forgotten now, so don't count on my spelling of Pasero, but the idea would be great for Hwy. 130 and the Keaau to Bay Front corridor as well. Maybe here, for just a dollar you could ride whatever distance you needed to go along the corridor and share the ride with the driver and how ever many people could fit in.
This would be better than hitchhiking and would provide work for the dedicated drivers who also received lots of tips from people who were in a hurry and were so happy to "just get going" I think it's worth thinkng about, and would no doubt cost less than a fleet of vans for van pooling. Every Pasero driver was responsible to keep his own car up and running good by himself. Maybe the county could cover the gas cost. Can't we come up with something like this for our heavy traffic?
Mahalo,
KD