My mother used to say that Honolulu is a city that behaves like a small town. Mainly she was talking about the oddity of a city pushing the million mark in population where people still ask each other where they went to high school and whether they were related to Auntie So-and-So.

But I think it also applies to the issue of rail transit. A lot of people who oppose the project have a visceral reaction to the idea, partly based on concern about how unattractive the thing might look.

Beyond the aesthetics, though, there’s the sheer aversion to commuter trains as one of the trappings of full-scale urban life, that constructing such a thing means Honolulu will have crossed some kind of big-city threshhold.

We couldn’t be at that point, could we?

At the press conference called to launch the Stop Rail Now petition drive, I ran into a friend with whom I usually agree on environmental issues. She is dead-set against the rail and believes the city hasn’t done enough to market and improve the transit system it now has: the bus.

I do wish this city could get by with improving its buses. But I see Honolulu pressing ahead with big subdivisions out where sugar once grew, the growth of the “second city,” Kapolei. So many more people trying to get from Point A to Point B, many of them people who need the maximum in speed and convenience to coax them out of their cars.

I just don’t believe the bus system can cope with all that.

This city is changing, radically and forever. That can be sad.

But if my mom were still here, she’d respond with one of her other expressions: “Never go back. Always go forward.”

So I’m trying to channel her sunny outlook, and hope that Honolulu can still hold on to a little of its old charm, somehow.

— Vicki Viotti 

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