Talking Headways Podcast: A More Humanized Experience in Honolulu

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Jon Nouchi, director of Transit for Honolulu. At the Mpact conference in Toronto, we discussed the idea of iconic transit systems, time as a performance metric, humanizing transit systems, and the Skyline rail line.

Now, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t give you three — count ’em, three! — ways to enjoy Talking Headways:

• You could just click here for a full, unedited and un-copy-edited transcript. It’s the full-on literary experience.
• You could click the “play” button on the player below and just listen to my dulcet tones.
• Or you could jump below the player and read an excerpted segment of the juicy bits.

All aboard? Here we go with the edited section:

Jon Nouchi: When I visit San Francisco, I think about the perception of time. Maybe we don’t think about time enough. We show where things go, but our Skyline is never affected by traffic so maybe we should make a concerted effort to tell people how long it takes, and start listing the time between stations, because it’s consistent.

Our trains have to operate within 10 seconds of a scheduled arrival time to be considered on time. So we have a 20-second window for on-time performance, and we just closed out last month at performing 99.87% on time.

Jeff Wood: That’s amazing.

Jon Nouchi: it’s huge. I think we’re better than the whole U.S. right now. But that’s not just about being on time, it’s about availability. It’s the human factors, the thousands of things we do every day: A station attendant opening the gates to the station on time, someone unfortunately throwing up on Skyline and gets cleaned up in a very short amount of time, etc.

It’s all these things that factor into that availability. But that thing you talk about is in terms of time. When I visit your city, you look at the map, it’s not a big city, but it takes a long time, and I think it’s the same in Honolulu or places like LA. The people make that joke, “Oh, you know, San Francisco is 30 minutes away from San Francisco.” Or, “Honolulu is 30 minutes away from Honolulu.” Yeah. Or an hour.

Jeff Wood: The time thing is really interesting. I know Barcelona has a time policy and Chris and Melissa Bruntlett wrote a book called “Women Changing Cities,” and one of the things they talk about is time poverty, and the need for folks who are caretakers to go so many different places, and the tax on them in terms of time. I think in Columbia or Venezuela, if care was measured as a part of the GDP, it’d be 20 percent.

And so all these people are going into paying the fare basically with their own time in trying to get places, and Bogota has actually created care blocks where they actually have places where they’ve set up healthcare and other care systems so that people don’t have to go as far, right? So instead of extending the transit system to make it go faster, they’ve pulled it closer to people.

I’m sure that’s hard in some places, but we need to have more discussion about how much it matters, not just for transit and access, but for people’s wellbeing, for their ability to do the things that they want to do, for their mental health. I think if we look at this not just as a transit or a land-use issue, but as a time issue or as a general human issue, these things should be discussed together as one big whole.

Jon Nouchi: That’s a great reframing of performance. We talk about availability and on-time performance, but does that matter to the people that are riding our system? The fact is, did they get home in a reasonable amount of time? I used to have maybe about an hour commute by car where I used to live, and it was probably about an hour and 20 on transit.

Now, I live two blocks from where I work, and I have a reliable seven-minute commute. But I really like that idea that you just talked about, about reframing the discussion about time, and that’s actually what we’ve leaned into with some of our, our latest marketing for Skyline and our bus network is, the tagline is, “Skyline, always on time.” And our on-air adverts and on social media talk about getting back to your family reliably. And I still remember when we opened our second segment, this one woman said that she got to work in about 27 minutes when it used to take her an hour and 10. And she was almost in tears.

And I hung out at that station a lot during opening week, so I saw her the next day, and she came up to me and grabbed my face and hugged me and said, “You know, I met you the other day. I told you, I get to see my kids two more hours.” Man, that’s powerful stuff we can’t quantify. And so that weekend was a showcase of the humanity of transit and the benefit it could bring.

I saw a single mother teaching her two kids how to use transit to get to the park that was right next to one of our stations — normally about a 50-minute drive from where she lived.

She took them on Skyline in about 40. And now they can reliably go to practice and go to football practice because she didn’t always have the time to drive them. And it’s just those kinds of things that’s the value There’s a cost to everything, but there is a value to things, and we don’t often quantify the value over what the cost is.

We always worry about the cost, but not the value.