Sunday, September 05, 2010

Is Honolulu Really the 12th Largest City in the US?

That Honolulu is the "12th largest city in the US" is used as the basis of the argument by rail proponents that it is the largest city in the US without rail.

In most standardized lists of "largest cities in the US," Honolulu is 50th, and San Francisco is 12th, which is what most would agree is the experience they feel of a truly large city. The city of San Francisco is an area of 49 sq miles, and so dividing that population of 900,000 by that area gives one a population density of 16,500 people per square mile, which is the kind of density required to make rail feasible, if not absolutely necessary. In places like Tokyo and New York, the density is double that.

The population the City and County chooses to use, is the whole population of Oahu, which is 602 sq miles of the approximately same population of San Francisco, giving it a population density of 1,650 -- or 1/10th that of San Francisco, and if one uses the Census Bureau's figures for the City of Honolulu, that would be 350,000, which places it properly at 50th, just above Wichita, Kansas, which is more the experience of the population density of Honolulu.

If we place Honolulu 12th, then it is larger than Boston, Seattle, Washington D.C, Denver, which is a tremendous distortion of reality and perception -- no matter how much one uses statistics to lie, misrepresent and distort, because those places are destination hubs for at least 5-10 million metropolitan areas.

The San Francisco Bay area also has other very large cities (San Jose, Oakland) as well as several other 100,000+ cities in their own right (Berkeley, Sunnyvale, Vallejo) and therefore draws from a metropolitan area of 10 million. In New York, it's 20 million, and not just the 350,000 population of Honolulu, in which 0% of the population presently lives where they will be building the Rail.

So we have a tremendous manmade fiasco and disaster in the making besides the natural risks of earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc., because of a egregious distortion of perception and reality perpetuated by the politicians and media of Hawaii.

And that's why Ed Case is right in saying Hannemann may be the most dangerous person in government in Hawaii because he has such a corrupting influence on everything in Hawaii, that with his election, there is no hope anymore for a meaningful existence of integrity and sanity in the Islands any longer.


At September 16, 2010 9:37 AM, Blogger Tony in Hawaii said...

Yes that is right - Mufi is dangerous! He's in the pocket of unions that want that Rail project no matter how wasteful and massive it becomes. If there was a gov't project to build a bridge into the middle of the ocean, the unions would support it just to get the jobs.

Here is my alternative to rail


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