We have a mayor’s race out here in Honolulu with three familiar faces: the incumbent, his predecessor, and a guy who’s spent his political life as a Republican who says no. No to everything. No to taxes. No to infrastructure. No to education. So of course he’s leading the polls at the moment, and the primary is August 13.

We have a heavy rail project that’s about halfway constructed, and our Republican says he wants to stop it in its tracks at Middle Street and run buses from that point forward. He doesn’t seem to understand that moving 400-800 people off a four-car train onto buses would take about 20-40 buses and they’d all have to move to street grade level one bus at a time. Then they’d have to stop at all the street lights cars and buses stop at now. Rapid transit would be converted to gridlocked traffic.

Here’s the route map. If you look at the Honolulu International Airport and move three stations to the right, that’s where our oh-so-cost-conscious clown wants to stop the system, nine stations short of completion. There is nothing at that Middle Street destination that would draw riders in and of itself. It would be like riding a bus to a hub and then transferring to another bus. The whole point of rapid mass transit was to get people to town quickly. We already have buses which travel city streets.

I swear, conservatives just hate spending money on the quality of life for anyone other than rich people. Our guy even has ads up saying “Charles has never voted for a tax increase and will not allow the rail project to be built on the backs of hard-working families and seniors.” I’m not entirely sure who’s supposed to pay for it, then. I mean, those hard-working families and seniors are going to ride it; surely they ought to contribute to its construction?

Gah. Idiot.