The city and state officials who promoted construction of Honolulu’s rail transit line now admit that they don’t know how they are going to pay for the cost of operating that line. Between 2019, when the first part of the line is expected to open for business, and 2031, those costs are expected to be $1.7 billion, or about $140 million per year. In 2011, the annual operating cost was estimated to be $126 million a year.
Honolulu has about a hundred bus routes, which cost about $183 million to operate in 2013, or less than $2 million per route. The rail line will therefore cost about 70 times as much to operate as the average bus route.
Officials project that rail fares will cover less than a third of operating costs, but that’s probably optimistic. They are predicting 116,000 daily riders in 2030, which works out to about 5,800 riders per mile. That’s more than the number of riders per mile carried by the Chicago Transit Authority, Atlanta’s MARTA, or the San Francisco BART system–and considerably more than carried by heavy-rail lines in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Miami.
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New York, Philadelphia, and Washington lines carry more than 5,800 per mile, but they have an advantage over Honolulu: they can run trains of eight or more cars, while Honolulu’s high-cost, low-capacity system will only be able to run four-car trains. That means Honolulu will have to pack twice as many people in per car as most other rail systems in order to meet its projections–and, to make matters worse, each of the cars will be smaller than a typical New York or other subway car.
The system that most closely resembles Honolulu’s line is the Tren Urbano in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which, like the Honolulu line, uses four-car trains. Tren Urbano ridership was less than 30 percent of predictions and it carried less than 3,000 riders per mile in 2013. If Honolulu’s line experiences a similar shortfall, taxpayers will have to cover a much greater share of operating costs.
When the city asked voters to approve a tax increase to pay for construction of the rail line, it never mentioned that another increase would be needed to pay for operations. Honolulu has one of the best-used bus systems in the country, and the Antiplanner expressed fears years ago that the high costs of the rail line would lead to cannibalization of that bus system. The best thing Honolulu can do is stop spending money on a ridiculous rail project and go back to running an excellent bus system.
http://www.honolulutransit.org/media/323519/20150303-correspondence-to-legislators-machida.pdf
If interested this seems to be the source of the $1.7 billion figure. Are the new operating costs are mostly a contingency line item?
Compare the linked
http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/pubs/profiles/2013/agency_profiles/9002.pdf
with
http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/pubs/profiles/2003/agency_profiles/9002.pdf
Over the last decade operating costs per bus revenue vehicle hour have increased 57%. Comparing 2013 bus costs with projected rail costs a decade out is disingenuous.
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The city and state officials who promoted construction of Honolulu’s rail transit line now admit that they don’t know how they are going to pay for the cost of operating that line.
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I haven’t followed it too closely but isn’t this a similar problem to Cincinnati’s new tram?
Since federal funds have been and will be used for these projects, that admission should be made in a federal court before a federal prosecutor.
If the rest of us obtained federal funds based on false representations, we would be in serious trouble. These guys merely say they got it wrong and then charge taxpayers more money? They don’t lose their jobs, no cuts n pay, no losses of any kind. probably get promoted or hired by another city/state to do the same thing.
Cannibalization of the bus system. Indeed
In the 1980s Denver built two underground bus stations, one on each end of downtown. These stations served the express routes to the outer suburbs, Boulder and Longmont. The first leg of the light rail system opened around 1995 and buses from the southeastern suburbs then ran to the southern terminal of the rail line. So, instead of having a single bus ride to a warm underground station downtown, they now had to get off the bus at an outdoor rail station, wait for a train, then get off the train downtown again at an outdoor station. People were so unhappy about this change they did restore some of the express routes downtown.
About 10 years ago Denver began its massive rail build out approved by voters, Fastracks. I used to take only one bus to get downtown. Now I have to take two buses or one bus plus a two block walk to a rail station for a train that doesn’t take me where I want to go. The bus system in Denver is currently being cannibalized.
Did you know that light rail has half the calories of regular rail?
The AntiPlanner should do some research and writings about “direct democracy” that authorizes these boondoggles. There is good and bad in “direct democracy”, and transportation projects probably are the largest and best example of both.