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Cost Overrun; Revenue Shortfall

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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To almost no one’s surprise, the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) has announced that the rail project it is building will cost at least 10 to 15 percent more than estimated, while the revenues from the general excise tax that is supposed to pay for the project are, so far, $41 million less than expected.

A 10 to 15 percent cost overrun isn’t large as rail projects go, but this is an expensive, $5.2-billion project to start with, so 10 to 15 percent is $500 million to $780 million. HART officials blame the cost increase partly on the lawsuits that, unfortunately, failed to stop this waste of money, but even they say that the delays only increased costs by $190 million. Since the project isn’t even supposed to be completed until 2019, there is plenty of time for overruns to mount up to be far greater than projected today.

Rather than make the sensible move and simply cancel the project, the city is debating how to pay for the overruns. One idea is to divert to rail $200 million in federal money that is now being spent on Honolulu buses. Another idea is to extend the excise tax, which was supposed to expire in 2022, for a much longer period of time. Either way, they would take money that would have been spent on something productive and devote it to a complete boondoggle.

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Courts Approve High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Ninth Circuit Court dismissed objections to the plan for Honolulu’s 20-mile, $5 billion rail line. Though proponents call it a high-capacity rail line, in fact it uses trains whose capacity is actually lower than light-rail–which term really means “low-capacity rail.”

A line with three-car light-rail trains can move about 9,000 people per hour. The maker of the Alstom trains Honolulu wants to run claims they can move 15,000 people per hour, but that’s at crush-capacity. At crowding levels that Americans will accept, the capacity is probably less than 7,000 people per hour.

By comparison, the Antiplanner estimates double-decker buses can move 17,000 people per hour on a city street and more than 100,000 people per hour on a freeway lane. Buses are faster too: Alstom trains in other cities average just 20 mph.
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Courts May Have Last Word on Trains

By | | Transportation
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A county judge says the California high-speed rail project violates the law approved by voters in 2008. But he won’t decide to issue an order halting the project until after another hearing, for which a date hasn’t yet been set.


The Reason Foundation’s Adrian Moore and Antiplanner friend Wendell Cox discuss California high-speed rail.

The Contra Costa Times lists many of the ways the project as planned today violates the 2008 ballot measure: the construction cost has doubled; the projected ticket prices have gone up; the speeds are slower; and the projected opening date is already nine years behind schedule. But the judge only rules that the project had failed to complete its environmental review and find funds to finance the entire project, not just a few miles in the Central Valley.

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Importing Boston’s Failures to Honolulu

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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One of the intriguing things about rail transit is how much more the CEOs of rail transit agencies get paid than those of bus-only agencies. Yet that high pay comes with a high risk of failure and disgrace, as it is much more difficult to build and run rail lines than to simply manage bus service.

Case in point: Dan Grabauskas, CEO of Honolulu’s “rapid transit authority” and the highest-paid city official in Honolulu. What did Grabauskas do to merit this position?

It turns out that his main qualification is having helped run the Boston rail system into its present deteriorated condition. In 2009, Grabauskas resigned from that position in disgrace. Some claim he was forced out by a Democratic governor for the sin of being appointed by the previous Republican governor, yet there is no doubt that Boston’s rail lines were in terrible shape, with frequent delays, at least two recent crashes (including one blamed on rusty signal wires that killed a train operator), and miserable customer service.

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Big Loss for Honolulu Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Opponents of the $5 billion Honolulu rail project prevailed in their lawsuit charging that the city failed to consider a full range of alternatives before deciding to build rail. A federal judge ruled last week that the city was “arbitrary and capricious” in selecting rail and violated the National Environmental Policy Act in failing to present more alternatives in the environmental impact statement.

Construction on the rail line had already been stalled by a previous lawsuit that found that the rail project failed to comply with state historic preservation and burial protection laws when it failed to complete an archeological inventory survey for the 20-mile route before starting construction. Instead, it had planned to do the inventory just ahead of each step of construction.

Basically, the city let construction contracts and began construction prematurely because it wanted to commit funds before voters had an opportunity to stop the project. Voters will get their chance tomorrow, when former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano, who opposes the rail project and was one of the plaintiffs in the recent lawsuit, is on the ballot for mayor of the city.

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Private Buses or Public Boondoggles

By | | Transportation
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A team of graphics artists has attempted to map the private buses that carry workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, reports the Wall Street Journal. At least six employers–Apple, ebay, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo–offer such services, but they are very secretive about where they go and how many people they carry.

Click image for a larger view.

The artists who developed the map estimate that these private buses carry about a third as many people as CalTrains commuter trains between San Francisco and San Jose. CalTrains cost taxpayers more than $110 million a year, but Silicon Valley firms obviously don’t believe they adequately serve their employees, probably because the rails don’t go near their campuses. Google alone has more than 100 buses in its fleet, about as many as serve the entire fixed-route system in the city of Stockton.

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Oahu Rail Construction Halted

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The City of Honolulu was so anxious to start construction of its $5 billion rail line before voters could elect an anti-rail mayor that it began without completing the legally required archeological surveys. Only about a quarter of the surveys have been done, and the rest won’t be completed before the end of the year. As a result, the state Supreme Court has put a stop to construction until those surveys are done.

The city argues that delaying construction will simply make the rail line even more expensive. But that’s what happens when you fail to comply with a law that, no doubt, rail advocates would have eagerly used to delay any new highway construction.
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As University of Hawaii engineer Panos Prevedouros notes, costs have already nearly doubled from estimates made in 2002. Mayoral candidate Ben Cayetano, who won a plurality but not quite a majority in the recent primary, argues that improving the bus system would do more to provide mobility at a far lower cost.

FTA Questioned Honolulu Rail Boondoggle

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Internal emails reveal that Federal Transit Administration officials were skeptical of Honolulu’s plan to spend $5.3 billion on a 20-mile rail transit line. City voters approved this line only after an expensive and hard-fought campaign. One FTA email accused the city of Honolulu of “lousy practices of public manipulation” and argued that the FTA should not only avoid being associated with it, it should “call them on it.”

This and other documents were turned over to plaintiffs in a lawsuit arguing that the city’s environmental impact statement (EIS) failed to consider a full range of alternatives. In a 2006 comment on the city’s plans to write the EIS, FTA staffer James Ryan noted, “We seem to be proceeding in the hallowed tradition of Honolulu rapid transit studies: never enough time to do it right, but lots of time to do it over.” Another FTA official, Joseph Ossi, replied, “This isn’t an FTA issue. Let the city deal with it. They have produced 3 failed projects and are well on their way to a fourth, so why is FTA wasting time on the City’s problems?”

“This is different,” a third FTA staffer, Raymond Sukys, answered. “This time [thanks to a tax increase] they have a huge cash flow which will build something. It seems likely that we will get involved in litigation again especially since we have an erroneous NOI out there. I do not think the FTA should be associated with their lousy practices of public manipulation and we should call them on it.” The “NOI” is the “notice of intent” to prepare an environmental impact statement, and Sukys apparently thought Honolulu’s NOI was insufficient because it failed to identify a full range of alternatives.

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Designed to Fail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Are American cities competing to see which can come up with the most ridiculous transit proposals? If so, Honolulu will probably win, hands down. The nation’s 52nd-largest urban area has only about 950,000 people, yet it is spending $5.3 billion, or more than $5,500 per resident, to build a single 20-mile rail line. That’s probably a greater cost per person than any rail system ever built–and it is just for one line, not a complete system.

The line will be entirely elevated, yet they plan to run just two-car trains, each “train” being about the length of a typical light-rail car (just under 100 feet). This means it will have the high costs of heavy rail and the capacity limits of light rail.

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One More Chance

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Construction on Honolulu’s ill-conceived rail line–at least $5.7 billion, and more likely at least $7 billion, for a 20-mile elevated line–is supposed to start next month. Polls indicate that voters who once supported the project have turned against it. Fortunately, Hawai’ians have one more chance to stop this idiotic project before too much money is wasted.

Artist’s conception of Honolulu’s planned elevated rail line.

The incumbent pro-rail mayor, Peter Carlisle, who filled the seat in a special election when the previous pro-rail mayor made an ill-fated run for governor, is up for reelection this year. A surprise entry into the race is Ben Cayetano, Hawai’i’s governor from 1994 to 2002, who decided to run solely to stop the rail project.

“Adding $5 to $7 billion in debt for an elevated, heavy rail system that will not reduce traffic congestion and will suck the air out of the city’s ability to provide more important basic services does not make sense,” says Cayetano in a comment posted on an interview where Senator Daniel Inouye endorses Carlisle. The only other major candidate in the race is also pro-rail.

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