The Honolulu Authority for High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit (HART) has signed a contract with Tutor Perini to spend $1.66 billion to build 3 miles of elevated rail line. The company will also build six stations on that rail line. This is the biggest contract for the Honolulu rail project let to date, but as expensive as it is, this doesn’t include all of the costs of planning, engineering, and design of the line.
As recently as a year ago, this segment of the project was expected to cost around $1.1 billion, and at least some people believed that the transit agency would have to reject all bids if they came in much higher than that as it simply doesn’t have the funds to complete the project. A previous bid of $2.0 billion by the same company was rejected in 2020, but HART apparently decided it could afford $340 million less than that amount even though it was about $400 million more than expected. Continue reading
