Honolulu officials worried that their new train would be “overwhelmed” with riders when it opened at 2 pm on June 30. They needn’t have worried; a local news station reported that “scores of people” lined up to ride the trains, which were free the first five days of operation.
Most trains are running nearly empty. Photo by Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.
In fact, about 9,000 people rode the train the first afternoon. Considering that each train can hold 800 passengers and they ran six times an hour until 6:30 pm, they were operating at about 40 percent of their capacity on opening day.
Over the next four days, another 62,000 people rode the trains, less than 25 percent of their capacity. When the agency began to charge fares, daily ridership fell to under 1,300 per day, or about 2 percent of the rail line’s capacity.
Taxpayers spent $9.9 billion, or $900 million per mile, for this 11-mile line to nowhere. The original plan was to build 20 miles from suburban Ewa to downtown Honolulu, but when costs more than doubled, the line from Ewa was terminated at Aloha Stadium. City officials hope to finish another 5 miles by 2025, and the rest by 2031, but don’t know where all of the money will come from to do so.
Update: A reader points out that the city claims that the $9.9 billion is the total estimated project cost and that it has only spent $5.3 billion to date. If true, then $9.9 billion for the eventual 20 miles would average nearly $500 million per mile, not $900 million. That’s still a lot of money.
This is a far cry from the original plans for an elevated rail line in Honolulu. When first proposed in 1963, proponents promised it would be “easy to build” and that it would fully “pay for itself out of fares.”
By 2005, cost estimates had risen to $2.9 billion, but officials projected that the line would attract more than 120,000 riders per day and some even thought that 200,000 would be likely. Officials today are not so confident, as the line’s capacity is strictly limited to 65,600 per day, not that this many will ever try to ride it.
When the city made the final decision to build it in 2012, costs had risen to $5.1 billion. Since then, costs rose until some reports indicate that the entire line is now expected to cost at least $12.45 billion, though it will probably be a lot more by the time it is done.
Construction was plagued by wheels too narrow for the tracks, cracked pillars, safety issues (that were solved by firing the whistleblower), and other problems. The latest is that one of the contractors that built the line is suing the city for $99 million, claiming that it failed to disclose problems with relocating utilities. This would bring the total cost to an even $10 billion.
Despite the high cost and complete separation from other traffic, the train averages just 30 miles per hour. That might be faster than driving at rush hour for anyone who happens to want to go from the location of one station to the location of another. But those who take transit beyond the rail line will need to take a bus, and as one news station found, that can turn a 35-minute trip into one that takes a full hour. Because of this, the train is not likely to attract anywhere near its full capacity of 65,000 riders per day, much less the even higher numbers once projected for it.
So far, the Antiplanner’s proposal to call this rail system the Poopy Line has not yet caught on. Instead of Skyline, the city’s name for it, one local activist calls it the Skylying. Since the Antiplanner sometimes refers to light rail as “lie rail,” Skylying is a perfect name.
Disneyland monorail cost million dollars per mile in 1959 or 10.5 million today. Las Vegas Monorail cost 650 million for 5 miles or 130 million per mile.
HART cost billion per mile…….
Vegas monorail was finished in 7 months….. right tech to scoot around Honolulu.. but cheaper.
More point poopy line went from 25% full for free to 2% when fares emerged. Meaning costs daily operation 98% by operating expenses from external payer. Ie Government. State of Hawaii lacks fiscal resources to keep such a leviathan running for long. Scrapping “The Bus” service seems inevitable option.
Years ago I wrote Private transit use a Netflix style add on system. Buy mini buses and sign up riders. Weekly or monthly fee it don’t matter how many times you ride it as it runs circuits. And custom ride bus that caters to destination demands.
TheBus is the highest-used transit service per capita in the nation. No one’s going to be scrapping it, lmao. But we should move toward a fare-free model, yes!
Hawaii has a train to nowhere. Lovely.
It connects to many, many TheBus lines, including BRT. Think multimodally!
Monorail probably would have been a boondoggle. But at 130 million a mile the same 9.9 BILLION could built 76 miles monorail. Connecting Honolulu, Hilo, pearl city, pearl harbor, Hickam, shoefield Army base. And connect to malls, major retail centers central business districts, and its major beaches and tourist attractions. That’s 100 thousand people a day.
$130 million a mile for monorail is as much a fantasy today as Honolulu’s monorail plan was in 1963.
According to hart’s 6/3/2022 “recovery” plan:
“ ES-3. Estimated Project Costs
The current EAC for the full scope of the Project to the Ala Moana Transit Center is $10.459 billion, plus estimated Project financing costs of $850 million ($11.309 billion total). With the truncated FFGA scope, as described above, the EAC will decrease to $9.148 billion, plus estimated financing costs of $785 million, resulting in a total estimated Project cost of $9.93 billion.”
The truncated scope is 1.2 miles shorter at 18.9 miles total, has two fewer stations, and has an estimated completion date of 2031, but that is at P65. Completing the final 1.2 miles to reach Ala Moana center, as contractually obligated in the original full funding grant agreement with the FTA, will cost $1.37 billion. No time frame is given.
Cost per mile for the truncated 18.9 mile route is approximately $525 million per mile. The original 20.1 mile route, if completed for $11.3 billion, would be approximately $563 million per mile.
I took the photo you’re using. The train in the photo is not empty – it’s just that no one happens to be standing in that front cab. It was taken before public operations started, so of course it’s not packed with people.
Please correct the article – “empty train” is an inaccurate caption, and a lie. Even better, I’d prefer if you removed the photo and stopped using it in this NIMBY crap. Thanks.
eeeli,
I changed the photo and caption at your request. However, I don’t see how legitimate complaints about the high costs and low ridership of this rail line qualify as “NIMBY crap.” Honolulu is not my backyard but my job is to find and criticize government stupidity and this is one of the grossest examples of such stupidity in the nation.
You put your photo on Wikipedia with a creative commons license. If you don’t want your photos used by people who disagree with you, you probably shouldn’t release them with a creative commons license.