$553 Million a Mile for Elevated Rail

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.

This isn’t even the last segment of the project, which was supposed to go to the Ala Moana Shopping Center, on the edge of Waikiki. To get there, HART will need to build about two more miles of rail line, which is sure to cost at least another billion dollars that HART doesn’t have. That segment may never get built because HART doesn’t have the money, which means one of the most important ridership generators will be left out of the project.

When originally proposed, advocates projected the cost would be around a billion dollars and even claimed that fares would end up covering the construction costs as well as operating costs. In 2003, the cost was projected to be $2.3 billion. In 2006, cost projections reached $3.6 billion and then escalated to $5.1 billion in 2012 when the city applied for federal support.

At that time, the federal government agreed to contribute $1.55 billion. Now the total cost is likely to be north of $12.0 billion, and the state and local governments have to pay all of the cost overruns. This isn’t helped by the fact that HART is run by total incompetents who, among other things, hired expensive consultants to manage the project who then put in hundreds of change orders that added at least a half a billion dollars to the total cost.

The project is not only the most expensive elevated rail line ever built, it is the most expensive single transit project on a per capita basis. Honolulu isn’t even one of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas — in 2000, it was number 54 — so it has fewer than 900,000 residents to pay for the line. The next largest urban area to build a major rail transit project, Salt Lake City, was number 41 with 1.2 million residents, and it has spent $5.5 billion building 45 miles of light rail and 88 miles of commuter rail. As a single rail line, the Honolulu project is not only expensive per local resident, it will only serve a small share of those residents since most of them neither live nor work on the route.

Not too many years ago, $550 million a mile was considered expensive for a subway, while elevated lines were costing around $100 million a mile and seemed outrageous at that price. Even today, according to the Eno transit cost database, elevated lines in other countries cost less than $100 million per mile.

Many U.S. cities elected to save money by building surface-level light rail instead of elevateds or subways, but the disadvantage of light rail is its low capacity. Light rail is limited by the length of its trains, which can be no longer than a city block to make sure they don’t obstruct traffic every time they stop at an intersection. Because of this, most light-rail lines can only move about 9,000 people per hour in each direction, although a few in cities with long blocks, such as Salt Lake, can move 12,000 per hour. In contrast, most elevateds and subways can move 30,000 (Washington DC) to 41,000 (New York) people per hour.

But not Honolulu’s. Although Honolulu decided to spend more money to build an elevated, it made the platforms at each station so short that its capacity is really no greater than a light-rail line. That’s why I call it high-cost, low-capacity transit. The upshot is that Honolulu residents will be paying a lot of money for a long time for a total clunker of a transit line.