Search Results for: honolulu rail

Rail Troubles

By | | Transportation
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The latest news from Hawai’i is that the Honululu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) lied to the city council when it told them the city’s rail project was $500 million to $700 million over budget. It turns out it’s really $910 million over budget. HART was just hoping to cover up $210 million of the deficit by quietly transferring bus money to the rail project.

Meanwhile, as fiscal conservative Larry Hogan is sworn in as governor of Maryland, rail advocates are doing a full–court press about how the state really needs to build the Purple Line, a light-rail line from the mighty city of New Carrollton (population: 12,000) to the city census-defined place of Bethesda (population: 63,000), passing through the census-defined place of Silver Spring (population: 77,000) on the way. The trains are expected to trundle between these suburbs at the breath-taking speed of not-quite 15.5 miles per hour, somehow attracting 69,000 daily riders along the way.

As shown earlier this week, the Maryland Department of Transportation has solid track record of overestimating light- and heavy-rail ridership by at least 100 percent. If it is built, the Purple Line is likely to be no exception. New Jersey’s Hudson-Bergen line, which serves neighborhoods whose population densities are four times greater than those along the Purple Line and regional centers with far more jobs than suburban DC, carried just 44,000 riders per weekday in 2012. The Purple Line is not likely to be less than that.

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Killing High-Speed Rail Even Deader

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Even as the prospects of stopping Honolulu’s $5 billion low-capacity rail project grow dim, the prospects for ever building the California high-speed rail system grow even dimmer. This week, California’s Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom–once a strong rail supporter–has come out against the project. As theSan Diego Union-Tribune says, this is “another nail in the coffin of high-speed rail.”


At the 2010 groundbreaking ceremony for what was supposed to be San Francisco’s high-speed rail station, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (left) tells then-Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood that he is “extraordinarily excited” about the future of the train. Flickr photo from Mayor Gavin Newson‘s photostream.

Asked about his former support for the project, he said it was “a $32 billion project then, and we were going to get roughly one-third [each] from the federal government and the private sector.” Now, “We’re not even close to the timeline, we’re not close to the total cost estimates, and the private sector money and the federal dollars are questionable.”

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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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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.

Rail Propaganda Is Not a Civil Right

By | | News commentary
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Honolulu’s transit agency signed millions of dollars worth of contracts to Parsons Brinckerhoff and other consultants to spread propaganda in favor of its $5 billion rail project, which is a major issue in tomorrow’s Saturday’s mayoral election. When a member of Honolulu’s city council proposed to require the transit agency to terminate these contracts and limit its public relations programs to just one staff member (instead of the current ten), the agency responded saying that it was required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to issue the propaganda.

This and other federal laws, says the transit agency, “require recipients of federal transit funding to engage in an active, inclusive, and extensive public participation and involvement process in the planning, implementation, operation, and improvement of public transit projects.” This would be believable if the agency ever actually listened to any member of the public who is not enthusiastically in favor of its vision of an ugly elevated rail line through Honolulu. While the agency has jumped through the hoops of seeking comments on environmental impact statements and other documents, it has totally ignored any the substance of those comments (such as a request that the agency compare rail with a wide range of alternatives).
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Propaganda is not public involvement, and transit agencies that conduct advertising or other campaigns to gain support for their projects (as opposed to simply getting new riders) are deceiving the public and wasting their money.

More Tales of Rail Failure

By | | Transportation
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The ink is barely dry on California legislation to start building high-speed rail, and now they reveal a $2.5 billion hidden cost that wasn’t included in previous estimates, that being the cost of tunneling the final mile into San Francisco. It shouldn’t really matter, as they don’t have the money to build the last 130 to 150 miles of rail from the Central Valley to San Francisco anyway.

On top of that, California residents are discovering that their high-speed rail authority has been keeping controversial aspects of the planned route as secret as possible, at least until it is too late for people to do anything about it. For example, the plan calls for running the track 75 feet above the city of Alhambra, which is likely to be a major eyesore.

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Honolulu Showdown

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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The Antiplanner is at a conference this week so postings will be light. In the meantime, readers might want to discuss this editorial against the Honolulu rail project, which it says “would change the landscape in ways many are unwilling to accept.” Only subscribers can read more than the first couple of paragraphs, but Honolulu is one of the best examples of how our transit system is broken.

Honolulu has about the highest rate of per capita transit ridership after New York City and one of the highest rates of transit commuting in the country, so you wouldn’t think a big project like this would be needed to “fix” Honolulu’s transit. It is purely a matter of elected officials chasing after “free” federal money to distribute to contractors who will make appropriate campaign contributions. (Significantly, the mayor who rammed the project through Honolulu’s city council then ran for governor but lost in the primary.)

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More Overbudget Rail Projects

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The planned Honolulu rail line is likely to go at least 30 percent over its projected costs, and ridership is likely to be 30 percent less than forecast, according to a new report commissioned and released by Hawaii’s governor. The report cost $350,000, which means it commands more respect than if one of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies had written it for free. (Actually, one of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies, Tom Rubin, did help write the report–but not for free.)

The report says the rail line, which the city projected would cost $5.5 billion, is likely to cost at least $1.7 billion more. While local voters approved a sales tax increase to pay for the line, the report projects that tax will be insufficient to pay for the rail line. Over the next 30 years, “The total capital and operating subsidy paid by local taxpayers” on top of the sales tax “is estimate to range from $9.3 billion . . . to $14.5 billion.”

“Transit system usage and fare revenue are likely to be substantially lower than is project,” adds the report, “since the Plan’s projection would require an unprecedented and unrealistic growth in transit utilization for a city that already has one of the highest transit utilization rates in the country.” Update:The full report is downloadable from a state web site. Continue reading →

Surprise: Another Light-Rail Line Is Over Its Budget

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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“Norfolk leaders want an audit to figure out why its light rail project has gone $108 million over budget,” reports the Associated Press. The city doesn’t need to spend money on an audit. The reason for the overrun is obvious: It’s a rail-transit construction project.

As if that isn’t enough, the line was planned by Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB), the company that planned most of the rail transit lines that have gone over budget in the past 50 years. PB also planned and helped build the Big Dig, another urban-planning project that went way over budget.

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A Rail Vision for America’s Future

By | | Transportation
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Suppose Barack Obama is elected president and appoints someone like Portland Congressman Earl Blumenauer as Secretary of Transportation. Suppose further that California votes for high-speed rail. Then, even if some of the rail transit measures on the ballots in Kansas City, San Jose, Seattle, and Sonoma-Marin counties (have I missed any?) don’t pass, it is pretty clear there will be a strong push to build far more passenger rail in America.

How much rail is enough? How much will it cost? What good will it do? Let’s try to envision a rail future for America.

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