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Building Eyesores Creates Jobs, Especially When You Tear Them Down

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Honolulu has the best bus system in America, taking a higher percentage of commuters to work and carrying more daily riders per capita than any other bus system. But just having the best bus system isn’t good enough for some people, who just have to have a rail line to have “real transit.” So the city is about to break ground on a 20-mile-long elevated rail line that is expected to cost $5.27 billion ($260 million per mile), and will probably end up costing more. The city has already spent $350 million just planning the rail line–enough to operate its bus system for nearly two years–without laying a single inch of track.

The project even has Bette Midler upset. She grew up in Honolulu but now lives in New York which, she notes, went to a great deal of trouble to remove many of its ugly elevated rail lines. “That this project is going to be so small, cost so much, and have such a terrible impact on the environment is dreadful,” she says. “The very idea that the state would sacrifice the most important amenity it has to offer the world, the beauty of its environment, is beyond belief.” Not beyond belief: some people want rail transit no matter what the cost.

The latest news is that former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano is running for mayor for the specific purpose of killing the rail line. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser “objectively” reports that, if Cayetano wins, “money and jobs may disappear.” Yes, money will “disappear” back into taxpayers’ pockets, who will foolishly spend that money on things that will create jobs that are a lot more useful than building an elevated rail line that will only have to be torn down in a few years.
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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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Honolulu’s Rail Plan

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Yesterday, in response to the Antiplanner’s post about crony capitalism, Scrappy commented that Honolulu needs rail transit to “reduce our carbon footprint, save energy and get us off the maddening addiction to cars.” He added that, “the environmental community in Honolulu is strongly behind rail.”

I appreciate Scrappy’s comment and don’t want to discourage him from participating in this forum, but I find it sad that my former colleagues in the environmental movement have become so innumerate that they would support a turkey like the Honolulu elevated rail plan. The final environmental impact statement for that project is now available. Let’s see what it says about saving energy, carbon, and driving.

Start with energy. Table 4-21 of the FEIS says the project will save 396 million British thermal units (BTUs) of energy each day, or 144,540 million BTUs per year. Sounds great, except that page 4-206 says project construction will cost 7.48 trillion BTUs. That means it will take 52 years of savings to pay back the energy cost. Long before 52 years are up, huge energy investments will be needed to replace rail cars, worn out track, and other infrastructure. So there is likely no net energy savings.

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