With rail facing a more than $1 billion budget hole, Honolulu’s top elected leaders now aim to stop construction four miles and eight stations short of what was planned, leaving crews to build the most challenging, expensive and critical stretch at some future date, if possible.
“I wish we could go all the way to Ala Moana now. That’s for another day,” Mayor Kirk Caldwell told rail board members during their meeting Thursday, officially abandoning hope of finishing the entire rail project with its current funding, and instead urging the board to recommend a shorter rail line for now.
“I think we need to focus for now on how we get to Middle Street,” Caldwell said.
Critics of that plan say it undermines the point of building the rail in the first place: to offer West and Central Oahu commuters a more convenient way to get to town. It would significantly reduce ridership from the city’s longtime estimate of 119,000 daily rail trips and place a bigger burden on taxpayers to subsidize the line in place of lost fare revenues, they say.
Eliminating the eight stations past Middle Street could reduce rail’s ridership by at least 51,000 daily boardings, according to Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation estimates. The move might solve some of the rail’s immediate money problems, but it could also leave city officials with more difficult long-term challenges as they try to pay for its operations, one key state lawmaker said.
Nonetheless, faced with new cost estimates that put Ala Moana Center well out of reach — and an Aug. 7 deadline from rail’s federal partners to come up with a realistic plan that’s on budget — Caldwell and City Council Chairman Ernie Martin this week endorsed stopping at Middle Street for now.
“It is clear that the benefits of such a plan outweigh the drawbacks,” Martin wrote in a letter Tuesday to Federal Transit Administration Regional Administrator Leslie Rogers. “It does not preclude us from eventually completing the full 20 miles and 21 stations” when the city has the financial means to finish it.
HART officials have estimated it would cost about $6.22 billion to complete the first 16 miles and 13 stations to Middle Street. Rail can expect to receive construction revenues of approximately $6.8 billion, based on the latest estimates. However, it’s now expected to cost more than $8 billion to build the full 20 miles.
“It’s not a perfect-world situation,” HART board Chairwoman Colleen Hanabusa said at the Thursday meeting. “But … we don’t have the money.” The board could schedule a special meeting as early as next week to make a recommendation to the City Council on the Middle Street idea, she said. The Council would then have to discuss what rail policy it wants to pursue during its own meeting, she added.
Even if the city opts by Aug. 7 to pursue the Middle Street plan, there’s no guarantee that the FTA will approve the idea and agree to provide the project’s full $1.55 billion in federal funding. HART officials say FTA leaders have told them the system needs to be “functional” but that there aren’t specific guidelines for what that means.
Earlier this week Caldwell had still been pushing to get the full 20-mile line built.
“I believe we should work to the goal of building the full 20 miles, 21 stations. But we shouldn’t cap. We shouldn’t cut and run,” Caldwell said during an interview on Hawaii News Now’s “Sunrise” morning show several days ago. “This project is just too darn important. It’s something we’ve been fighting for 40 years here.”
The news that both Caldwell and Martin agreed work should stop at Middle Street surprised some members of the City Council’s Transportation Committee, which also met Thursday. Kymberly Pine, who represents the Leeward Coast, was deeply frustrated.
“That’s pretty stupid,” Pine told HART staff after they briefed her. “As someone who’s stuck in traffic the longest … I can tell you, you need to look at the ridership numbers on all these plans.” HART officials say they’ve just begun to analyze how stopping at Middle Street would affect ridership and other factors.
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A month ago, even with an $8.1 billion price tag on rail, Mayor
Caldwell vowed to build rail to Ala Moana. Why did he flip flop and now
agrees with Charles Djou to stop rail at Middle Street? Because his and
other polls reveal he is trailing Charles Djou badly, said Ben Cayetano,
the former governor and unsuccessful candidate for mayor in 2012.
-- Richard Borreca, June 19, 2016
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Caldwell hedged his position on Friday, asserting that continuity of the project would not necessarily be broken. The mayor pledges to secure other funding to complete the full alignment as designed, proposing to seek it from federal, state and private sources. But there’s no indication that this money will materialize in time to keep construction on track, or ever.
The only thing that is clear is that, as described, the project will end at a point where it’s projected to lose about half its ridership. Commuters won’t flock to ride the rail if, at Middle Street, they’ll have to disembark and wait for a bus to their urban-core destination.
That result wouldn’t justify the investment Honolulu’s taxpayers already have made.
Then, once the forward drive to complete the project is allowed to stall out, inertia would settle in. When the project is finally completed — if it ever restarts — the full pricetag would be higher than it would be if the city stuck to the current plan. That much is certain.
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A million years from now
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