Rail officials continue to search for a solution for too-thin wheels on too-wide track but have yet to receive interest on a contract offer that had a Sept. 24 deadline for bids to fix the problem.
At the same time, officials with the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation have yet to receive an explanation of why at least one of the doors on its automated train cars was discovered open while moving during a test run in July, a violation of safety rules that forced daily testing of the entire fleet to shut down.
Months later, the fleet remains idled, and the trains are not undergoing testing.
In a series of text messages sent Monday, Lori Kahikina, HART’s interim CEO and executive director, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that while there is no update on the doors, “We are pushing HRH (Hitachi Rail Honolulu) for a final analysis and remedy.”
Hitachi Rail officials have repeatedly declined to respond to requests for comment from the Star- Advertiser about the door, wheel and track problems.
The bid solicitation to fix the wheel and track problems, issued July 12, called for locally based contracted welders to modify key X-shaped track intersections, called frogs, that are too wide for the rail cars’ wheels by half an inch. The gap forces the automated trains to slow down from 55 mph to 5 mph to navigate each frog and prevents them from leaving and arriving at each station on schedule every four to five minutes.
“At this point we’re focusing on replacing the wheels” rather than the tracks, Kahikina said in a text message. “The weld is to allow us to use either size wheel.” Moments later Kahikina said, “I just found out from our procurement folks today that even though we didn’t receive any bids the procurement is still open so I can’t discuss it.”
The plan is to run the trains along a 20.2-mile, 21-station route from East Kapolei to Ala Moana Center, Hawaii’s busiest transit hub. The project is currently budgeted at $12.499 billion and is not scheduled for completion until March 2031. The budget faces a current shortfall of about $3 billion, with no simple plan to plug the deficit and no offers of financial assistance.
Last week the HART board voted to ask the City Council to propose a bill that would implement a city visitor tax and then permanently commit a percentage of the new tax revenue stream to benefit construction of the rail project.
The HART proposal follows a measure passed in the Legislature this year that ended the sharing portion of the state’s hotel tax — or transit accommodations tax — with the state’s counties but allows counties to recoup the lost funds by implementing their own TAT of up to 3%. Previously, the state alone imposed the tax, set at 10.25%, and distributed a portion of proceeds — limited to $103 million annually — to the counties. Honolulu received 44%, or about $45 million.
According to the state’s calculations, if Oahu were to levy its own 3% TAT, it would generate about $48 million a year.
Bill 40, which broaches the idea of creating a “transient accommodations tax for the City and County of Honolulu” but does not mention HART or the city’s troubled rail project, is slated for first reading Wednesday before the Council.
Even though the rail project is just 4 miles shy of reaching its scheduled destination at Ala Moana Center, some political leaders and even a former HART board member have called for construction to end somewhere downtown.
Rail officials first learned about their problem with the mismatched wheels and frogs late last year while testing trains at 55 mph.
Each of 20 trains is expected to consist of four cars, each running on eight wheels, for a total of 32 wheels per train. Only seven trains would initially operate.
Each wheel weighs 290 pounds and measures 28 inches in diameter and 4-3/4 inches wide. Replacing the wheels with ones that are a half-inch wider would add approximately 314 pounds to each one, making each train about 800 pounds heavier.
One of the original ideas was to have new frogs manufactured out of state, imported and then installed — a process that could take well over a year.
Instead, HART’s bid solicitation asks for welding repairs to be conducted on-site by local welders that “will enable the lifting of the current vehicle speed restriction of 5 mph at the double crossovers due to the inadequate guarding operation across the switch caused by a wheel-frog incompatibility issue in the wheel of the Hitachi vehicle.”
The solicitation also suggested the possibility of future work for the local welding company that makes a successful bid, or a hui of local welding companies, once rail opens to the public.
“It is expected that as … revenue operations get under way, there will be an increasing on-island demand for specialized track welding services, and that this upcoming Request for Sealed Bids (RFB) will have served as entry opportunity for locally based companies with skilled welders,” according to the solicitation, which has yet to generate any takers.
On July 17, Kahikina was informed that a passenger door was discovered open on at least one of the seven automated trains while it was underway during testing, forcing testing to shut down.
Each of HART’s trains has 24 double sets of doors, and a train is not supposed to be able to run while a door is open. It’s unclear whether any of the doors were open before the train began moving or whether any may have opened while underway. Each train is designed with 188 seats, with a maximum capacity of 800 passengers.
An apparently similar malfunctioning-door incident was documented on video by a passenger on Washington, D.C.’s metro system in May 2019, according to media reports at the time. In that case the metro’s entire fleet of 274 cars was taken out of service and brought back online a day later after a malfunction with the trains’ master control system was identified and fixed.
