EDITOR’S NOTE: The Honolulu Star-Advertiser is featuring each of the nine Skyline rail stations and surrounding communities stretching 11 miles from East Kapolei to Aloha Stadium. The series started Sunday and continues through Thursday. Passengers will begin riding Skyline on Friday.

———

If produce such as eggplant, green onions, corn and taro leaf could ride mass transportation, the city’s Honouliuli rail station would have a nearby critical mass of potential riders.

But crops don’t commute on trains, so it could be years for this station to draw high use.

The Honouliuli station, between the University of Hawaii West Oahu and the western edge of Waipahu, is envisioned to one day be surrounded by high- density housing and commercial buildings within a 10-minute, half-mile walk as the main station for the Ho‘opili community master-planned for 11,750 homes mixed with businesses.

However, most development adjacent to the station, which could rise up to a dozen stories or so, is a ways off because building Ho‘opili on verdant agricultural fields began at the southern and western ends where infrastructure arteries already existed and also tie into the first two of nine Skyline stations being readied for inaugural rail service scheduled to start Friday.

In the interim, the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation persuaded Ho‘opili’s developer, D.R. Horton, to build a 344-stall park-and-ride lot next to the Honouliuli station otherwise still surrounded by farmland to make some initial use of the station.

The lot is at the end of Kamalie Mua Street on an expanding eastern front of Ho‘opili. HART has said an additional 400 stalls could be added to the site “if ridership warrants.”

Eventually, a dozen blocks surrounding the station are to become Ho‘opili’s town center with a high-density mix of businesses and residences.

“The Honouliuli rail transit station will service a brand new town with an integrated mix of uses for residences and employment,” states a city transit-oriented development plan.

D.R. Horton began planning Ho‘opili more than a decade ago on 1,554 acres of prime agricultural land where Aloun Farms began growing crops after the demise of the Oahu Sugar Co. plantation in 1995.

In addition to 11,750 homes and numerous businesses, Ho‘opili is slated for five public schools, including an elementary school two blocks from the Honouliuli station and a high school for 3,200 students four blocks away.

The Texas-based development firm delivered its first Ho‘opili home in 2017 and to date has built about 2,500 homes, or roughly 400 per year on average.

Meanwhile, Aloun continues to farm portions of the Ho‘opili site until D.R. Horton is ready to start subsequent phases of development.

Jon Nouchi, deputy director of the city Department of Transportation Services, said it may be hard for many Skyline riders and the general public to imagine a dense town center surrounding Honouliuli station in the not-too-distant future. However, he said, the groundwork has been laid with the grid for future Ho‘opili streets spaced to accommodate rail’s existing guideway support columns.

“It is literally a community designed around the premise of rail,” Nouchi said.

Currently, the closest Ho‘opili homes to the Honouliuli station are about two blocks away.

Brandon Moncrief moved into one of these homes, a unit in the five-story Nahele condominium complex, earlier this month and plans to make regular use of rail as a way to get to work and visit his wife’s family in Waipahu.

“It’ll be easy for Grandma to come and visit us, and it’ll be easy for the grandkids to visit Grandma,” he said.

Moncrief also plans to buy an electric bike he can take on the train to the last of the initial nine stations at Halawa and then use it to cover about 2.5 miles to his job at Camp Smith in a traffic- free commute.

Many Ho‘opili residents seeking to ride rail’s interim service segment might find it more convenient to use the UH West Oahu station called Keone‘ae, which is closer to most existing homes and also has a park-and-ride lot with 300 stalls along with a multibay hub for city buses.

There will be no service by TheBus at the Honouliuli station as part of the initial rail segment operation, though city bus service is expanding within Ho‘opili as the community grows.

A HART representative said the park-and-ride lot at the Honouliuli station was desired in part to serve riders until work on a 1,000-stall park-and-ride lot on state Department of Land and Natural Resources land can be built next to a future second entrance of the Keone‘ae station between the western end of Ho‘opili and UH West Oahu. This planned facility with a bus depot will replace the parking lot and bus hub on UH property, which is slated for future campus use.

Tracy Tonaki, D.R. Horton’s Hawaii division president, congratulated the city on its impending opening of the initial rail segment.

“We are extremely excited for Oahu, the families who live in Ho‘opili today and the many more families who will call it home in the future,” she said in a statement.

If the rail line to Kakaako is completed as expected in 2031, there could be another 3,200 or so homes in Ho‘opili by that time.

The rail authority has not projected station use for its initial phase of service. According to a 2021 estimate for ridership in 2030, when HART previously assumed the full line would be done, the Honouliuli station was projected to have 3,110 passenger boardings a day, or 14th-most among 19 stations.

HART also estimated in 2020 that 80% of riders using the Honouliuli station in 2030 will get to or from the station by walking.

Full completion of Ho‘opili isn’t likely before 2035, or four years after the full rail line is now expected to be running.

RELATED

• Skyline: Honolulu rail rolls out after years of delays, cost overruns

• Skyline: Honolulu’s new rail line begins in East Kapolei

• Skyline: Interactive timeline of Honolulu’s rail system

• Skyline: How to ride Honolulu’s rail system for the first time

• Skyline: 2nd station is sandwiched by UH campus, Ho‘opili growth

• Skyline: Rail station surrounded by farming is years away from major use

• PHOTOS: Take a look back at Honolulu’s rail construction

• PHOTOS: Honolulu Skyline’s first 9 rail stations ready to roll

• Click here to view previous rail coverage.

Honouliuli (Dark bay). Honouliuli is the largest ahupuaa on the most southwest tip of the island of Oahu. In one tradition, Honouliuli is believed to be named after a chief of the same name, who was the husband of Kapalama. They were the parents of Lepeamoa and Kauilani, two heroes in ancient tradition.