Rail is a catastrophe that will have wasted $10 billion on an expensive, inadequate system that is not going to relieve traffic congestion.
It is disappointing that our mayors, city councils, Legislature and governors have all been responsible for creating this project, ignoring public opinion and the true needs of our people.
American politics has lost the trust of the voters by ignoring popular sentiments, resulting in a very troubling federal administration. Our local government has also been neglecting real needs of the public by presenting the false narrative about how rail is the solution for traffic congestion and will also improve the housing situation.
Our politicians need to wake up, or face increasing anger and rejection by a disgusted public, as we just saw nationally. Doubts about handling of rail can easily extend to general distrust of government.
A recent commentary by a member of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) board gets the math wrong, confusing “rider” with “ridership,” by inaccurately claiming rail has “90,000 riders per month” when the actual number is about 1,900 (“Detractors will see Skyline’s benefit,” Island Voices, March 30).
Weekday ridership in recent months averaged a pathetic 3,800, which is approximately 1,900 riders taking round trips — generally the same people riding every day. Do the math and you will find an average of 11 people on each weekday train, which means it is running 98.5% empty (168 daily trains, each with capacity for 800 people, 1,900 riders).
Five years ago, one of the city’s estimates for daily ridership of this first segment, now running from East Kapolei to Aloha Stadium, was to be 19,000, which is six times higher than reality. That immense difference suggests that all other city ridership projections are worthless.
Rail rapid transit requires concentrated populations to support it, living and working in walking distance of the stations, but we do not have that along the low-density rail route, forcing people to take a bus then transfer in an uncomfortably slow process.
This settlement pattern is baked in, despite token attempts at transit-oriented development. Rail was supposed to solve existing traffic congestion, not add more population to clog the route.
The train will reach its final station in maybe 10 years, just as autonomous cars and buses become more prevalent, probably making rail obsolete the day it fully opens.
The rail fiasco is one of the biggest deceptions in Hawaii history, taking $10,000 per person for a useless system with money collected by our regressive general excise tax that punishes low-income people. Now it seems that HART is lobbying to extend that tax forever.
We are subsidizing each current rider about $50,000 annually, based on the annual operation and maintenance budget of $100 million, apportioned to approximately 2,000 riders.
Consider how many actual problems could have been resolved with that huge amount of money, such as adding some relatively inexpensive express bus lanes and using the remaining cash to build 15,000 homes. Our rail is overpriced compared to other new systems, such as the 218-mile Los Angeles to Las Vegas train planned at $12.4 billion.
Unfortunately, we are stuck with this useless monster, which will stand as a monument to political idiocy, autocracy and greed, a painful example of our incompetent, broken political system. Cut the loss, say no to further extensions, and develop real solutions.
