Letter to U.S. DOT Secretary Mary Peters

I assisted Cliff Slater of Honolulutraffic.com in preparing this important letter to U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Mary Peters. It speaks volumes of the conspiracy to disqualify all superior alternatives and promote rail as the "locally preferred alternative."

October 28, 2008.

Mary E. Peters
Secretary
U.S. Dept. of Transportation
1200 New Jersey Ave, SE
Washington, DC 20590

Dear Secretary Peters:
We wrote to you on January 15th this year requesting the reinstatement of the Managed Lane Alternative (MLA) in Honolulu’s Transit Corridor Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). We have received no reply from you even though the DEIS is now pending.
In addition to the MLA, we also request the inclusion in the next iteration of the EIS the Bus/Rapid Transit (BRT) Program as fully described in the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) that the Federal Transit Administration approved in 2003.
We have lately noted that this BRT FEIS had forecast ridership six percent greater than is forecast in the Alternatives Analysis (AA) for the rail alternative (fixed guideway). Further the capital cost projected was one-fifth that currently forecast for the rail line’s MOS.
Dr. Panos Prevedouros, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Hawaii, has kindly provided us with the following basic data showing these forecasts together with some of the assumptions made at the time:

It seems rather strange to us that this BRT alternative was not considered during the AA process especially considering that Parsons Brinckerhoff was the principal consultant in both the BRT FEIS and the AA for rail. And also in light of their comment at the time that,
The light rail transit alternative was dropped because subsequent analyses revealed that Bus/Rapid Transit using electric-powered vehicles could accomplish virtually all of the objectives of light rail transit at substantially less cost.
We therefore request that this BRT program, with a suitably modified In-Town section, be reinstated in a Supplemental Draft EIS together with the MLA.
Sincerely,
HONOLULUTRAFFIC.COM
Cliff Slater
Chair
CDS/rrs

CC:
CEQ
FTA Ron Fisher
FTA James Simpson
FTA Ray Sukys