By Panos Prevedouros and Randall Roth
Panos Prevedouros is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where Randall Roth is a professor on the law faculty.
The Federal Transit Administration says it will demand its
money back if rail does not reach Ala Moana Center. Rather than view this as the beginning of a
negotiation, both mayoral candidates used it as leverage to convince voters
that the city has no viable option other than to find the additional billions
needed to satisfy the FTA.
Fortunately neither the FTA nor the winner of the mayoral
election will decide rail’s fate. The members
of the state legislature and the city council will decide whether to raise
taxes enough to cover the cost.
Assuming these decision-makers approach their task
logically, they will begin by addressing four questions: (1) How much more
money would be needed to finish rail? (2) Where would that money come from? (3)
What would be accomplished? And (4) What could be accomplished if the same
amount of money was spent on something else, instead of rail?
If they approach this with open minds, we believe that they
will reach the following conclusions:
- Another $5.75 billion, over and above the
non-recoverable $3.5 billion already spent, will be needed to reach Ala
Moana Center (i.e., total construction costs of $10.8 billion, less $3.5
billion already spent or irretrievably committed, less $1.55 billion
federal money yields $5.75 billion);
- The chances of getting an additional federal grant for
rail are virtually nonexistent;
- It is unrealistic to expect the private sector to
provide more than an insignificant portion of the needed $5.75 billion;
- The bulk of the new money will have to come from local
residents, who will have to pay an average of $200 per person ($800 for
each family of four) every year until construction ends;
- The rest—roughly 15% of $5.75 billion—will come from
tourists or other non-residents;
- After construction ends, each family of four will
continue to pay an average of $800 per year, to cover the annual cost of
operating and maintaining a safe and reliable rail system; and
- Traffic congestion will be much worse when rail becomes
fully operational than it is right now.
Anyone who questions this last statement should see the
Final Environmental Impact Study in which the city admits, "traffic
congestion will be worse in the future with rail than what it is today without
rail."
Other ways to spend the money: Working together, the city and state can reduce
traffic congestion, for example, by aggressively adding new traffic lanes to
existing roads, as has already been done successfully on each side of the
central part of H-1 Freeway; by installing flyovers and bypasses in chokepoint
areas like the Middle Street merge; and by adding new contra-flow and
bus-on-shoulder options. Each is a
proven strategy that, unlike rail, would directly benefit all commuters.
Equally important, the city could afford to greatly improve
its award-winning bus system. This might
include increasing the number of express buses that go where commuters want to
go, rather than eliminating most of them as is part of the rail plan.
All of the above could easily be done for less than half of
the money that would be saved by pulling the plug on rail now. The legislature and city council could spend
the rest on other areas of need, such as a comprehensive homeless plan, heat
mitigation and other improvement for our schools, sewer and road repairs … or
simply leave it in the pockets of island residents.
The existing guideway could be modified for walking,
biking, and other community activities, and provide unique views of the
island. The High Line in New York is a
wildly popular public park built on an abandoned rail line above the streets on
Manhattan’s West Side. While no one
would set out to spend $3.5 billion for a High Line trail/park in Hawaii, it
could become a tourist attraction.
And last but not least, twenty years from now traditional
mass transit will be functionally and technologically obsolete for cities like
Honolulu thanks to autonomous vehicles and ride-hailing apps. Who’s the future
of urban transportation: Apple, Google and Uber or Caldwell, FTA and HART?
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On September 17, 2016 the Washington Post published this article: Washington searches for new streetcar riders in an Uber era (!)
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