Honolulu's Special Interests Enrichment

The price tag for preparation of the Honolulu rapid transit project’s environmental impact statement was originally $86 million but has since bulged to $156 million, a City spokesman confirmed today. The current value is $156,211,000 and it is due to expire July 11 of this year. Read full article in Hawaii Reporter.

This does not include the cost of the Alternatives Analysis which was in the order of $20 Million.

Recall that in 2007 Tampa opened 10 miles of elevated reversible toll lanes ($1.50 toll per trip). Planning, design, and construction were completed in seven years for a total cost of $320 Million. In comparison, the Honolulu Rail Gang will spend $320 Million for planning, design, lobbying and PR, and 90% of it comes from local taxes.

Wind Turbines on Fire

I doubt that The Blue Planet Foundation would use any of these wind turbine images for its letterhead. Perhaps its advocacy should also be commensurate to the facts.

Electricity Travels at the Speed of Light. State PUC Is Sightly Slower.

On December 26, 2008, an island-wide outage occurred on Oahu during a severe lightning storm that resulted in a loss of electric service to HECO customers ranging from approximately 7 to 20 hours.

On January 12, 2009, the PUC initiated an investigation of the outage.

In March 2009, HECO submitted an outage report prepared by its expert consultant, which concluded that the island-wide outage was triggered by lightning strikes.

In January 2010, the Consumer Advocate submitted its Statement of Position that HECO could not have anticipated or prevented the outage through reasonable measures and could not have reasonably shortened the outage and restored power more quickly to customers. The Consumer Advocate further stated that penalties should not be assessed for the outage, but recommended that numerous studies be performed with the objective of preventing or minimizing the scope and duration of future power outages.

As of May 9, 2011, the PUC's investigation of the 2008 outage is still open.

Portland's "High Capacity Transit" Success... All 2.3% of It!

Interesting excerpts of an actual evaluation of Portland's MAX light rail in 2011:

• High Capacity Transit is desirable when there are large numbers of people moving to geographically constrained destinations within a short period of time – such as commuters traveling to downtown San Francisco or midtown Manhattan. (Nothing in common with Honolulu.)

• MAX was supposed to be a “catalyst for transit-oriented development” (TOD) at Cascade Station near the airport, but IKEA, Target and Best Buy are built away from the MAX stop and serviced by large parking lots. RESULT: 2.2% use MAX. (This will happen to the Ewa mall by Bishop Estate, Pearl Highlands, Pearl Ridge and Ala Moana Center.)
  

• Gresham Civic Station is a suburban location that has been intensively planned for more than 25 years, with expectations that this would be a showcase for suburban TOD. The entire area was bare dirt when MAX opened in 1986. Eventually, much of the site was built-out. RESULT: Although there are hundreds of apartments close to the newest MAX station at Gresham Civic Center, only 2.25% the tenants actually use light rail. (This will happen to Ho'opili and other pie in the sky TODs.)
  

• The two-day observations at Cascade Station were perhaps the most revealing in terms of assessing the oft-made claim that light rail is a “catalyst for development.” Light rail is not only irrelevant to the commercial success of Cascade Station, it is a barrier to continued development due to density requirements near rail stations. (Maybe Honolulu developers will wake up to reality.)
  

Finally, a quote describing real Transit Capacity (which is of course why I have been advocating a managed bus system since 2000):

• For comparison, the highest-throughput mass transit facility in America is a simple busway managed by the Port Authority of New York-New Jersey (PANYNJ). On weekdays between 6:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m., PANYNJ operates a 2.5 mi eastbound contra-flow Exclusive Bus Lane (XBL) along westbound Route 495 to Lincoln Tunnel from the New Jersey Turnpike. The XBL carries 1,700 buses and 62,000 passengers each morning, on average, saving about 15-20 minutes in travel time. This averages about 1 bus every 8 seconds for a 4-hour period, with roughly 37 seated passengers per bus.

Full Report -- CASCADE POLICY INSTITUTE: The Myth of High Capacity Transit, May 2011.