$10 Billion Is the Ultimate Price Tag for Honolulu's Rail Boondoggle

Back in January 2016 the Honolulu Civil Beat published my opinion with the title: $10 Billion: The Ultimate Price Tag for Honolulu Rail?

On Friday, May 13, 2016 the cost or rail was pegged by HART at $6.9 Billion.

On Sunday, May 15, 2016 the cost or rail was pegged by FTA at $8.1 Billion.

On March 20, 2016, the New York Times published an article that included my opinions with the title: Hawaii Struggles to Keep Rail Project from Becoming A Boondoggle.

Given these cost updates (while less that one third of the project has been built), clearly the question mark is no longer necessary, and the project is a verifiable boondoggle.  Thus:

$10 Billion Is the Ultimate Price Tag for Honolulu's Rail Boondoggle

I am sorry that Honolulu voters did not pick me in 2008 or 2010, or past Gov. Ben Cayetano in 2012 for mayor. Honolulu's punishment in now too severe, and we haven't seen the half of it yet. 

Engineering experts raise quality concerns over Honolulu’s rail construction

With Gina Mangieri of KHON Channel 2 News Always Investigating...

So we took a field trip with engineer, and prominent rail critic, Panos Prevedouros.

“One of the cracks in this area was pretty alarming and it was along the line of the segment,” he pointed out.

Other concerns have to do with the amount of rust, starting with tracks that the city bought early to hedge on steel price.

“Basic rust is not a problem. It’s actually a protective coating that, when the rail starts running, it will clear a lot of it,” Prevedouros explained.

But when it gets installed, more problems can arise. “One of the issues is that it creates problems with the labor that tries to install them. They may need extra protection because when you’re bolting them, there may be excessive dust of rust,” Prevedouros warns, which can be dangerous when inhaled.

Other rust hot-spots lie in the rebar forms that start each pillar.

“Here we see the rebar for the support columns,” Prevedouros pointed out, “and I am a little worried that it’s quite rusty, because when you pour the rebar around it, it creates problems with adhesion of the concrete to the rebar itself. In the long term, it may cause spalling problems, delamination problems.”

That’s not the only worry about the pillars, especially in certain parts of the route.

“The problem in general with Waipahu is it was famous for springs and underneath water caves,” Prevedouros said, “and this is a very heavy, very long bridge. Some of these pylons may have settlement issues. There have been reports that at least a couple of them have issues of settling. They’re going into the ground. Beyond a few inches, it becomes tremendously stressful for the structure and we probably need to add more to support the bridge.

“It could be sudden, but it could take several years,” Prevedouros added. “First, we’ll hopefully see cracks, but then we’ll have to react to it before we have a collapse.”

Quick reactions have to be at the ready on other key jobs along the building process, like when crews go to snug the segments together with cables in something called “post-tensioning” — something that brought a near disaster near the Banana Patch — which was memorialized in HART’s report as Span 258, NCR 509.

“They had a failure with a segment they were trying to post-tension it, which is the process this thing is getting built,” Prevedouros said, “but the tendons failed. There was essentially a minor collapse. Now they’re shoring it up to try to connect it with the two pieces to the left and the right. The whole segment seems to be supported from the bottom and they’re trying to fix the situation.”

“Does it run a future safety risk?” Always Investigating asked.

“The problem is now, by having this failure, it is costing a lot of time and resources to fix it,” Prevedouros said. “But they will fix it in a way that will probably be quite durable.”

Liang Shi: Will Driverless Cars Improve Traffic Congestion?

Many colleges and universities have a quick but tough competition among their graduate students called the 3MT or the Three Minute Thesis. Students stand up and deliver, in three minutes or less, a coherent and interesting summary of their research leading to their Masters or Doctorate degree.

I am very pleased that my PhD student Liang Shi competed among ~60 University of Hawaii at Manoa graduate students and got 2nd place.  Congratulations!

"You may have seen the news that Google is testing their Driverless cars in California. The car was designed to drive itself without any human intervention. It uses a rotating roof top light radar system (aka LIDAR) that maps critical components of the road environment, including curves, signals, traffic lanes, vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles. It also maps cones and construction zones for avoidance. It has no driver controls, such as steering wheel or pedals. It is believed that driverless cars can reduce traffic accidents and congestion. But last November, a Google car was pulled over by the police for driving too slowly, which generated my research question ”will driverless cars improve traffic congestion?” My research is to estimate how driverless cars affect the traffic flow of freeways and city streets.

For example, take an intersection controlled by a traffic light , when the traffic light turns from red to green, it takes 1 second to 3 seconds for human drivers to perceive the change of the signal and react accordingly by switching pedals. For a driverless car, it only takes 0.3 seconds to do so. Driverless cars use sensors and cameras to detect the traffic lights.  They can communicate with the local controller that operates the traffic light. For advanced driverless cars, called connected vehicles, they can talk to each other exchanging information of location, speed and other parameters. Imagine if all the cars at the signalized intersection were driverless cars: They would all start at the same time without the human response delays. So the road can serve a larger amount of traffic in the same amount of time. In addition, driverless cars are equipped with collision avoidance technology, so if a regular motorist violated the red light, the driverless car would not enter the intersection and it would avoid the collision.

Based on my analyses, if all vehicles are driverless cars, capacity of the road will be doubled. This means that every city intersection would have twice as many lanes at no cost to the city.  But if in the future we only have 1% of driverless cars in traffic, traffic flow will not improve. If we have 5% driverless cars, congestion will improve by about 5% if they are regular driverless cars, or by 12% if they are connected driverless cars. So with 5% driverless cars, traffic flow will begin to improve in a noticeable way. However, if the cars are designed to drive conservatively, they will cause more delays than humans do.

To answer my research question, which is “will driverless cars improve traffic congestion?” the answer is that if driverless cars become dominant in the market and if they are designed to drive very closely to each other, then they will reduce traffic congestion, possibly by a lot. "

Rail critics offer ideas on how they would do it better

Quoted in Richard Borreca's editorial in the April 12 issue of the Honolulu Star Advertiser.

The question is not whether the city’s over-budget, $6.57 billion rail project is good or bad; the question is what are you going to do with this turkey?

Already bailing from the project, estimated to be at least a year behind schedule, is Don Horner, the retired First Hawaiian Bank chairman, who resigned Monday as chairman of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.

Council Chairman Ernie Martin last week called for both Horner and HART CEO Daniel Grabauskas to be removed from their positions.

Earlier I asked four of Honolulu’s most perceptive rail critics what they would do if they were running the train instead of Grabauskas and Horner.

The question went to Ben Cayetano, former governor who ran for mayor unsuccessfully on a platform of stopping rail; Scott Wilson, former AIA Honolulu president; Panos Prevedouros, University of Hawaii civil engineer professor and unsuccessful mayoral candidate; and finally Cliff Slater, businessman and longtime rail critic.

First, Slater said, “Grabauskas and Horner should go; they have not been honest with the public about the purported benefits of the project nor have they been forthcoming about the projected costs.”

The problem, Slater said, is that the route should be shortened, but that won’t happen unless “a mayor is elected this fall who is willing to take on the ‘Rail Establishment.’”

Wilson noted that “AIA Honolulu has advocated against elevated rail in central Honolulu since the 1990s when Mayor (Frank) Fasi first raised the idea.”

Honolulu architects aren’t against rail, Wilson argued, but the hope is that an “at-grade, light rail system” would cost less and not devastate the landscape, which will happen with the 20-mile parade of concrete columns and 21 elevated train stations.

Wilson said stopping the heavy rail system at Aloha Stadium or Middle Street and switching the rest of it to light rail, “will save approximately $2 billion over the final 10 miles of the route.”

The UH’s Prevedouros expanded the thinking about the rail system. He said if he were running the rail line, he also would stop the rail line at Middle Street. Then he would “negotiate with FTA (Federal Transit Administration) and instead of the four miles downtown I’d propose adding about 5 miles in the other direction to fully serve Kapolei, Honokai Hale and Ko Olina, including a 4,000-stall park and ride structure for the Waianae Coast commuters. Half of this rail extension could be done at ground level for a much lower cost per mile.”

Monday’s news of Horner’s resignation takes care of half of Cayetano’s first suggestion. Like Slater, he also said he would ask for Grabauskas to resign.

“Both have been less than honest with the public,” Cayetano said.

If the former governor were in charge, the new rail system would be changed into a combination rail and bus system.

“I’d ask the HART board to commit to stopping rail at the Middle Street bus hub and begin planning for a bus rapid transit system running on a dedicated existing lane on King Street to downtown, Ala Moana Center and, if feasible Waikiki,” Cayetano said.

Also, Cayetano would work on a plan to satisfy the federal requirements for spending the transit money without a penalty for changing the plan.

“I would recommend that whatever federal funds have not been used for rail be returned to the FTA ASAP,” Cayetano said.

The existing plan and its execution, Cayetano said, “is a disaster,” but he thinks there is still a way out.

“A bus rapid transit system running on an existing, dedicated lane will avoid the enormous costs of an elevated, heavy-rail system running through downtown; no condemnation of real property will be needed, the huge costs of relocating HECO’s underground utility lines will be avoided and the city’s environment and beauty preserved.”

Hawaii Struggles to Keep Rail Project From Becoming a Boondoggle

Major article about Honolulu's rail project in the Sunday New Your Times: Hawaii Struggles to Keep Rail Project From Becoming a Boondoggle.  In it I'm quoted as follows.

“It’s a disaster. In my view, we are worse than how we expected,” said Panos D. Prevedouros, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Hawaii, who has twice run for mayor opposing the project. “We were saying at the beginning we would be lucky if it could be done for $6.4 billion, and people thought we were close to lunacy. We are sitting here today, and we are now computing about $7.1 billion cost.”

“We have become numb to these numbers,” Mr. Prevedouros said. “But it’s very dear for a small place like us, with only like 400,000 taxpayers.”

I loved this part: As construction jams traffic and upends neighborhoods, a poll conducted in February by Civil Beat, a Hawaii news site, found an overwhelming number of respondents who said they either considered the rail plan a bad idea or were troubled by its progress. Just 15 percent of those polled called it a good idea.

Although the NYT did not take a position, it is imperative that Honolulu cuts its losses, terminates the project at the Middle Street Transit Center and, in the future, consider expansion west to Honokai Hale and the Ko'Olina resorts, including a large park and ride lot for the Waianae coast commuters.