The first of its kind in Hawaii, the system seeks to alleviate the substantial traffic issues affecting the state's most populous urban agglomeration, as well as provide a reliable transportation alternative for visitors and commuters in southern Oahu. The mostly-elevated system features design elements from both heavy rail systems and light metros, with a commuter rail-like design incorporated into trains and suburban stations. Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays.The Honolulu Rail Transit Project (also known as the Honolulu High-Capacity Transit Corridor Project) is an urban rail rapid transit system under construction in Honolulu County, Oahu, Hawaii. If HART can just come up with a figure for how much it can spend, then it can start talking rationally about where the rail is going and when.
The city needs the same black-and-white thinking with rail. The bank wants black-and-white answers to those questions. When you go to the bank to get a new mortgage, the bank won’t take guesstimates for how much money you have, how much you earn and what you owe.
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But bonds are not free there is interest attached. The first question is, how much money do you really have? It is tricky because now that the city passed the hotel room tax, rail has a new source of income, which means the city can borrow against it by selling bonds. That task should keep City Hall and HART busy for some time. Instead of searching for the essentially unknown answer to the question of “How much is rail costing?” just list how much money you have. What HART needs to do is reformulate its questions. “That’s where the current deficit, I think it was reported at $1.97 billion, lies.”īut both Caldwell and Blangiardi can read a map: Middle Street or downtown, neither is also called Ala Moana Center. “Beyond that is where the problem lies,” he said. Current Mayor Blangiardi appears to also suffer from some “waveritis,” saying that right now he is confident that the project had enough funding to get to the Civic Center.
In 2016, Caldwell told the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation board: “Let’s do a good job for the first 15 miles and then we can talk about the rest later.” Later he changed the goal back to Ala Moana. But now there is talk of stopping early - so when does “pau” mean PAU? Honolulu mayors - from Mufi Hannemann, through Kirk Caldwell, Peter Carlisle and now Rick Blangiardi - have all professed a desire to run rail to Ala Moana Center. And in some ways, the question of how we know when we are finished is another unknown. Obviously the big one is what the final cost will be. Last week the city officially designated a new hotel room tax as the new source of funding for the rail system.Īccording to a Honolulu Star-Advertiser report, by snagging a portion of a new city-initiated hotel room tax, the rail line will collect a total of $350 million from the tourist tax. There are lingering questions about why the rail system exploded in cost, now pegged at $11.4 billion and once estimated at just $5.2 billion. It is not just obsessive left-brain thinking to want to see who is paying for the 20-mile system. As city and state operations grab more new taxes for Honolulu’s rail system, it would be a good time to spell out in a clear, organized fashion who pays for the city’s rail transit system.