Hawaii’s HART troubles in Honolulu

STIMULUS UPDATE 2022: $300 DIRECT ONE-TIME PAYMENTS BEING SENT OUT IN HAWAII

Management of TheBus was turned over to Oahu Transit Services in the early 1990s. OTS is a private company but one that relies heavily on government funds to stay in business. The subsidy from the city of Honolulu to OTS to run TheBus for fiscal 2023 comes to $176 million, according to the city’s figures.

Challenges to TheBus raise broader questions about the efficacy and future of some public transportation systems, as it’s endured a sluggish ridership recovery following more than two years of pandemic-related obstacles.

Fares on TheBus were recently raised to $3 per rider per trip, but that’s unlikely to boost farebox revenues significantly. TheBus has seen a marked decline in ridership over the last 20 years. Hawaii’s relatively severe COVID-19 lockdown and the decline of Japanese tourism to the island haven’t helped matters.

In June 2002, total trips on TheBus came to more than 5.3 million rides. In June 2022, the same line served up over 2.8 million trips, according to American Public Transportation Association numbers — about a 48% decline in ridership over 20 years.

That is much worse than the national trend in public transit over the same 20-year period, according to a breakdown by the St. Louis Fed. Nationally, trips dropped from 772 million in June 2002 to 521.3 million in June 2022 — a 32% decline.

On Jan. 10, the Washington Examiner traveled from Waikiki to downtown, by Uber, to speak with several experts at Hawaii’s one free-market think tank, the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, about TheBus and several other public transportation-related issues on the island.

Grassroot Institute experts said TheBus appears to be competently, though expensively, managed. Buses mostly run on time. However, some are practically empty, and the longer buses don’t tend to fill up. Management hasn’t matched the reduced passenger traffic with a reduction in vehicle size to save money.

The think tankers couldn’t get too worked up over it, however, because of one of the reasons for TheBus’s decline: the rise of light rail, with all the delays and massive cost overruns that seem to afflict such projects.

The troubles with the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, or HART, are well known by transportation experts on the mainland.

For instance, Arizona State University research professor Steven Polzin told the Washington Examiner, “Honolulu has been struggling for numerous years in their efforts to complete their rail system with multiple management changes, etc.”

Locally, Honolulu’s HART troubles are seen as more of a running joke, as well as a pain in the wallet.

Originally projected to cost something on the order of $1.5 billion-1.7 billion with a 2020 completion date, the current estimate for HART’s construction is north of $12 billion with a doubtful 2031 completion date. By some estimates, that makes it the most expensive light rail project in the nation if we look at it on a per capita basis.

Grassroot Institute experts explained that because the island has sunk so much money into light rail, it has also strongarmed TheBus into working to make it a success by chopping up some of its routes into “feeder routes” that will push passengers toward the rail. That has worsened commuter times for some islanders and threatens to make things more complicated when the trains start running.

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The first leg of that long-delayed rail project could come as early as this year, though HART CEO Lori Kahikina admitted to Hawaii News Now that “there have been some communications software issues that arose during the trial running testing phase.”

She added that contractor Hitachi “has brought in specialists to hopefully resolve that problem and keep us on track.”