Tag Archives: honolulu high capacity transit project

What happened to the light rail alternative to Honolulu’s transit plan?

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Thanks to RLB for returning to the issue of the city’s examination of alternatives in a comment a couple of days ago. He wrote, in part:

I don’t pretend to understand the ins & outs of the Environmental Impact Statement planning and implementation, but I don’t see how your statements are supported by publicly available documents.

For example, in the City’s Alternatives Analysis, Chapter 2 has a section called “Alternatives Considered.” It says:

“The alternatives considered during screening included a No Build Alternative, a Transportation System Management Alternative, and a number of ‘build’ alternatives.Transit technologies that were examined included conventional bus, guided bus, LIGHT RAIL TRANSIT [emphasis mine], personal rapid transit, people mover, monorail, magnetic levitation, rapid rail,”

I appreciate the reference back to source documents, and I think RLB is right in saying that it is hard to understand how the light rail alternative could not have been evaluated. So let’s take a closer look.

Light rail, being the dominant form of new or planned urban rail transit systems over the past twenty years, was necessarily the most obvious alternative technology.

Beginning in the fall of 2005, the city did the preliminary screening of alternatives that RLB refers to, and published the “Alternatives Screening Memo” in October 2006. Several different alternatives were rated. Light rail was called “a strongly recommended technology“.

Recommendation – Light Rail is a strongly recommended technology for alternatives with limited portions of mixed traffic and predominately exclusive right-of-way, although the transition between the two types of service will pose technical challenges (power collection and visual impact). This technology is also recommended for analysis for alternatives with exclusive right-of-way.”

The alternatives screening memo concluded by recommending that light rail should be included among several technologies to be further considered.

But when the Alternatives Screening Report followed just a month later, several technologies had been dropped after further consideration, and just four alternatives were included in the analysis.

No Build

Transportation System Management

Managed Lane

Fixed Guideway

Light rail was not neither rejected nor included for any additional analysis. It was essentially ignored, although it could have been assumed to be included in the “fixed guideway” option.

This is suggested by a list of issues that remained “unresolved” after the Alternatives Analysis had been completed, which included: “Selection of transit technology for the Fixed Guideway Alternative (if selected)”.

Supporting this view was the city’s official response to those who commented on specific types of transit technologies during the screening analysis:

“Vehicle and system technologies will not be selected prior to the draft Environmental Impact Statement. Comments about issues related to vehicle and system technologies will be considered when specifications are developed.”

In December 2006, the Honolulu City Council adopted a “locally preferred alternative” by passing Bill 79 (2006).

In Part III of the bill, the council reserved the right to select the technology to be used, clearly indicating that the choice of a particular fixed-guideway technology was still in the future.

The council reserves the right to select the technology of the fixed guideway system for the locally preferred alternative.

AIA testified in favor of Bill 79.

AIA supports the fixed-guideway alternative…We strongly support the implementationof this system.

And, at the beginning of 2007, when Honolulu architects began pressing for a dialog on design issues, including alternatives to an all-elevated system, the city rejected their requests, saying it was too early for such discussions.

According to PBN (2/23/2007):

oru Hamayasu, chief planner for the city and county’s Department of Transportation Services, said it’s too early in the process for architects to get involved. The city’s consultant, New York-based Parsons Brinckerhoff Inc., has its own architects working on the project.

“We are sensitive to design details and we certainly would welcome the help from the AIA in the next phase when we get into design elements,” Hamayasu said. “I understand AIA’s desire to get involved early, but right now it’s really, really early.”

This view was reiterated in the legal notice published in the Federal Register announcing the city’s intent to do an EIS for its rail project (3/15/2007).

In a section on “Alternatives”, the legal notice stated:

The draft EIS would consider five distinct transit technologies: Light rail transit, rapid rail transit, rubber-tired guided vehicles, a magnetic levitation system, and a monorail system.

It went on to describe alternative alignments that would be considered. It is interesting to note that both were described as including elevated as well as at-grade sections.

The legal notice then specifically provided:

At this time, comments should focus on the scope of the NEPA review and should not state a preference for a particular alternative. The best opportunity for that type of input will be after teh release of the draft EIS. [page 12255]

The subsequent NEPA Scoping Report, published in May 2007, appeared to confirm that light rail was still an option.

Comments were received in favor of monorail, light rail, and rapid rail…No information was received that would eliminate one or more of the transit technologies currently under consideration.”

But later in 2007, more than a year before the draft EIS would be published, AIA protested to Mayor Hannemann that a “request for information” sent to rail manufacturers contained specifications that would preclude any at-grade option.

In a December 28, 2007 letter from AIA Honolulu President Peter Vincent to Mayor Hannemann, it was pointed out that the specifications were imposed by the city and were not at the suggestion of the city’s consultants.

According to comments made by the City’s transportation consultants, the decision to design an elevated system was mandated by the City and was not the result of the recommendations of industry experts.

This letter drew a heated response from the mayor, essentially telling AIA that it was too late to discuss technology choices, contrary to repeated public reassurances, legal notices, and explicit instructions over the prior two years.

Mayor Hannemann dismissed the AIA’s concerns as “11th hour opposition”.

Publication of the draft EIS and its presentation of the impacts of various alternatives, which was supposed to be the starting point for discussion of particular technologies, was still more than ten months away.

And when the draft EIS was issued, light rail was not one of the alternatives considered. It simply disappeared, without comment.

RLB is right. It’s hard to see how this could have happened, given all of those references including light rail among the alternatives to be studied. But light rail, the most widely used urban transit technology and the most obvious alternative, was ultimately ignored and dismissed without comment or explanation.

Tuesday…Cooking the specs, or how to control the design of transit with behind-the-scenes decisions

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If the city budget scheduled to be passed next month includes the more than $1 Billion requested to fund the first large contracts for transit cars and initial construction of the elevated guideway and stations, it will be a major political coup for Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann achieved as much through political trickery as political muscle.

The trick is simple and often relied on when manipulating policies and contracts: You don’t have to “fix” the final decisions if you quietly control and set the specifications. Tailor making the specs to “fit” a particular bidder or technology is often a way to throw business to a favored party in what otherwise appears to be competitive bidding.

It’s hard to tell whether that’s what’s happening with Honolulu’s transit system, but it is clear that the Mayor Hannemann’s administration has defined the system through specs shoved into the design requirements. While distracting the public with the debate over “steel wheel on steel rail”, a category which actually includes a range of different transit technologies, Hannemann has slipped in a small number of key specifications which predetermined the specific choice of perhaps the most expensive type of steel-on-steel system running on an intrusive elevated guideway, essentially a mini-freeway of concrete and steel, from one end of the island to the other, interrupted periodically by stations the size of football stadiums in the sky.

Those limiting specifications inserted by the Hannemann administration include the call for a grade-separated system using “hot” 3rd-rail power.

These key specifications have been quietly inserted at key points by the administration and not by the council, and instead have constrained the council as it has tried to move forward with transit.

The council’s selection of a locally preferred alternative and a “fixed guideway” using a form of “steel rail on steel wheel” technology is consistent not only with the system pursued by Hannemann, which might have been state of the art in 1985, but also the light rail systems used most of the urban systems built since that time.

While the public, the council, and key constituencies were being told that the final choice of technology was still open, the choices were in fact being narrowed to one.

These differences are important. In private correspondence, one experienced transit planner described the differences in available transit technologies, very subtle from the public’s perspective but extremely important in terms of the profile of the resulting system.

Although the city describes its proposed system as “light rail”, he says this repeats “the classic mistake of confusing something else with light rail transit; it’s a common mistake but one that can lead the non-technical person to reach a misleading conclusion.”

This is in part, the result of a marketing decision made a couple of decades ago by Bombardier – a lead, if not favored competitor for the HHCTC Project – when light rail transit was emerging as a viable option for new start rail systems to call its fully-automated rail transit technology, which uses linear induction motors, “Advanced Light Rail Transit” or “ALRT.” [Who was the fictional character who said “It isn’t what it is; it is what I chose to call it.”]…

The technology that the City Administration proposed to use… is best described as an “automated light metro,” as is consistent with the definitions recorded in the attachment. It is its inability to operate on the surface in a right-of-way that is not secure, i.e. fenced-in, that makes it a light metro and not a light rail transit system. That is a result of two facts: 1) its operations will be fully-automated and 2) it will have an energized “hot” third rail for traction power distribution, in both cases throughout its 20.5 miles-long alignment, as well as 8.9 miles of proposed future extensions to West Kapolei, UH Manoa and Waikiki.

In contrast, “real” light rail transit – as defined in the attachment – has as its defining characteristic the ability to operate safely on the surface of city streets in mixed traffic lanes, in addition to in reserved transit-only lanes, transit malls with intersecting streets, roadway medians intersecting cross streets, on open or fenced-in railroad type rights-of-way with or without grade crossings, on elevated structures and in subways.

No other fixed guideway mode – heavy rail, light metro,commuter rail, magnetic leviation, monorail, personal rapid transit systems, etc., has this flexibility. At the same time, some LRT systems do have characteristics shared with other rail modes.

The “attachment” referred to can be found here.

Cynics say Hannemann has thrown his support behind the most expensive type of system in order to reap the harvest of campaign contributions from current or prospective contractors. Others only a bit less cynical say the system is Frank Fasi’s legacy, carried forward with few changes from the system Fasi proposed two decades ago and promoted within the administration by city engineers who worked on Fasi’s project and are now in leadership positions in the current transit project.

To be continued…