Honolulu rail system

In 1966, then-mayor Neal S. Blaisdell suggested a rail line as a solution to alleviate traffic problems in Honolulu, stating,

 "Taken in the mass, the automobile is a noxious mechanism whose destiny in workaday urban use is to frustrate man and make dead certain that he approaches his daily occupation unhappy and inefficient."^[20]

The failure of Honolulu to get their act together is staggering. It's an island. It has to import cars by air, and fuel by ship. All the urban development is constrained to a tiny strip along. The lack of a mass-transit system is quite puzzling. Takes a bit of reading to get to the core of it, but looks like the cause is political: it's a contest for space between mass transit and cars. (No surprise there--it's a fundamental conflict in urban transportation). And BRT doesn't seem to have entered the conversation until recently; prior to effective BRT, 'rapid' transit meant rail.

Should Honolulu have rail? Probably not. Circa 2000, rail probably looked reasonable. But that was before Curitiba pioneered BRT, and demonstrated that heavy-rail levels of capacity were possible using rubber-tracked vehicles with internal combustion engines.

Technically speaking, there are only two cases where rail transit is justified:

1. You already have a rail transit system, and you are building an additional corridor that will interconnect with it, and building more rail will eliminate the 'change of gauge' problem that continuing along a corridor would otherwise require a transfer to another vehicle.
2. A railroad line/corridor/ROW already exists and can be re-used/repurposed.  

Looking at the proposed rail line, looks like Honolulu meets neither of these criteria.  So why rail? Cars.  As I mentioned  previously, it's a fight for urban space, a fight for travel right-of-way. It proved politically easier to spend billions to build a curious heavy rail/commuter rail/light rail hybrid, rather than take roadway right-of-way from cars. (Choosing between pain today or pain tomorrow, and the public will always take pain tomorrow--something politicians endlessly exploit).  

If you can't make use of the surface right-of-way (which has been politically allocated to cars), then you have to use separated guidway--either elevated or underground. My understanding is that as a volcanic island, there is no 'digging' to be done on Honolulu: building anything underground means dynamiting through igneous rocks of various types. And elevated is cheaper than underground, regardless. (Digging through air is pretty cheap, I understand). So after the political decision to allocate all the surface space to cars was made, elevated was the only place to stick a train. But elevating a train isn't cheap: It's like building a highway consisting solely of bridges. And so the cost is in the billions. And so the project is politically tendentious. Complicating this, Hawaii has zero experience building rapid transit of any sort. 

Sadly, this is a common problem across America: we've not built grade separated transit in decades, and hence there is no professional experience in doing it. All the experience is European and Chinese. And yet the 'benevolent' requirements of 'Buy American' provisions for the FTA condemns U.S. rapid transit to autarky. Rather than import (and localize) foreign expertise, we have to 're-invent the wheel', making all the same dumb mistakes. 

Why? Because this is America, and we don't have a national rail agency. It's a federal system: the Feds fund it, but the local agency builds it. And to do that, every local agency has to learn how to do it. Which is impossible, and so most local agencies rely on consultants to provide the expertise.

And as a consultant, I can tell you, there is a strong incentive to over-state your expertise, 'stretch' related qualifications, and magnify that aspect of related projects. Because that's how you win work, and if you don't win work, you don't eat. And that includes practices like underbidding the work (saying you can do it in less time/for less money than the task will actually take). When public projects go sideways, the reasons for it are predictable.