Council panel OKs
‘work plan’ for mass transitThe idea is to update and consolidate
data, Chairman Okino says
The City Council is laying tracks toward a fixed-rail mass transit system for Oahu -- a plan the Council rejected in 1992.
The Council Transportation Committee unanimously supported yesterday a resolution backing a "work plan" to define rail transportation.
"It's not another study," said Council Chairman Gary Okino. "It's meant to be a quick, brief preliminary assessment that will pull together all our previous studies, update all the information, give us different financing options as to how we're going to do this."
Mayor Jeremy Harris, while supporting a rail system, is also moving ahead with a Bus Rapid Transit system that would use exclusive lanes to ferry riders.
City Transportation Cheryl Soon said the Council needs to make up its mind. A little more than a decade ago, a past Council voted 5-4 against a tax increase that would pay for the city's share of a rail system.
"If you really don't intend to go all the way through with it, don't appropriate a penny, just stop right now," Soon told the committee.
"If you're going to go the distance, then you and you and you and you and you need to say right now, 'I'm not going to back down later.'"
Okino said the key to the project is to make the rail line at a different level than vehicle traffic, to avoid snarls.
Okino and Transportation Chairman Nestor Garcia are members of the governor's task force on transportation.
State Transportation Director Rodney Haraga said he will present a mass transit plan to the task force Monday that will include rail, a bus system and road improvements, including an elevated highway.
But Haraga told the Council the only way to proceed with mass transit is through cooperation between the city and the state to avoid losing federal funding, like the $600 million that was returned with the 1992 rail vote.
"In my conversations with the congressional delegation, basically they told us they will not be embarrassed again," Haraga said. "So if we don't unite and jointly go together for funding purposes, we are at a disadvantage."
Haraga said the 1992 plan should be amended to extend the rail system beyond Leeward Community College to Kapolei.
He said that with 78,000 new homes projected on the Ewa plain in the future and the potential for 30,000 military personnel and dependents being based here if Hawaii gets a Stryker brigade and aircraft carrier, traffic could be a mess.
Haraga said that whatever rail system is developed, there also must be a bus system to move riders in town. "If you try to bifurcate the two systems, it just won't work," he said.
