Perfect weather and sandy beaches might spring to mind when a mainlander thinks of Honolulu. But this metro area of nearly 1 million people is far from paradise for those who get stuck in its notorious traffic, which competes with Los Angeles for the title of worst in the United States.
"Anybody who flies into Honolulu and drives into town—heading to Waikiki, for example—you are immediately struck by the H-1 freeway, seven lanes of traffic going in the same direction," says Dan Grabauskas, executive director and CEO of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART). "And if you land at rush hour, it's a standstill. It surprises people when they come here, to see how much congestion we face."
HART is working on an alternative to that miserable commute: a 20-mile elevated rail line—a first for the islands—that will whisk passengers between downtown and outlying communities in a fraction of the time it currently takes to crawl through rush hour traffic. With the first trips planned for 2017, the $5.2 billion Honolulu Rail Transit Project is expected to reduce congestion by 18 percent, taking as many as 40,000 automobiles off the road and replacing them with a fleet of four-car trains that can accommodate up to 800 riders, with racks for both bicycles and surfboards.
But surfboard storage will not be the project's only unique feature; this will also be the first fully automated wide-scale urban transit system in the United States. Instead of human drivers, a centrally-located computer system will control stops, departures, and speed, and even open and close doors. Operation will be cheaper than for manually-driven rail, says Grabauskas, and he also expects it to be safer. "There are transit systems where driver error has caused collisions or other incidents," he says. "The driverless operation we have is going to be very safe." (...)
In Honolulu, which is starting from scratch, automation was perhaps the easiest thing about making the system a reality. The rail line was "decades in the making," says Jennifer Sabas, former chief of staff to Hawaii's Sen. Daniel Inouye, who secured $1.5 billion in federal funding for the rail line before his death in 2012. Sabas now serves as executive director of Move Oahu Forward, a business- and labor-backed non-profit organized to support the line in the face of opposition from residents and politicians who argued that the elevated tracks and stations would loom over the landscape, and that the system, which will be funded by a half-cent surcharge on the state's general excise tax in addition to the federal contribution, simply cost too much. "Since there was such an issue over whether to even build a train, the driverless aspect hasn't gotten much attention," says Sabas.
"Anybody who flies into Honolulu and drives into town—heading to Waikiki, for example—you are immediately struck by the H-1 freeway, seven lanes of traffic going in the same direction," says Dan Grabauskas, executive director and CEO of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART). "And if you land at rush hour, it's a standstill. It surprises people when they come here, to see how much congestion we face."HART is working on an alternative to that miserable commute: a 20-mile elevated rail line—a first for the islands—that will whisk passengers between downtown and outlying communities in a fraction of the time it currently takes to crawl through rush hour traffic. With the first trips planned for 2017, the $5.2 billion Honolulu Rail Transit Project is expected to reduce congestion by 18 percent, taking as many as 40,000 automobiles off the road and replacing them with a fleet of four-car trains that can accommodate up to 800 riders, with racks for both bicycles and surfboards.
But surfboard storage will not be the project's only unique feature; this will also be the first fully automated wide-scale urban transit system in the United States. Instead of human drivers, a centrally-located computer system will control stops, departures, and speed, and even open and close doors. Operation will be cheaper than for manually-driven rail, says Grabauskas, and he also expects it to be safer. "There are transit systems where driver error has caused collisions or other incidents," he says. "The driverless operation we have is going to be very safe." (...)
In Honolulu, which is starting from scratch, automation was perhaps the easiest thing about making the system a reality. The rail line was "decades in the making," says Jennifer Sabas, former chief of staff to Hawaii's Sen. Daniel Inouye, who secured $1.5 billion in federal funding for the rail line before his death in 2012. Sabas now serves as executive director of Move Oahu Forward, a business- and labor-backed non-profit organized to support the line in the face of opposition from residents and politicians who argued that the elevated tracks and stations would loom over the landscape, and that the system, which will be funded by a half-cent surcharge on the state's general excise tax in addition to the federal contribution, simply cost too much. "Since there was such an issue over whether to even build a train, the driverless aspect hasn't gotten much attention," says Sabas.
by Amy Crawford, CityLab | Read more:
Image: HART
