By Cliff Slater

It all started out quite sensibly. The city proposed a regional Bus/Rapid Transit plan that would provide an unobstructed run for buses using zipper lanes along the Leeward corridor to downtown, with time savings of 25 minutes.

This appeared to make sense even though Kazu Hayashida, then state Department of Transportation director, had problems with it for both financial and engineering reasons.

Then the city added an in-town BRT that would mesh with the regional BRT from downtown and provide two legs, one to UH and the other to Waikiki, using special 120-passenger buses that would stop every half mile. They would use exclusive lanes, which would be taken out of the existing roadways. There would be further timesavings of 14 minutes from downtown to UH, and 3 minutes to Waikiki.

While all this was great for bus riders, private transportation providers and UH traffic experts noted that the use of exclusive lanes in town would have a terrible impact on traffic congestion. Traffic congestion in town is already bad enough; taking road space away from existing traffic would cause a traffic nightmare. As the Hawaii Transportation Association put it: "chaos."

But the juggernaut rolled on, and a supplemental draft environmental impact statement was published showing clearly that work on the regional BRT would be concurrent with that of the in-town BRT. However, the new state transportation director, Brian Minaai, reacted negatively to the regional BRT in even stronger language than had Hayashida.

I believe that sometime after March 2002 issue of the supplemental impact statement, the city decided that the regional BRT was not going to fly because of the state's opposition.

In addition, in the newly drafted, though unreleased, final environmental impact statement, the city's consultants had dramatically reduced the earlier projected downtown to UH timesavings of 13.6 minutes to a minuscule 1.8 minutes and on the Waikiki leg to just 1.9 minutes.

This posed a problem because the regional BRT had provided virtually all the timesavings; the in-town BRT alone would not be able pass the rigorous scrutiny that is required for Federal Transit Administration funding.

Thus, with no regional BRT and minuscule timesavings from the in-town BRT, the concept was born of building a starter line from Iwilei to Waikiki, which would require less than $25 million in federal funds and, under FTA rules, allow the project to escape the FTA's usual scrutiny.

And so, in June 2002, amid much scurrying around, the City Council passed $31 million in funding for this initial leg to match $20 million in federal funding.

Furthermore, the gubernatorial election was looming, Mayor Jeremy Harris had decided to drop out of the race and the likely incoming governor was Linda Lingle, who had already publicly announced her opposition to the in-town BRT because of its traffic-causing problems.

To get around that obstacle, the city published a special final EIS, which, unlike the earlier EISes, was not a joint city/FTA effort. This one complied only with Hawai'i environmental laws and not national ones. Gov. Ben Cayetano accepted this final EIS for the state just before leaving office.

This state final EIS posed the Iwilei-Waikiki line as the first phase of the whole BRT program; it did not say that the regional BRT idea had been shelved but rather showed it being built several years later.

The starter line idea was not the city's ideal solution but rather the best political compromise that could be made. The idea was that it would give the city a foot in the door that would almost certainly lead to further expansion of the BRT; government projects often evolve this way.

In October 2003, after much wrangling with the FTA, the city produced what is called the federal final EIS, since it is a document that complies with national environmental policy but not Hawai'i's.

In the federal final EIS, something new appears: For the first time we hear of the term initial operating segment (IOS) used for the Iwilei to Waikiki line, which the city termed the first phase of the full BRT program. However, in its promotional activities, the city made the case that the IOS should be considered alone and objected to opponents raising the issue of the consequences of building the full in-town BRT.

A month after the federal final EIS, the FTA issued a new decision, approving only the IOS and requiring further environmental study if the city wished to construct anything further.

In December 2003, in response to a federal lawsuit, the FTA told the court that the city had not even applied for federal funding for the IOS and spelled out the various hoops the city had to jump through in order for funding to be granted.

Nevertheless, faced with the $31 million in city funds lapsing at the end of calendar 2003, the city awarded contracts for IOS construction work on the last day of the year despite having no federal funding. Only a federal court requirement that the city not begin work before a February hearing date has so far prevented the start of construction.

And in the federal government's new report on rapid transit projects, we find that Honolulu's full BRT project — of which the IOS is supposedly only one part — has been dropped from its list of approved projects.

And so what does that leave us with? The IOS, which will wreak havoc with traffic congestion. It will not save time, except under limited circumstances, since for travel between its main termini, downtown and Waikiki, the existing City Express Route B will still be faster. And for travel along Ala Moana Boulevard, the IOS will be slightly faster than routes 19, 20 and 42 only because these buses stop frequently, whereas the IOS — inconveniently — only stops a little under every half-mile.

The BRT has gone from vision to vestige; someone should put it out of its misery.

Cliff Slater is a regular columnist whose footnoted columns are at www.lava.net/cslater.