ISLAND VOICES
Busway unsuitable for O'ahu
By Gary Okino
Gary H. Okino is a City Council member.
I read Cliff Slater's May 4 missive with alarm. Armed with a regular column in this paper, Slater has become a huge obstacle to Honolulu's effort to achieve a viable mass-transit solution.
His latest brainstorm for a "reversible elevated busway" is riddled with inaccuracies and distortions. More damaging, however, is his ongoing effort to discredit the only mass-transit solution that will work for Honolulu — a high-capacity, exclusive right-of-way rail system.
To illustrate the shortsightedness of a busway, consider the following:
Building more roads is not the answer. A busway simply adds two more lanes to our existing highway system. Experience has proven that by the time new lanes are built, they're already inadequate.
More troubling, however, is that Slater's proposal perpetuates vehicular use, encourages urban sprawl and ultimately increases congestion.
In contrast, a good mass-transit system, such as a monorail, decreases dependency on motor vehicles, promotes mixed-use transit-oriented development, and facilitates interaction between land uses without increasing congestion.
A busway is large, heavy and unsightly. A busway requires two bus-wide travel lanes, and standard shoulders for safety and emergency purposes. In addition, the weight of buses and vans dictate a more massive and expensive structure. It's doubtful a single-column system could support this structure.
A monorail system, on the other hand, can be placed on single, widely spaced columns because of its lightweight vehicles and the fact that monorail vehicles can safely pass within inches of each other. The monorail structure can also be prefabricated off-site and simply dropped into place.
Monorail is more cost effective. Current estimates for the Seattle Monorail system total about $100 million per mile. Applying that estimate to a 15.9-mile Honolulu system suggests a cost of $1.59 billion, not $2.6 billion as Slater claims.
Moreover, the monorail estimate includes the cost of vehicles, while the busway proposal does not. Slater's estimate of $1.2 billion for a busway will increase dramatically when you adjust for the added cost of a more massive busway structure, the aerial on- and off-ramps, and the vehicles themselves.
