Column: HART’s P3 plans built on unbelievable ridership estimates

Rail is a terrible candidate for public-private-partnership (P3) due to exaggerated ridership numbers and uncertainties of final construction costs. Official passenger projections are as unbelievable as the initial estimates of $3 billion for construction, which will likely spill well over $10 billion entering the most difficult downtown stretch.

The P3 contract would be partly based on the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation’s estimates of future ridership, which is how the private operator would try to make a profit on their investment. They provide money for construction, operation and maintenance in return for collecting fares and added taxpayer funding.

HART estimates there will be 119,600 daily rail trips — but critics maintain that projection is grossly excessive, based on experiences elsewhere and low population densities along our line. For example, Puerto Rico estimated 110,000 daily riders in San Juan but is getting only 31,000. We are expecting more riders per mile than Chicago, Atlanta or San Francisco. Most urban transit systems have shown a recent decrease in riders.

HART will probably be locked into a contract we cannot honor due to ridership overestimates, and we will likely have to pay back the difference to the “partner.” If there are fewer than expected passengers, the private operator would either go bust, or raise fares, or extort added payments from the city to compensate for its losses. One way or the other, we have to pay the full amount eventually, probably with added penalties.

P3 is a fraud by our politicians to distract from their inability to raise sufficient tax funds. HART and the city are acting out of desperation, since they don’t have enough money to meet federal requirements. HART is trying to hide the billions needed for construction by extending that cost as far into the future as possible, “paid” by a partner.

HART is throwing in the towel, conceding it does not have the ability to manage this project, as indicated by HART’s board chairman, Damien Kim, who recently said it “hasn’t worked out too well for the rail project.”

It is tragic that the situation has gotten so bad that HART is desperately trying to turn rail over to some private company, who HART hopes will do all the work for it in this most difficult final phase. This amounts to a conservative attempt to privatize government as much as possible, and turn huge profits over to the private sector at taxpayer expense.

Politicians often lack the financial knowledge to effectively negotiate with sophisticated corporations in long-term contracts; the devil is in the details. HART will give away the store with false promises, then when the bill comes due later and we have to reimburse the private “partner,” the politicians who instigated this disastrous project — Mufi Hannemann, Peter Carlisle, Kirk Caldwell, City Council members and state legislators — will be long gone, collecting their pensions, leaving us to pay for the highest per-capita transit turkey in history.

This P3 scheme is a natural extension of the well-known history of the project itself, more concerned with construction jobs and transit-oriented development than providing efficient transportation, conceived by our bankers and corporate landowners to push people as far as the limits of our island allows, develop valuable agricultural land and make room for overseas, absentee buyers to dump their excess cash into our desirable neighborhoods in downtown Honolulu.

At this point, the best solution would be to end the mistake at Middle Street with an integrated bus and ride-share station that could bring riders more directly to their final destination, requiring no further construction cost or damage to the urban environment, without any P3.

Dennis Callan, of Punchbowl, was co-chairman of Stop Rail Now and is a longtime transportation activist.