Honor bound

City engineers plan to adopt something akin to an honor system for riders of Honolulu’s planned rail transit system, and are designing the stations to allow riders to board trains without passing through any pay gates, turnstiles or similar barriers.

That would make the system easier and faster for riders to use, but the open design has members of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation board asking exactly how the open stations will function.

One question is how to effectively enforce fare collection in a system without barriers. Rail fare revenue is expected to total $47 million a year by 2030, and that money is supposed to cover 40 percent of the operating cost of the system.

Another concern is whether the open design could allow trains or the 21 rail stations to become magnets for the homeless or criminal activity, which might make the system less inviting for riders.

The Honolulu stations are being designed to include conduits and spaces for gates so that they can be retrofitted later if barriers are needed, but changing the plan to install barriers at each station would cost millions of dollars, said Toru Hamayasu, interim executive director of HART.

Don Horner, chairman of the Finance Committee of HART, said he wants to hear more about the open design and the logic behind it.

"The first priority for the train is for it to be safe, clean and on time, and does a barrier system lend itself more to ensure safety and cleanliness than a nonbarrier system? Or does the barrier system reduce ridership because it adds time for getting on the train?" Horner asked.

"Nobody at the board level is making a recommendation on which way to go, we’re just asking what is the analysis," Horner said. "It’s an important consideration."

The planned 20-mile elevated system will extend from East Kapolei to Ala Moana Center. Planners expect the system will cost $5.27 billion, including design and engineering costs, interest on debt and environmental reports.

Hamayasu said the decision to adopt an open station design was made partly because barriers slow passengers down and they present some complications when riders want to transfer from bus to rail.

The city plans to charge passengers a single fare that would allow them to transfer from the rail system to a bus — or from a bus to rail — without additional charge.

Accomplishing those transfers with gates or other mechanical barriers for the rail system presents some technical challenges. For example, a barrier system might require that magnetic strips be added to bus transfers so riders could get access to the rail platform, Hamayasu said.

A barrier system also places more restrictions on the movement of passengers within the station so riders can be funneled to access points where they are required to provide proof of payment. Those kinds of considerations led planners to opt for a system without barriers.

An open design allows rail passengers to enter and leave stations more efficiently from multiple directions, which speeds the flow of pedestrian traffic in and out of the stations.

IT MAY SEEM counterintuitive that transit riders would voluntarily fork over tens of millions of dollars to ride an ungated rail system, but transit officials in cities such as Dallas, Minneapolis and Phoenix say that open stations without barriers work just fine.

John Siqveland, public relations manager for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro Transit system, said it is misleading to call the Twin Cities’ network an "honor system." Riding the rail there without paying is like parking at a meter without paying, he said.

You can do it, but you might regret it. Metro Transit has 69 full-time and 45 part-time officers patrolling the system and making sure riders pay. Passengers caught without paying face $180 fines.

Fares on the Hiawatha light rail line from the Mall of America to downtown Minneapolis range from $3 during rush hour to 50 cents during off-peak hours.

Siqveland said Metro Transit statistics show that so far this year, 99.1 percent of passengers on the Hiawatha line have been paying the fare, and 99.9 percent have been paying fares on the city’s new Northstar line.

"The amount of fare evaders is very, very low," he said.

The 20-mile Phoenix system is also ungated, in large part because it would have been very difficult to incorporate barriers into the design of the street-level stations, said Hillary Foose, public information officer for the Phoenix-area METRO light-rail system.

Passengers buy paper tickets or smart-cards to pay their fares, and anyone caught riding without paying can be fined anywhere from $50 for a first offense to $500 for repeat offenses, not counting fees imposed by the courts, Foose said.

Fares are $3.50 for an unlimited bus and train day pass, and a private security company patrols the Phoenix, Mesa and Tempe trains and stations to make sure riders have paid.

Weekday ridership on the Phoenix system averages about 40,000. Based on the number of citations issued, officials estimate that 4 percent to 6 percent of rail riders aren’t paying.

"By and large, people are doing the right thing," Foose said. "There is always a small percentage of folks who just won’t (pay), but our riders I think take some ownership over the system. I think they expect to pay, and they want their fellow riders to pay."

The metro system has regulations to control homeless or other people who want to sleep on trains, or try to ride it from end to end without really going anywhere, Foose said.

Security teams sweep the trains at the end of the routes to move people off, and regulations prohibit people from taking up more than one seat or putting their feet up on the seats, said Foose.

"We do have prohibitions in place that allow us to combat some of that," she said.

Phoenix rail officials sometimes get calls from people who want barriers installed to ensure that everyone pays, but that conversion would cost millions of dollars, "and it’s just not the system we designed," Foose said.

Dallas Area Rapid Transit spokesman Mark A. Ball said studies show that 95 percent of riders on Dallas’ open system pay their fares. Average weekday ridership for DART rail this year has been running about 76,000 passenger trips.

In an emailed response to questions, Ball said more than 200 DART police officers and "dozens" of fare-enforcement officers patrol the trains and issued 35,290 citations for fare evasion in the year ending Sept. 30. The basic fine for a citation is $50, he said.

In Honolulu, the city tentatively plans to create a 26-member security crew to enforce fare collection on the trains and platforms, and has budgeted $1.7 million per year for that fare-checking function.

"It’s just like parking-meter enforcement," said Hamayasu, the rail transit authority’s interim executive director. "The more enforcement you have, the compliance rate goes up."

People will be required to pay a fare in order to stand on the platforms, which will limit the amount of loitering on the concourse, Hama­yasu said.

The Honolulu Police Department is also expected to create a transit division that would be funded from rail system operations to handle general law enforcement functions for the system.

However, Hamayasu said a re-evaluation of the barrier options is under way in Hono­lulu, in part because recent innovations in smart-card and smartphone technology might make a barrier system technically more practical.

He said operating cost is an important consideration, and that high labor costs for the security staff could make a barrier system more desirable.

Hamayasu did not have accurate cost estimates for outfitting Honolulu’s 21 planned transit stations with barrier systems, but acknowledged it would cost millions of dollars.