With a new rail transit system in place, Honolulu’s esteemed bus system will never be the same.

That’s the word from city transit planners, who intend to integrate TheBus and TheHandi-Van with the rail project — not by adding more vehicles, but by shifting them to carry passengers to rail stations for the second leg of their commute.

J. Roger Morton, president and general manager of Oahu Transit Services Inc., which operates TheBus and TheHandi-Van, said rail "will provide a very important backbone for us in our most heavily used corridor, so obviously our services are going to change."

Honolulu’s TheBus has been rated the nation’s best bus system for providing coverage and proximity, with 97 percent of the island’s working-age residents living near a transit stop, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., research organization. Sixty percent of jobs on Oahu are reachable within 90 minutes by bus, nearly double the national metro-area average, it noted.

Maintaining that reach with an integrated, multi-modal transit system will be the challenge, especially with rising costs as well as legal challenges and a mayoral race that threaten to derail the whole project. But officials express optimism.

"We did come out as the top in the country in linking residences to jobs in the community," Morton added, "and I just can’t see that that would be anything but enhanced with a combination bus and rail."

"If you look at the transit corridor now," said Wayne Yoshioka, the city’s director of transportation services, "it contains about 68 percent of employment (of Oahu), and I think that’s going to increase to about 70 percent in the future. That’s consistent with the whole background of the transit system."

The project is not expected to require more road vehicles, which now total 518 buses and 150 vans, Yoshioka said. The expenses will be "not expanding, just replacing," including engines in buses.

"I’m looking forward to the point where the rail comes in and naturally frees up our buses," Yoshioka said, "so that with the same fleet size, without increasing our fleet size, we can first serve the rail stations but then we still have more buses that can be deployed elsewhere."

The rail project with bus connections was envisioned more than 30 years ago, when the seeds of Oahu’s "second city" were planted below the Makakilo hillside community.

As Kapolei was developed, some of the buses that had taken residents from Makakilo to central Honolulu were directed instead to a transit center at Kapolei, where they would transfer to downtown buses. Similar routes serve Waipahu and Mililani, Yoshioka said, and those will be logical patterns to bring commuters by bus or van to rail stations along the entire corridor, he said.

"Some of these rail stations are going to have a lot of demand," Yoshioka said. That also will free many buses to be dedicated to other routes, but how many has yet to be determined.

"We have so many tied up in the central corridor that we don’t have the flexibility to do a lot of things I would like to do," he said. "If we don’t have to drag the bus all the way to town, you can circulate a lot faster and you can have a lot more frequency."

But will this draw more commuters out of their cars? Several studies suggest that the combination of rail and bus is more likely to draw "discretionary riders," those who would otherwise drive but would be drawn to the rail’s speed, comfort and convenience.

Transportation consultant John Schumann compared records in Sacramento, Calif., which built a rail system in the 1980s, with Columbus, Ohio, which had only bus transit. He found that during a 17-year period, rail transit ridership increased significantly in Sacramento, while bus transit ridership declined in Columbus. Operating costs per passenger increased more in Columbus than in Sacramento.Research indicates that "U.S. urban areas that expanded rail service on average significantly outperformed urban areas that only expanded bus service in terms of transit ridership and financial performance," according to British Columbia’s Victoria Transport Policy Institute, a think tank that supports public transit. "It indicates that rail transit investments are often economically justified due to benefits from improved transit performance and increased transit ridership."

Nonetheless, in Hawaii what is "economically justified" remains a topic of hot dispute. In a Jan. 25 report for the Federal Transit Administration, the consultant group Porter & Associates Inc. concluded that operating TheBus and TheHandi-Van could cost city taxpayers $1 billion more in subsidies by 2030 than the city has projected.

Porter’s report estimated that 19.2 percent of the city’s general fund and highway fund revenues may be needed to subsidize TheBus, TheHandi-Van and the rail system by 2030, for an annual cost of $518 million. The city’s estimates were 14.2 percent and $372 million for the same time period.

Yoshioka rejected Porter’s contention that the city was lowballing its estimates. He said that the Porter report was a "stress test" that predicted a worst-case scenario. "The stress is a certainly extreme condition," he said. "We’re not as much an optimist as they say we are."

Also, he said, the Porter report’s prediction was based on bus expenses over the past five years, "which is the standard practice of FTA methodology" but was "a period of rapid (cost) increase in certain areas." The city’s expense estimates were based on the past 10 years, which he said were more reflective of what could be expected in the future.

Yoshioka remains committed to completion of the city’s rail project in concert with TheBus system, hoping that former Gov. Ben Cayetano will not be able to bring it to a screeching stop if elected mayor.

Asked if the project has been put in jeopardy by Cayetano, Yoshioka said, "I hope not. The people of Honolulu have waited long enough for this. We’ve been trying to do this since the ’70s and it’s not going to get any cheaper to do."

The key issue are the bonds needed to keep the rail project afloat. The Porter report to the FTA said more than $500 million in loans would be needed for the construction. Mayor Peter Carlisle has approved bonds for the rail project up to a certain point, but Cayetano has indicated he will refuse to continue to do so.

When asked if the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation could find ways to obtains loans needed to keep construction afloat, Yoshioka replied, "I’ve been led to believe that it’s possible."

Yoshioka also distinguished the type of credit HART needs. "When we’re talking about borrowing associated with HART," he said, "we’re talking about short-term commercial credit."

He added, "Although the instrument is a GO (general obligation bond) type instrument because it’s backed by the power of the city, the bottom line is this: It’s not a long-term instrument. By 2022, the debt is gone. There’s no debt after 2022. That’s a big difference between a 30-year GO bond and what’s proposed by HART."

Cayetano, as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit aimed at halting the rail project, has begun revealing exchanges by email between the FTA staff members since 2006. He said an estimated 500,000 documents, which have been provided to the plaintiffs, include questions about compliance with environmental law.

"I think what he uncovered was a healthy discussion within FTA, differing opinions," Yoshioka said. "I’m sure he didn’t raise the positive emails he found.

"To think that FTA would be a monolithic organization that everybody thinks the same way is naive," he said. "The bottom line is FTA, having worked through all these issues, fully supports this project."

Indeed, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told Sen. Daniel Inouye during a committee hearing on Thursday that his department is "committed to this. We’re committed to the money; we’re committed to the project. And, until we hear differently from others who are immediately involved in this, I see no reason why we won’t go forward."

In the meantime, Yoshioka said he will also continue forward according to plan.

"If any of those financial plans were unacceptables to FTA, it would have stopped this project at that point," he said. "And it hasn’t stopped it."