Construction on the rail project came to an abrupt halt 13 months ago when the state Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the city had violated state law by starting construction before completing the archeological survey.

The resulting 13-month delay cost Honolulu taxpayers $38 million, according to Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) executive director, Dan Grabauskas.

The city now wants to restart construction, to avoid additional delay costs.

A recent Star-Advertiser editorial seemed to think that is a good idea ("Time to get rolling on rail transit," Our View, Sept. 8). The editorial noted a pending federal lawsuit, but seemed to support the city’s attempt to restart construction now.

Here’s how that editorial concluded: "If this project is to be finished by 2019 as the current plan maintains, there’s no time left for distraction. The city must put the pedal to the metal, and get the job done right."

Obviously it would make no sense at all to restart construction if the city were certain to lose when the federal lawsuit is finally decided on the merits.

We plaintiffs and our lawyers expect to prevail — but the city and its lawyers evidently see things differently. Meanwhile, objective legal experts seem to agree that the legal arguments on both sides have merit, and that either side could prevail.

Confronted with such uncertainty, it just makes sense for the city to apply basic principles of risk analysis to the known facts before committing additional billions of taxpayer dollars. Here’s why:

While no one can say exactly what a victory by the plaintiffs in this lawsuit would require the city to do, it is likely that the city would be forced to conduct a rigorous and objective analysis of all the reasonable alternatives to rail — which is what the city was supposed to do before selecting rail in the first place.

If that happens, we are confident that bus rapid transit will be found to be preferable to elevated heavy rail, as it was in the 2003 final environmental impact statement.

That EIS, which was written by Parsons Brinckerhoff and the city, and approved by the Federal Transit Administration and the state, concluded that "a grade-separated (elevated rail) transit system would be unacceptably: (1) intrusive on the visual environment; (2) divisive of communities; and (3) too expensive."

If that is indeed what happens, the cost of any construction on rail between now and then would be completely wasted, not to mention the very high additional cost of an environmentally responsible deconstruction of whatever the city had built. The total cost of all that could easily be in the billions.

Does anyone honestly think saving $38 million is worth the risk of wasting billions?

We used $38 million as the estimated cost of waiting for a final decision, but there’s no good reason why that number couldn’t be considerably smaller. For example, if the city would stop trying to delay a final resolution of the federal lawsuit and instead join the plaintiffs in asking the court to decide the substantive issues now, we could have a decision from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in short order.

If the city wins the lawsuit, it can then restart construction with no threat of having to tear everything down later. And the cost of waiting a little longer will have been relatively small.

If the city loses, the taxpayers save billions, in more ways than one.