Even pro-rail optimists would have a hard time describing a bright future for Honolulu 25 years from now.

The environmental impact statement made clear that traffic congestion would be substantially worse with rail than it was back in 2014. And bus commuters will have been forced out of their express buses into feeder buses that only go to the nearest train station, so they can take train cars to more buses that finally take them to their respective destinations.

Many of these rush-hour commuters will have to stand during the train ride. The lucky few who avoid rush hour, however, will have their choice of any seat on the train.

As commuters traverse West Oahu, they can gaze at suburbia rather than prime agricultural land, and residents along the entire 21-mile route can listen as steel-on-steel boxcars accelerate from zero to 60 mph, and then decelerate to zero, at one-mile intervals every few minutes, except from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.

Those who live anywhere near a train station will wonder why parking facilities were not included at 16 of the 20 train stations, and they will learn to live with creative parking.

Residents not particularly fond of this new lifestyle will try to remember the exact buzzwords from 25 years earlier: Was it transit-oriented development … or developer-oriented transit?

Thanks to U.S. Department of Energy data from other heavy-rail cities — the smallest of which is four times the size of Honolulu — taxpayers in 25 years will wonder why city officials did not tell the public way back in 2014 that this rail system would consume far more energy, on a per-user basis, than car commuters do in an average gasoline-fueled vehicle.

The City & County of Honolulu will have raised property taxes, sewer fees and public-transportation fares dramatically because it built rail with no financial plan beyond the cost of construction. Taxpayers will wonder how city officials in 2014 thought the $100 million annual operating cost would be financed. Did they think money would someday grow on trees?

Another reason for the surge in taxes — surprise, surprise — will be that the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation was not able to contain rail construction costs any better than had other heavy-rail cities, where the average cost overrun for such projects had been 40 percent.

In 25 years it also will be clear that sewers, fresh water supplies and other essential infrastructure do not last forever. Equally shocking, the humongous tab for lifetime health care promised to every city worker will finally come due, just as actuaries had projected back in 2014.

A new batch of federal District Court judges and magistrates will have replaced the old ones, some of whom are still miffed about the 9-foot wide, 40-foot tall, graffiti-covered concrete slab running alongside the federal courthouse.

The lucky few locals who won a chance to buy one of the few "affordable" condominium units in Kakaako will have long since flipped them to foreign nationals who have taken over Kakaako and Waikiki.

Many locals will have moved to Las Vegas by then, so the good news is that much of Honolulu’s financial problems will have fallen on absentee owners of Kakaako high-rises — an area of town named Shanghai East by an elated Mayor Kirk Caldwell.

At dawn on the morning of the 25th anniversary of rail, someone will point out that rail hardware lasts only 25 years, even in areas far removed from sea air. A few old-timers might recall former Mayor Frank Fasi’s promise that Aloha Stadium would never rust … and Kirk Caldwell’s promise that rail would hardly make a sound and look real nice, because he was going to hide it behind buildings.

And finally, as youngsters commute in their driverless car, watching a movie or doing office work, assured that the computer driving the car will not get drunk, suffer road rage or carelessness and that traffic will flow smoothly — they will wonder why their parents and grandparents ever allowed rail to be built.