Sharing of traffic center sparks rail discussion

Honolulu’s mayor used a tour of the island’s future traffic operations center, a city-funded facility that will house state agencies, to push for state leadership to help rescue the city’s massively over-budget rail transit project.

“I think about the last legislative session. There’s discussion on rail: ‘The city should have skin in the game,’” Mayor Kirk Caldwell said Friday, speaking to reporters inside the giant interior of the unfinished Joint Traffic Management Center. “The city has a lot of skin in the game and has from Day One.”

“We’re sharing this with everyone, including the state, so that we can do a better job as one community. No walls, no division — doing things for the better interest of the entire community,” he added.

The $53.6 million traffic management center at King and Alapai streets is slated to open in late 2018, officials said. The federal government will cover $37.8 million, and the city will cover the rest, they added.

Various federal, state and city agencies — including Honolulu’s Police and Fire departments as well as state and city traffic managers — will share the space as they aim to better respond to emergencies and the traffic snarls they often create around the island, officials said.

“All the relevant supervisors, all the managers that control traffic … in the city will literally be within arm’s reach of each other,” said Jon Nouchi, deputy director for the city Transportation Services Department. Because so many city- and state-owned roads overlap, sharing the space also will help those managers better coordinate adjustments to traffic signals, Nouchi said.

It would also help them better respond if the state’s Zip Mobile breaks down again on the H-1 freeway, Nouchi and other officials said. The state and city will continue to work out of their existing management centers even after the new facility opens, Nouchi said.

The state Legislature ended its 2017 regular session without a solution to bail out the 20-mile, 21-station elevated rail project, which officials estimate faces a deficit of around $3 billion, including financing.

Many of rail’s advocates are pressing the Legislature to reconvene in a special session to tackle the problem. State leaders say the two chambers would have to work out much of their differences on rail before reconvening for such a session.

“I’m asking … that the Legislature, when they look at the issue of rail, that they consider this not as an us-versus-them,” Caldwell said at the center’s construction site Friday. “This is one community of 1 million people. … We’re all working together.”