One of the most complicated maneuvers needed to complete Oahu’s rail transit system — a task that will involve numerous freeway lane closures in West Oahu — will now take place sometime this winter instead of in the fall, project officials say.
Currently, construction crews are building nearby columns and preparing to extend the rail line’s 20-mile guideway over the H-1 freeway and Farrington Highway, just Diamond Head of where the H-1 and H-2 merge. The maneuver to build long stretches of guideway over those major roadways will require a towering structure that’s called a "balanced cantilever."
Until recently, project officials had said that Oahu commuters in that area would start to see the guideway extend over the freeway and face its subsequent lane closures around September.
Now that’s been pushed back to sometime in November or December, rail officials say.
The change, they say, is in part an attempt to better coordinate all the freeway construction taking place in West Oahu with state transportation officials.
In late May, state Department of Transportation road closures caused huge backups on the freeway, which were made worse by the city’s rail construction lane closures taking place simultaneously on Kamehameha Highway. At the time, HART officials called the DOT lane closures on the freeway "unexpected."
"That’s one of the reasons both sides are trying to coordinate better," Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation spokesman Scott Ishikawa said Wednesday, regarding the postponement of the balanced cantilever maneuver toward the end of the year.
The move, he said, won’t affect the rail system’s overall schedule, which calls for trains to start running east of Kapolei to Aloha Stadium in 2017.
The DOT is currently working to add an outer right lane on the westbound H-1 in the general area that the guideway will cross the freeway. That outer lane is being built between the Pearl City/ Waimalu onramp and the Waipahu offramp, and from the H-1/H-2 merge to the Waikele offramp. State officials say the work is slated to be done by January 2015.
HART and DOT officials now meet weekly "just to make sure everyone’s on the same page," DOT spokeswoman Carolyn Sluyter said Wednesday.
