$10 Billion Boondoggle Opens
10th July 2023
Honolulu officials worried that their new train would be “overwhelmed” with riders when it opened at 2 pm on June 30. They needn’t have worried; a local news station reported that “scores of people lined up to ride the trains, which were free the first five days of operation.
In fact, about 9,000 people rode the train the first afternoon. Considering that each train can hold 800 passengers and they ran six times an hour until 6:30 pm, they were operating at about 40 percent of their capacity on opening day.
Over the next four days, another 62,000 people rode the trains, less than 25 percent of their capacity. When the agency began to charge fares, daily ridership fell to under 1,300 per day, or about 2 percent of the rail line’s capacity.
Taxpayers spent $9.9 billion, or $900 million per mile, for this 11-mile line to nowhere. The original plan was to build 20 miles from suburban Ewa to downtown Honolulu, but when costs more than doubled, the line from Ewa was terminated at Aloha Stadium. City officials hope to finish another 5 miles by 2025, and the rest by 2031, but don’t know where all of the money will come from to do so.