Add your name and contact information to the project mailing list. We will send you periodic newsletters either by e-mail or paper-mail. The newsletters will provide information on the study and inform you of planned meetings where you can ask questions of the people working on the project.
Scoping is the official beginning of public involvement in the project process and represents the first step in the project environmental review required under state and federal law. During the scoping process, the general public and governmental agencies are asked to provide input and suggestions about the purpose and need for the project, the study alternatives, and the environmental, social, and economic impacts to be analyzed in the Environmental Impact Statement.
The Alternatives Analysis, or AA, is part of the planning and development process established by Federal law for new, large scale transit projects. The AA includes:
Identifying specific transportation problems in an area, or "corridor" being studied;
Defining reasonable alternative strategies to address these problems;
Forecasting potential environmental, transportation, and financial impacts of these alternatives; and
Evaluating how each alternative effectively addresses the transportation needs, goals, and objectives for the corridor.
The AA provides decisionmakers with enough information to select a specific project design concept, and determine the scope of the project so it can be included in the metropolitan area's long-range transportation plan. After completion of the AA, decisionmakers have the information needed to select a locally preferred alternative. With this information, the project can then advance to preliminary engineering and the final phases of environmental review, final design and eventually project construction.
The term locally preferred alternative refers to a project alternative selected by the local jurisdiction that best meets the corridor's long-term transportation needs. If the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) believes the LPA has merit, the agency will approve the project to advance into preliminary engineering. Frequently, the FTA will ask for more data or information about the LPA prior to approving it.
An Environmental Impact Statement is an environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) and its implementing regulations and Chapter 343 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes. The EIS for the Honolulu High-Capacity Transit Corridor Project will follow completion of the AA, and will contain more detailed information on the locally preferred alternative, including environmental mitigation measures that will be required for construction and operation of the project.
Currently three alternatives are proposed to be evaluated in the EIS. All comments received during scoping are being reviewed, and the alternatives may be modified based on the comments. The alternatives proposed to be included in the EIS are:
No Build Alternative
Fixed Guideway Transit Alternative via Salt Lake Boulevard
Fixed Guideway Transit Alternative serving Airport and Salt Lake
The Hawaii state legislature passed Act 247, authorizing the county to levy a tax surcharge to construct and operate a mass transit project serving Oahu. In August of 2005, the Honolulu City Council subsequently adopted ordinance 05-027 to levy a 0.5% excise tax surcharge to fund public transportation. The City also will apply for FTA New Starts funding to help fund construction of the system. Annual operating costs will be paid for from passenger fares and City revenues.
Traffic has been increasing rapidly on Oahu. No single project will be able to relieve congestion far into the future. When built, the transit project will help take some drivers off of H-1 and other corridor roadways. This will reduce congestion in the short-term, and also help reduce the rate at which congestion grows in the future, but not eliminate traffic congestion in the corridor. All urban areas inevitably experience some level of traffic congestion; however, an effective transit system provides users mobility despite traffic congestion.
The near-term schedule includes the selection of a locally preferred alternative (LPA) by the City Council that occured in December 2006. The Alternatives Analysis was delivered to City Council on October 30, 2006. The City has completed scoping for the environmental process.
The team will next prepare a draft EIS and request approval from FTA to begin preliminary engineering (project design). The earliest that construction could begin on a selected alternative would be 2009. Due to the size and cost of the overall project, it is likely to be built in several phases lasting several years.
The City Council selected the Fixed Guideway Alternative as the Locally Preferred Alternative. Details about the alternative are available in the Alternatives Analysis available under the More Information tab of this website.
If a fixed-guideway project is constructed, the transit stations will provide access in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, including such features as elevators and ramps. Transit vehicles will include areas for wheelchairs, and priority seating will be provided for elderly and disabled passengers.
Our goal is not to condemn homes to make way for the project. Wherever possible, design decisions will be made to keep the project within existing roads’ rights-of-way. Some acquisition of land would be required. In most cases only partial slivers of land would be needed - for example, a few feet wide for the length of a property to widen a sidewalk. We expect most acquisitions would be of commercial properties.
When acquisition is required, the first step is to approach land owners to discuss options. In most cases, those acquisitions can be done without complications and the property owners would be compensated at fair market value, even for small slivers of the property.
Currently, over 60% of the population on Oahu is served by this corridor. By 2030, this will increase to nearly 70%. The Ewa and Kapolei area is projected to have the highest rate of growth over this time period. While several additional areas could be served with potential future expansion of the system, the proposed corridor would directly serve the greatest number of people. Other areas would be served by increased bus service feeding into the fixed guideway system.
Visual simulations of design concepts for several locations were presented at the June Community Update Meetings. More simulations are still being prepared. The simulations do not present the final system design, but rather examples of what the system could look like. The simulations may be downloaded here.
Along the corridor, stations are being evaluated at locations with dense population and around major activity centers, and at locations where good bus connections can be provided. During the Alternatives Analysis scoping process in December 2005, many station locations were suggested by members of the public. Every suggested location was evaluated based on how near it was to other adjacent locations being considered, how many residents and jobs would be located walking distance from the station, if land is available to provide park-and-ride facilities, and if the system could be designed to provide a straight and level section of track for a station in that location.
As described in the Alternatives Analysis Report, approximately 60,000 more transit trips would occur in 2030 with the Fixed Guideway Alternative than with the No Build. New transit riders, who previously would have driven, are expected to account for about ½ of the trips made on the fixed guideway system. This is similar to the experience of several other U.S. cities that have opened new fixed guideway systems in recent years. Between 10,000 and 15,000 of these trips would occur during the a.m. peak period, removing somewhere between 7,000 and 12,000 automobiles from the roads compared to the No Build Alternative.
Transit ridership on Oahu has varied over the past 20 years or more with year-to-year increases and decreases both occurring. Transit ridership had several years of declines in the 1990s but this is in common with other measures of travel demand. The 1990s saw one or more years of declines in vehicle registrations, licensed drivers, vehicle miles of travel and highway daily volumes. Current transit ridership, as measured by the recently completed (December 2005 to January 2006) on-board transit survey, is at a level of approximately 236,600 unlinked trips on an average weekday, about 8% higher than 10 years earlier.
The travel forecasting procedures used for the Alternatives Analysis were obtained from OMPO. The procedures, consistent with nearly all travel forecasting models nationwide, follow a 4-step process wherein travel patterns are estimated as the product of a sequence of individual decisions the number of trips that a household will make (trip generation); the destinations of these trips (trip distribution); the modes that will be used for travel (mode choice); and the paths on the transportation network that the trips will take (network assignment). The first step, trip generation, estimates the number of daily trips that a household will make, for different trip purposes, as a function of household size, household income and household vehicle ownership. Trip generation assumes that people make trips and so if the number of people increases the number of trips will increase, though not necessarily on a one-to-one basis. Trips will be forecast to occur on transit if they are destined for locations served by transit and if making the trip by transit is attractive relative to other modal options.
The 2030 population forecast used in the Alternatives Analysis is the forecast approved for use in long range transportation planning by OMPO. Consistent with adopted procedures, the islandwide population total for 2030 is prepared by the State of Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (DBEDT). DBEDT forecasts that the 2030 resident population on Oahu will be 28% higher than that recorded in the 2000 census. This 28% growth in thirty years from 2000 to 2030 compares to 39% growth which occurred in the previous 30 year period from 1970 to 2000. The allocation of the islandwide 2030 population forecast to various geographic locations on Oahu is prepared by the City and County of Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting (DPP). The DPP allocations are estimated consistent with market trends and the policies of the Oahu General Plan and the regional Development/Sustainable Communities Plans.
