Top Investigative Reporting and Online Journalism Awards
Best business and Government Reporting
The city's rail authority - HART - has released renderings for its planned Chinatown station. Talk about urban sprawl: This drawing is from the HART website and is their engineering drawing of the Chinatown station (page 44/85). Using the right hand lane height from ground level to the underside of the rail structure of 18' 1" (as [...]
BY PANOS PREVEDOUROS PHD - Back in 2009, University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization provided some rail jobs estimates that said employment will start with 300 jobs, and at the peak of construction, there may be 2,000 jobs, but at that time UHERO did not know that a $1.4 billion contract to build the rail [...]
BY WENDELL COX - Honolulu is set to construct an ambitious urban rail project. It’s a $5.125 billion behemoth that this metropolitan area with less than a million residents may not be able to afford. Honolulu's Beleaguered Residents Critically, there is plenty of competition for the scarce dollars that Honolulu residents have to spare. The [...]
A toll road bill quietly moving through legislature: Somehow we missed the toll roads bill now winding its way through the Legislature but better later than never. It is HB 2153 HD1 introduced by Reps. Souki, Ichiyama, and Yamashita. This bill would allow the Hawai‘i Department of Transportation to build toll roads, (aka HOT lanes [...]
BY HONOLULUTRAFFIC.COM - Wendell Cox, of Demographia, has just published a study of transit commuting across income groups. He finds a surprising result. Here are a few paragraphs: "One of the most frequently recurring justifications for densification policies (smart growth, growth management, livability, etc.) lies with the assumption that the automobile-based mobility system (Note 1) disadvantages [...]
BY PANOS PREVEDOUROS PHD - The recent article "For Transit Agencies, Terrorists Are Moving Targets" in the magazine of the New Jersey Transportation Planning Authority raises many critical issues relating to the security of urban rail systems. Security experts and transit officials alike all but guarantee that some intentional tragedy will, sooner or later, befall [...]
BY PANOS PREVEDOUROS PHD - In 2004, I started keeping tabs on major events of the infamous Honolulu Rail. This link takes you to the 2004 to 2010 highlights. The 2011 highlights are below. January 18: FTA issues Record of Decision. The ROD allows the city to take these actions if it so chooses (but read the [...]
BY BOBBIE AND CLIFF SLATER - I’m sure you have heard that the city has announced that they have received permission to enter “Final Design”, and the city is alluding to a more optimistic outlook for federal funding. The Honolulu Star Advertiser headline was,“Rail project cleared for federal funding.” However, that headline was plain wrong. You [...]
BY WALTER HEEN, BENJAMIN CAYETANO, CLIFF SLATER AND RANDALL ROTH - The City & County of Honolulu claims that construction of the proposed elevated heavy-rail system would increase the number of jobs on Oahu, somewhere between 5,000 during each year of construction to a high of 17,270 in the so-called peak year. This brings to mind Mark Twain's [...]
BY PANOS PREVEDOUROS PHD - Energy and Honolulu rail is an angle that I did not have time to look at in detail, until last week when my students did some energy analysis of Honolulu’s proposed rail. They discovered this June 2008 article by Sean Hao: Rail's use of energy subject of debate in the Honolulu Advertiser. Of [...]
Loading ...
Connect with Us