Journalists got to ride the city’s second segment of the Skyline rail system on Thursday that will take passengers down a new, 5.2-mile route to some of the most important stations and major employment centers at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and Daniel K. Inouye International Airport.
Hopes are high that the opening of Segment 2 next week will result in a needed boost in Skyline ridership given accessibility to those two major employers of thousands of workers who
commute.
Daniel K. Inouye International Airport alone employs about 15,000 workers who have to park off-site and take employee shuttle buses to get to work.
The new airport Skyline station instead will drop them off between the neighbor island and international terminals.
In September, the city’s Department of Transportation Services reported that the number of Skyline riders was as low as 1,842 on a Sunday and as high as 7,519 on a Saturday for a September total of 119,513 passengers.
Paid fare service runs from
4 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. on Oct. 16, followed by two days of free ridership on Oct. 17 and 18.
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Passengers riding for free will need a HOLO card to enter any station to access the new route.
The new segment includes four stations closer to town from the current Halawa Station next to the empty Aloha Stadium.
The next-t0-last stop of Segment 2 is the Lagoon Drive station, where passengers can then board express buses to downtown, Waikiki and the University of Hawaii-Manoa, said Roger Morton, director of the city’s
Department of Transportation services, which runs both Skyline and TheBus, which are
interconnected.
A single HOLO card fare covers both TheBus and Skyline boardings.
Once the final Segment 3 leg is completed in 2031 and ends at the Civic Center station in Kakaako, the more than $10 billion system will include 19 stations along an 18.9-mile route.
But Mayor Rick Blangiardi still wants to add another station somewhere in Kapolei and to eventually reach his alma mater, UH-Manoa.
