Honolulu’s Skyline rail system has passed its testing phase — with some lingering challenges — before Thursday’s opening of the next 5.2-mile route for public ridership that will take passengers into four new stations at Makalapa/Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, Lagoon Drive and Middle Street in Kalihi, amid elevated expectations of a significant boost in ridership.
There’s also nothing less than $125 million in additional federal funding at stake for opening Segment 2, along with Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s push to increase passenger counts to 25,000 a day within a year.
In September, the city’s Department of Transportation Services, which operates both Skyline and its interconnected city bus system, reported rail ridership figures as low as 1,842 on a recent Sunday and as high as 7,159 on a recent Saturday for a total of 119,513 passengers for the month.
Blangiardi told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser during last week’s media preview of the new route and four stations that the city will launch an intensive advertising and marketing campaign touting rail’s benefits, especially for Leeward commuters who face daily gridlock on Oahu’s roads while Skyline trains run 99% on schedule and soar overhead unaffected by vehicle traffic.
“Nobody has seen a campaign like we’re about to unleash for the coming year on every screen on every digital platform — ‘Skyline’ — stories that people will read,” Blangiardi said. “We’ve got to strike an emotional chord here with people because there’s so much to overcome … all this cynicism.”
For parents who commute with children who attend different schools, Blangiardi said they will be able to adapt to new bus connections with Skyline station stops that he promised will save families gas, insurance and maintenance costs for the price of one HOLO card tap for combined daily Skyline and TheBus service.
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“People will say, ‘How can we make this work for us?’” he said. “It’s going to free them up. On average for a family, it’s probably a $1,000 a month for car, insurance and gas. They can save $1,000 a month.”
With the second leg, Blangiardi expects ridership to shoot up, thanks largely to employees of Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and the 15,000 or so workers at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, who currently have to park offsite and board employee shuttles to get to their jobs.
He called the new Skyline stops “a game changer” that he said has already reduced much of the original criticism about the costly transit project, although he acknowledged that plenty of skepticism about rail remains.
“Now we’ll be able to take people on the West Side to major employment centers,” Blangiardi said. “For the last two years, we’ve been averaging 99.8% arrival times within 10 seconds. We’re really excited about this.”
By riding Skyline, he said, employees at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and the airport “will be able to get work on time and with certainty.”
‘Get it operational’
Most employees who work at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam live in Ewa, according to Jon Nouchi, deputy director for DTS.
“They’re coming from all over, but mostly they’re coming from the west,” Nouchi said. “There’s a lot of new houses out there with pristine beaches and we’re giving them another option to get to work.”
The new airport station delivers and picks up Skyline passengers in between the neighbor island and international terminals.
DTS Director Roger Morton called the Makalapa/Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and airport stations “primary employment centers” and said the mayor has “a very ambitious goal that within a year we’re targeting 25,000 riders per day. That’s an ambitious goal, but we’re working hard to meet it.”
Blangiardi has placed similar pressure on Lori Kahikina, CEO and executive director of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, which continues to build Skyline’s third segment and stations to its final destination in Kakaako.
Blangiardi, Kahikina and other rail officials have acknowledged public criticism that they should not have ended the first leg at the Halawa station near the abandoned Aloha Stadium when public service began June 30, 2023.
But they were under intense pressure from both the public and the Federal Transit Administration to show that the system works — and to rebuild confidence and a healthier relationship with FTA officials, who were so frustrated that they told Blangiardi in the early days of his first term in office that Honolulu had to get its “act together,” the mayor said.
“We had to get it operational and prove to the FTA,” Blangiardi said. “When we got into office, they had already spent $6 billion. There was no indication of when it would become operational. … We had to demonstrate that we can get this operational and we did. We had wheels that didn’t fit. We had ‘frogs’ (track junctions) that needed welding. And the biggest thing we had was such a negative public who couldn’t understand how much money was being spent.”
After the first phase of the 18.9-mile, 19-station rail system opened in 2023, the FTA released $175 million in federal funds that had been withheld since 2017 toward the $744 million remaining the agency owed the city at the time.
The opening of the second rail segment also comes with expectations the FTA will release another round of $125 million in federal funding for Skyline. Kahikina hopes the latest payment arrives by the end of the year.
Counting on commuters
Paid fare service for the new second, 5.2-mile leg runs from 4 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. beginning Thursday, followed by two days of free ridership Friday and Saturday.
Passengers riding for free still need a HOLO card to enter any station to access either the first or new routes.
Nouchi told the Star-Advertiser aboard last week’s ride into the new stations that opening the latest phase comes with far less pressure because rail officials have proven the system works with 99% efficiency over the more than two years of service.
Blangiardi said he expects Skyline criticism to ease once ridership numbers increase and the public sees its usefulness for commuters when the four new stations open closer to town, ending at Middle Street in Kalihi, another employment hub.
“They’re going to be pleasantly surprised,” Blangiardi said. “We’re fulfilling a fundamental need to major employment centers with trains arriving every 10 minutes within 10 seconds. We’ve never had that before. That’s going to improve people’s lives and eliminate uncertainty. We have a really akamai public and they’re going to see the fact that it’s stress free and safe and will be able to take out the uncertainty in their lives and rely on it. People will catch on to that.”
Morton especially expects the airport rail station “to be the biggest station in ridership volume.”
And he expects Skyline passengers to also use the new Lagoon Drive station where DTS has planned express bus service from the station to downtown Honolulu, Waikiki and the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Jonathan Bennett, 38, a student at Leeward Community College in Pearl City, took his first Skyline ride last week, accompanied by his 8-year-old daughter, Kobe, and a group of 44 of her friends on a YMCA field trip. He said he was impressed by the ride and intrigued that the newest segment could drop him at the Lagoon Drive station so he could ride TheBus directly to UH-Manoa for the same price of a Skyline trip.
“I’ll definitely look into it,” Bennett said.
His daughter — named after the late Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant — declared that riding Skyline was “super nice and kind of fast.”
The view from Skyline
Most of the rail system’s overhead guideway stands 30 feet above street level. But the route into the airport station runs parallel to the H-1 Freeway’s long right-turn entrance into the airport from the Ewa direction, on the edge of the airport tarmac.
The guideway had to be built at its highest point — 70 feet above the tarmac — to ensure it would clear commercial jet tails, followed by a tight “S curve” to avoid the tarmac itself.
The elevation then drops to just 15 feet to allow Skyline trains to run below the airport’s flight path.
Going westbound, the Skyline route offers an elevated view of artist Wyland’s humpback mural that he painted on Hawaiian Airlines’ Airport Center building that includes smaller whales on the bottom that can be difficult to see from the freeway.
Once the final Segment 3 leg is completed, which is expected in 2031, the more than $10 billion system will include 19 stations along an 18.9-mile route, ending at the Civic Center Station in Kakaako.
If the city can figure out how to find the money to extend the Skyline route farther, Blangiardi still wants to add another station somewhere in Kapolei and to eventually reach his alma mater, UH-Manoa.
He said he is even considering the possibility of extending a future leg underground and through Oahu’s water table to get to Ala Moana — Hawaii’s largest bus transit center — on to Waikiki and finally connecting to UH-Manoa.
“It’s not outside the realm of possibilities,” Blangiardi said. “The channeling they do all around the world is all underwater.”
