Honolulu Rail: The Complete Final Environmental Impact Statement
By city estimates, 116,300 people will ride trains along a proposed $5.5 billion Honolulu rail project each weekday by the year 2030. We’re willing to guess that’s far more people than will actually read the Final Environmental Impact Statement. But part of the reason it’s critical for people to be able to dive into this 650-megabyte monster (that’s thousands of pages, for those who measure in paper), is because the issues that concern Honolulu citizens don’t always make it into the executive summary.
The executive summary is a good place to start, but inevitably, even good-faith efforts by city officials to condense an incredibly complex development plan into a dozen or so pages result in myriad omissions. It’s also worth noting that an entity that’s poured countless hours of work and an enormous investment into making this proposal a reality would be foolish not to present its information in a way that supports its efforts.
As reporters, it’s our job to wade through this deluge of information, and tell you what it means with help from those — the document’s drafters and reviewers — who understand it best. But it’s also important that readers have the opportunity to see for themselves, and explore what this transit plan, in its latest incarnation, is all about.
Maybe you’ll read the thing word-for-word, maybe you won’t. Either way, here it is, in its massive searchable entirety.
The entire Final EIS document is also available this week at the City Municipal Reference Library, 558 South King Street, as well as at the City’s Department of Transportation Services, 650 South King Street, Fasi Municipal Building, Third Floor.
Honolulu High-Capacity Transit Corridor Project
Final Environmental Impact Statement / Section 4(f) Evaluation
Please note that due to the size of the Final Environmental Impact Statement (“EIS”), we have broken it up into smaller files. The EIS is in five parts and the appendices to the EIS are available via links below.
Appendices
| Appendix | Description |
|---|---|
| Final EIS Appendix A | This appendix includes the comments received in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement and response to those comments. It is broken up into three parts.
– Pages 1-1000 |
| This appendix provides information about the Preliminary Alignment Plans and Profiles. | |
| This appendix provides information about the Preliminary Right-of-Way Plans. | |
| This appendix provides information about bus service with the Project for the year 2030 and each of the phased openings. | |
| This appendix describes the general construction process and methods likely to be used in the construction of the Project. | |
| This appendix provides information about the Record of Agency correspondence and coordination. | |
| Final EIS Appendix G | This appendix provides information about the Record of Public and Stakeholder Correspondence and Coordination.
– Pages 1-400 |
| Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act Draft Programmatic Agreement. | |
| This appendix includes a summary of the mitigation and commitments that are documented in the body of the Final EIS. | |
| This appendix includes a summary of the Project’s relationship to land use plans, policies, and controls as documented in the Final EIS and technical reports completed for the Project. | |
| This appendix contains information about Honolulu International Airport, including the Airport Layout Plan and drawings that support an airspace evaluation by showing how the Project meets FAA requirements, including the Runway Protection Zone and Approach and Transitional Surfaces. |
