During his fifth State of the City address Tuesday, Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi announced that the second segment of the Skyline rail will open to the public on Oct. 1, and construction on the third segment will begin this year.
The second segment runs a little over 5 miles from Aloha Stadium to Middle Street and includes stops at Honolulu airport and Pearl Harbor.
Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation Executive Director and CEO Lori Kahikina was a bit surprised by Blangiardi's commitment to a firm opening date.
"You know how mayor is. So he did the same thing to us in segment one. I kept telling him summer, summer, summer. 'No, I want to say a date,'" she recalled.
She previously indicated that segment two would open later this year — but had not committed to a date. Kahikina said Blangiardi did give her a heads-up before his speech this week.
"I still wanted to tell everyone that night, when he said 'Oct. 1', I stood up and I said, 'end of the year,'" she joked.
Kahikina said she sent an email the following morning to her team, including Hitachi and the Honolulu Department of Transportation Services, emphasizing the need to do everything in their power to complete the next segment by Oct. 1.
"By him saying opening Oct. 1, that actually backs us up a little bit more, because we need to give time to transfer over to DTS, and they determine actually when they open for revenue service," she said.
Kahikina said her team will know more about the schedule once Hitachi goes into trial runs in July.
"I do want to make it so public that we are not going to cut corners just to meet that Oct. 1 deadline. We have to make sure everything is safe," she said.
She said testing segment two will be more difficult because segment one is already in operation — with electricity and passengers.
"So there's only a few hours in the evening on the weekdays and a few hours on the weekends that we can do this testing," she told HPR. "Now we're going to have to run it, engineering hours, take down segment one and bring the two segments together and do this testing."
Segment three, the last part of this rail project, will operate from Middle Street in Kalihi to the Civic Center station near Kakaʻako and is scheduled to be completed in 2031.
Kahikina said that some of the support columns for segment three should start going up this summer. Downtown utility work is also expected to wrap up this summer.
As for federal funding uncertainty, she said, "There's over $300 million outstanding that we're hoping that it's not in jeopardy. It is a contract right now with FTA (Federal Transit Administration), and I understand it has already been appropriated, but you just, you never know what's going on in D.C. right now."
This interview aired on The Conversation on March 20, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m.
