The Honolulu City Council is determined to spend billions of dollars on a ridiculous rail-transit line in Oahu. State Rep. Marilyn Lee happened to visit Puerto Rico and came back gushing about that island’s new Tren Urbano in Honolulu’s leading paper.

“There are many similarities between Hawaii and Puerto Rico,” says Rep. Lee. “We must proceed with our scheduled plan to build transit -- our sister island state has shown it can succeed.”

There are so many fallacies in Rep. Lee’s column that it is hard to know where to begin. Needless to say, Puerto Rico is not a state. Further, Honolulu rail proponents have a nasty habitat of calling rail transit “transit,” implying that Honolulu doesn’t have mass transit because it doesn’t have rail transit.

In fact, there are lessons that Hawaii can learn from Puerto Rico, just not the ones that the apparently innumerate Rep. Lee learned. As Honolulu rail skeptic Cliff Slater has noted, far from showing that rail transit can succeed, the Tren Urbano is just one more rail disaster.

Start with the cost. It was supposed to cost $766 million to build. After more than a decade of planning and construction, it ended up costing $2.25 billion. Even after adjusting for inflation, Northeastern University researchers found, that was a 113 percent cost overrun.

Next, look at ridership. Rep. Lee admitted that “ridership is lower than projected.” And how. The Tren Urbano was projected to carry 80,000 people per day. In its first year, it carried less than 25,000 people a day.

In 2005, the Puerto Rican Transportation Authority spent $43 million operating the Tren Urbano and collected slightly less than $600,000 in fares. Granted, 2005 was the first year of operation, but even in the first year you expect farebox recovery to be a little more than 1.4 percent. The agency collected far more from its bus riders, on whom it spent far less.

Puerto Rico was lucky: most of the cost of building the Tren Urbano was paid by U.S. taxpayers. Honolulu plans to impose most of the cost of its rail line on its own residents.

If Hawaiians want to look at a successful transit system in Puerto Rico, skip the Tren Urbano and look for the públicos, or public cars, that range up to 17-passenger vans. These are sometimes described as shared taxis and the operate a lot like airport shuttles in other U.S. cities. Públicos have fixed routes, but they will deviate from those routes for an extra charge.

In 2005, the públicos carried more than 20 times as many passengers (and passenger miles) as the Tren Urbano. The público’s farebox recovery rate? An amazing (for American transit) 98 percent. That’s because they are really a form of private transit that is regulated by the local Department of Transportation.

While Honolulu might benefit from something like públicos, it already has (despite the claims of the rail nuts) one of the most heavily used mass transit systems in the U.S. It carries nearly 4 percent of urban travel, more than all other major urban areas except New York, San Francisco, and Washington. It also carries 8.7 percent of commuters, more than Portland, San Diego, or many other regions with supposedly successful rail transit systems.

Plus Honolulu has numerous private bus operators and a competitive taxi system that caters to tourists and really is very close to the públicos in many ways. But Honolulu’s transit agency does everything it can to hamper its competition, such as forbidding private buses from taking tourists to popular beaches served by the public bus system.

The only reason Honolulu needs a rail transit line is so local politicians can award fat contracts to rail contractors and engineering firms. For transit riders and auto drivers, rail transit can only be bad news, draining away funds from transport systems that really work to feed the egos of local officials.

It is too bad that so many urban planners have jumped on the rail transit bandwagon. To justify their support of rail construction, they have to twist the data, bend their ethics, and betray the taxpayers they are supposed to serve. That’s just one more reason to be an antiplanner.

Randal O’Toole is director of the Thoreau Institute and a member of GRIH’s Board of Scholars. The Thoreau Institute, which publishes the Antiplanner where this piece was posted, is a nonprofit organization that seeks ways to protect the environment without big government. The Institute has prepared comprehensive analyses of the Forest Service, Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, more than 150 state land and resource agencies, dozens of transit systems, and more than a dozen metropolitan planning organizations. See more at http://ti.org/antiplanner/?page_id=209