Next Stops for Honolulu Rail: Airport to Middle Street in 2025

Ridership and operating hours are expected to increase significantly when this second segment opens.

The second segment of the Skyline rail line is expected to open in late 2025, according to both the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation and the city’s Department of Transportation Services. That segment will extend the line from Aloha Stadium to the Middle Street Transit Center in Kalihi, with stops at Pearl Harbor, the airport and Lagoon Drive.

Every day, an average of 4,000 passengers ride Skyline between West Kapolei and Aloha Stadium. Transportation officials say they knew that first segment would attract few passengers, but they expect many more once the line to Middle Street is open.

Roger Morton, deputy director of the Department of Transportation Services, says he stresses to people that the rail line wasn’t designed simply to transport people from East Kapolei to the stadium. It was designed as the key first step to eventually get people into central Honolulu and Downtown.

Tests on the second segment, which began in June 2024, are done at night after the first segment closes. During the tests, operators run the trains at full speed.

Construction of the second segment and its infrastructure is 99% complete, HART COO Rick Keene says, adding that once testing is complete, trial runs will begin in the second quarter of 2025.

National construction contractor Tutor Perini was the only company to bid on the contract to build Skyline’s third segment, which runs to the corner of Halekauwila and South streets in Kaka‘ako. That station has been dubbed Ka‘ākaukukui.

On to Ala Moana Center?

HART CEO Lori Kahikina says that for now, expected funding only takes the rail to South Street but that any money left over after that segment is complete could be used to help extend the line further. In 2017, the Honolulu City Council voted to require that the route run at a minimum from Kapolei to Ala Moana Center – two stops beyond the Ka‘ākaukukui station, but current projections of the funding won’t pay for those last two stops.

HART often refers to the Ka‘ākaukukui station as the Civic Center station, but that name is misleading because Civic Center currently refers to the cluster of municipal buildings and lawns anchored by City Hall and the Fasi Municipal Building on King Street, two blocks mauka of the planned rail station. 

Tutor Perini expects to have shovels in the ground starting June 1 and to start in two to three different locations going in different directions. Kahikina says she’s confident the company will finish its work in 2031.

“We haven’t missed a deadline yet, so we’ll see what unforeseen things that we encounter,” Kahikina says. “But our funding ends in 2031, so we’ll make sure we finish it on time.”

Keene says he believes all of the money to pay for that third segment to Kaka‘ako will be received by 2031.

And if HART’s leaders have their way, that won’t be the end of the line.

“We’re so committed to find a way to get to Ala Moana [Center], which we still want to do, but a lot of it’s going to depend upon how this new contract starts out, our anticipated cash at the end, how much room we have to keep going financially,” Keene says.

“If you look at almost every other [urban rail] system in the country, as people start using it, as people see the utility of it, then there’s a demand for taking it further,” Kahikina says.

Morton says the rail line is going to be with us for the next 75 years and that it will grow to accommodate new developments and population centers that spring up over that time.

“It is on track to be a key part of our infrastructure,” Morton says.

Connecting Bus Routes

For now, the trains run Monday through Friday from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. and weekends from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. But that will change: A common complaint among riders and potential riders has been Skyline’s limited operating hours. 

Morton says HART has always acknowledged that Skyline should stay open later, but says expanding the hours wouldn’t make financial sense until the second segment opens and there are more riders. When that happens, he says, the hours will be expanded.

“The reality was that we knew that our first segment wasn’t really connecting population centers to employment centers, that we knew that the ridership would not be great, and so therefore we didn’t think keeping it open [longer] made any sense” for the first segment.

When that first segment opened in 2023, the Department of Transportation Services changed bus routes to align with it. That will happen again with the second rail segment, but this time “on steroids,” Morton says. Most changes will be at the Lagoon Drive and Middle Street stations, with bus routes to accommodate people traveling to and from Downtown, Waikīkī and UH Mānoa