Skyline ridership still up a month after second segment opens

Riders are continuing to take to the rails, more than a month after the second segment of Skyline opened to the public on Oct. 16.

Since then, weekday ridership numbers have routinely surpassed 10,000 daily, according to data provided to Aloha State Daily by the City and County of Honolulu.

There were three Mondays — Oct. 20, Oct. 27 and Nov. 10 — where the number of riders dipped just below that threshold: 9,816, 9,936 and 9,998 respectively.

Veteran’s Day, which was Tuesday, Nov. 11, had the lowest weekday ridership tally since Oct. 16, with 7,966.

Opening day of segment 2 had the highest weekday count so far, with 11,897 riders, followed by Wednesday, Nov. 19, with 11,298. Even more turned out for a fare-free weekend on Oct. 18 and 19.

The first segment of the rail opened in June 2023 and spans just under 11 miles from East Kapolei to Aloha Stadium. This section includes the rail's first nine stations.

The newly opened 5.2-mile stretch of guideway now carries riders beyond Aloha Stadium to the Middle Street Transit Center and has four new stations: Makalapa (Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam), Lelepaua (Daniel K. Inouye International Airport), Āhua (Lagoon Drive) and Kahauiki (Middle Street Transit Center), taking riders to some of the island’s biggest employment hubs.

“The Department of Transportation Services is incredibly pleased to see our communities embrace Skyline as a new alternative way to get around,” DTS Deputy Director Jon Nouchi said in a statement provided to Aloha State Daily. “We are now seeing average weekday ridership surpass 11,000 passengers, a figure that is triple what we carried during the operation of Segment 1.”

Nouchi says it’s “particularly encouraging” to see that of the rail’s four highest-performing stations, three are part of the newly opened segment: Kahauiki, Āhua and Lelepaua.

“This data confirms that we are connecting our residents to the destinations that matter most,” he continued. “Additionally, we are also carrying about 8,500 riders on our new connected A Line, U Line, and W Line, which express passengers on fast, frequent, and direct routes to Downtown Honolulu, [University of Hawai‘i at] Mānoa, and Waikīkī, respectively. We look to [improve] TheBus services to and from Skyline to bring more people to Skyline and further growing our ridership into the future.”

(ICYMI: You can read more about new and recently modified bus routes here).

“Seeing more than 10,000 riders a day on Skyline’s second segment in its first six weeks is an outstanding start. It shows that people are embracing this system and the convenience it brings. We expect ridership to continue growing as more residents experience how Skyline can make their commute easier and more reliable,” Mayor Rick Blangiardi said in a statement provided to ASD.

City spokesman Scott Humber told ASD in an email that the city's Department of Transportation Services originally wanted to double ridership in the second segment and “we have exceeded that by nearly tripling it, going from 3,500 daily to more than 10,000.”

Humber noted, too, that Mayor Rick Blangiardi wants to get to 25,000 rides daily by Oct. 16, 2026.

In September, daily ridership counts ranged from 1,842 to 7,519. Prior to the second section of the rail route opening last month, monthly ridership numbers this year had been as low as 89,167 in June and as high as 119,513 in September.

In October, ridership totaled 241,373.

Here are the weekday counts from Oct. 16 through Nov. 21, provided by the city: