Dept. of Transportation Monthly Newsletter
Connecting the DOTs...
December 2020
Completing Kapalama Container Terminal
By: Davis Yogi
The commercial harbors have long been the hub of commercial activity with the import and export of goods like sandalwood, sugar, and pineapple with evidence of long history of commerce traced to old rail road tracks hidden and covered by roadways and brush. With the advent of Statehood on August 21, 1959, Hawai‘i’s economy changed and continued to grow with the State of Hawaii purchasing lands from the Oahu Railway and Land Company (established 1889 - 1947) and Hawaiian Dredging and Hawai‘i Contracting (1902 -1929 later merged into Hawaiian Dredging Construction, Ltd.) and work by the smallest of the three DOT divisions working to ensure the flow of commerce over the following decades.
2020 Master plan, the importance of cargo shipping to our State could not have been overstated. Based on the throughput of containers (counted in 20foot equivalent units or TEUs) the American Association of Port Authorities ranked Honolulu Harbor as the tenth busiest of all 75 North American container ports in 1995. Yet, in a selected study of thirteen of these comparable ports (SMS Research, 1996), Honolulu Harbor’s cargo acreage places it in the lower 31 percent of this range. This discrepancy between the large number of containers handled and the limited cargo acreage available suggests that Honolulu Harbor’s cargo handling efficiencies are constrained by a lack of space.
A 1994 DBEDT study revealed that about 80% of all goods used in Hawaii are imported (Size and Growth Potential of Hawai‘i’s Maritime Industry, Lee & Olive, 1994). And of this amount, 98.6% of the goods are brought in through our commercial harbors system. In its 1997 Honolulu Harbor
The evolution in the method of cargo to be delivered in containers and demand for goods shifted cargo to be ordered and scheduled to arrive “just in time” to replenish depleted stocks. See KAPALAMA CONTAINER TERMINAL page 11
