3 - "The number of riders is likely way overrepresented"
There are a lot of people out there spinning this kind of non-sense. The EIS for the rail project estimates that by 2030 there will be about 120,000 daily boardings on the system. TheBus currently gets roughly 220,000 boardings today (and has for the past 35 years) on a system that has poor frequency in the suburbs and is painfully slow (4-8mph) in urban Honolulu.  Honolulu is the 4th densist metro area in the country (by population-weighted density which measures the average density at which residents actually live), trailing only NYC, San Fran, and LA.  More than 2/3 of all Oahu jobs will are located within 1 mile of a planned rail station, a higher ratio of jobs to a single transit line than any other city in the country can claim. There are tens of thousands of people living on the Leeward Coast, Ewa, and Central Oahu who get up early and go to work at unreasonable hours just to avoid traffic.