In paradise, they are building transit that runs over the road rather than under it or on it.

Honolulu’s 32-kilometre, $5.16-billion light rail line — scheduled for completion in 2019 — will run mostly over highway medians.

It will connect the city with the airport, the Pearl Harbour naval base and the 50,000-seat Aloha Stadium.

Elevated transit is generally considered a cheaper alternative to tunneled subways and it has the added benefit of leaving car lanes intact. It also avoids traffic delays.

So if overhead trains are good enough for Hawaii, Chicago, Vancouver, London and New York, why has transit-starved Toronto so consistently shunned this solution?

It has been suggested many times. But, with the exception of the Scarborough RT, there’s never been much appetite for overhead tracks.

Most recently, it’s been floated as an alternative to running an LRT on the road on the east end of the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown LRT , from Laird Rd. to Kennedy Station.

It would eliminate the problem of reduced left turns and car lanes in a busy section of town, said London-based transit expert Michael Schabas in his review of Metrolinx’s Big Move . He contends east Eglinton is never going to have the kind of pedestrian vibrancy of a Queen St. so adding LRT to the road merely adds traffic.

“Most of Vancouver’s Skytrain network is elevated. This does not seem to have damaged Vancouver’s reputation as one of the world’s most beautiful cities,” says his report.

An elevated track would also allow for driverless trains, something Schabas thinks Toronto should consider to save operating costs. Automated trains cannot operate in mixed traffic, they must drive on a grade separated right of way for obvious safety reasons.

Being an island with limited space, means there’s a compelling case for elevated transit in Hawaii, which is being modeled on the Vancouver Skytrain, said Scott Ishikawa of the Honolulu Rail Transit Project.

“The most important reason is the trains are separate from the surface traffic below, free of any traffic delays and accidents,” he said.

“A train ride from the first stop (in Honolulu) to the last stop will be 42 minutes, regardless of time of day,” said Scott Ishikawa of the Honolulu Rail Transit Project.

But Toronto planners and politicians fear elevated transit lines risk creating a public realm with all the atmosphere of the Gardiner Expressway’s dank underbelly.

The Hawaiian version has also been controversial.

But, said Ishikawa, “The system will actually be dwarfed by buildings and freeway viaducts, particularly in downtown Honolulu.”

Toronto chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat cites the shadow that a structure like the Gardiner casts on the street below. She also brandishes one of the chief arguments for building Toronto’s LRTs in the first place.

“From a land use planning perspective, if our objective in integrating higher order transit into our city is to create great places for walking, for commerce, living,… elevated infrastructure doesn’t work so well for any of those objectives,” she said.

It may be less expensive to build than an underground subway but it’s not necessarily cheap to maintain, said Keesmaat.

“This is the challenge with the Gardiner. It’s much more expensive from an operational and maintenance perspective than a road that’s at grade. The Catch22 with elevating any kind of infrastructure – a really good example of this is the subway in Chicago – not only is it ugly, it creates really dark spaces,” she said.

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It’s not just the shadow but the noise of elevated transit lines that can be problematic, said TTC CEO Andy Byford. If you build above the street you’ve also got to contend with getting people there, that means elevators or escalators.

Keesmaat says she’s more optimistic than Schabas about the potential for at-grade LRT to inspire a more human atmosphere on Eglinton east.

“There are some areas along Eglinton that will mature very quickly, the easy sights. They’re always the ones that go first. Then there are other sites that are tricky. Land values are going to have to increase significantly before you’re in fact going to see that intensification,” she said.

That’s often the case, she said, pointing to Bloor St. near the Dundas West Station. It has taken years, but mid-rise development is happening there.

“The Honolulu transit corridor project is really about connecting the city with the county…. It’s about connecting two urban areas. That’s very different from the context we imagine along Eglinton where we would like to see a significant amount of intensification along the corridor,” said Keesmaat.

Despite the accolades heaped on Vancouver, the integration of Skytrain into the urban fabric has been uneven, said Lawrence Frank, a professor of the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC.

Some of the station development has been very successful. But the spaces between stations have been more problematic although it’s not clear how much elevated transit depresses those land values, he said.

On balance though, Frank said that elevated transit should probably be considered more often.

“It’s just a matter of having very careful urban design standards and I really believe that vegetation – a lot of investment in trees along the sides of the street – is really important. To the degree possible you want to buffer it any way you can,” he said.

While overhead transit hasn’t historically been embraced here, Metrolinx CEO Bruce McCuaig says it “is one of the solutions we do need to think about for different parts of the system as we move forward.”

It was rejected east of Don Mills for the Eglinton Crosstown. But there are plans for an elevated section in the West End, near Black Creek Dr.

“That’s an opportunity,” he said, “for us to show how we can build an elevated section of guideway in a way that fits into the community. One of the concerns in Toronto historically has been how do you integrate an elevated structure into the local community.”