Mililani Transit Center Opens

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A $5-million transit center in Mililani that will one day offer a hub-and-spoke bus system will have its grand opening this month.

The two-story Mililani Transit Center - along Meheula Parkway in the Mililani Town Center parking lot - will initially offer a circulator bus through Mililani and Mililani Mauka. The route will take one hour and stop at the transit center every half hour.

Dick Poirier, chairman of the Mililani-Waipio-Melemanu Neighborhood Board, toured the facility and called it a “beautiful structure” of 37,000 square feet, including 35 parking spaces for Town Center employees, an 800-square-foot conference room, elevator, 10 bus bays, six waiting shelters, 72 concrete stools and public restrooms.

Poirier added that the board has concerns about security because the transit entrance is on the parking lot side of the shopping center.“It’s dark, you can’t see it from the main road,“he said.“We’re suggesting to have some kind of cameras to monitor all hours, and secondly we’re pushing to have a police substation in the transit center.”

The planned hub-and-spoke system would have circulator buses running within the community that would be timed to connect with major bus lines from Mililani to downtown, Kapolei and other areas, Poirier said.

“The city’s going to come up with more routes,better routes,more circulator buses,“he said.“But at least we’ve got a major facility in place that we can work off.”