A 15-mile motorway is one of the world’s most expensive, having gone hundreds of millions over budget.
Interstate H3, also known as the John A Burns Freeway, is a 15-mile highway on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu.
It crosses the Koʻolau Range along several viaducts and through the 5,165-foot-long Tetsuo Harano Tunnels and the much smaller Hospital Rock Tunnels.
The highway satisfies a national defence purpose – connecting the main gate of Marine Corps Base Hawaii in the East and the US Navy port of Pearl Harbor in the West.
H3 was the most expensive Interstate Highway ever built on a cost-per-mile basis. Its final cost was £1 billion (equivalent to £1.8 billion in 2023), or approximately £64 million per mile (equivalent to £113 million per mile in 2023).
This was five times more than the original budget of £200 million to build the six-lane highway due to the time it took to build and the opposition it faced.
It is one of the biggest construction and public works projects ever undertaken by the state of Hawaii. The highway was finished in 1997 after being proposed in 1960 and started in the late 1980s.
H3 faced decades of controversy and protest. The route passes through land that holds extreme cultural significance to native Hawaiians, and groups are still calling for the road’s removal today.
Many contend that the freeway is “cursed” due to its destruction of religious sites and is, therefore, harmful even to those who traverse it.
Residents of East Shore communities also continue to object to the freeway’s developmental impacts on their quiet neighbourhoods.
They fear urbanisation on the scale of Honolulu, which could bring heavy traffic into their neighbourhoods and affect the value of their homes in the relatively rural communities.
Admirers consider the road an engineering wonder. It is often compared to various cinematic landscapes in Star Wars and other movies, and it sometimes reduces travel time for cross-island commuters.