Keeping current with issues that matter most in Hawaii.

New Treatments for Our Auto Addiction

by Alan D. McNarie
Cultures invent words for the things that become important to them. Thai has a huge array of words for precisely describing the moods and emotional states of people, for instance. Hawaiian has various words to describe different types of rains, such as “kauanoe” and “kanilehua.”

In recent years, modern residents of Hawai’i Island have started inventing new terms for traffic patterns: the Five O’Clock Derby, the Kainaliu Crawl….
Hawai’i Island’s traffic eats thousands of hours out of its residents’ lives every day. With most of the island’s population crowded along a thin necklace of coastal highways; with most of its affordable housing on one side of the island and most of its job-generating resorts on the other side; and with runaway growth outstripping its infrastructure, the island could be a poster child for poor traffic planning. One of the greatest challenges for the administration of Mayor Harry Kim, as he enters his second four-year term, will be untangling the massive traffic snarls that have resulted out of decades of bad governmental decisions.

The County is aware of the challenge. Last year, it completed a massive “Regional Circulation Plan” for the Keahole to Honaunau traffic corridor along the Kona Coast. A similar study is under way as a Puna regional plan. This fall, the County Council passed an ordinance creating two “fare free” zones for its Hele-On public buses in Puna and West Hawai’i. And last October 8, the Kim administration collaborated with the State Department of Transportation in organizing a workshop by Colorado traffic consultant Jim Charlier that called for a basic rethinking of how traffic problems are solved – moving away from simply building bigger highways, and toward an approach that creates a more balanced infrastructure of highways, feeder and residential streets, pedestrian and bicycle corridors and mass transit. Workshop invitees included not only state and county officials, but also many of the island’s major landowners and developers.

“We are only beginning this process of community planning, so I cannot say where it will take us,” wrote Kim, in a follow-up letter to participants. “At this point I cannot tell you how it will impact you and your land-use plans. That is why it is so crucial that we keep the lines of communication open between us. You will be an important participant as we begin this project, and I look forward to working with you. The bottom line is simple: we need your help in addressing the problems and needs of the County of Hawai’i.”

Regional Plans

Hawai’i Island is in the grip of automobile dependence. According to the 2000 U.S. Census figures, out of an islandwide labor force of 70,791, 63,401 commuted to work; of those, 43,508 drove to work alone, and 12,494 carpooled. 1, 873 walked to work, 206 bicycled, and 3,879 worked at home. Only 466 utilized public transportation, including buses and taxis; of these, 363 – only six tenths of a percent of the workforce – took the bus.

Those figures are already out of date; they don’t reflect four solid years of post-2000 growth, in which job numbers burgeoned, especially on the Kona side, but affordable housing and road infrastructure failed to keep up with demand.

The traffic problem is particularly acute on the Kona side, where two Kona highway projects, the Ke Ala O Keauhou (Ali’i Parkway) and the Mamalahoa Bypass, are still mired in litigation and controversy – the former because of Hawaiian graves within the planned right-of-way, and the latter because of a controversial deal between the Yamashiro-era county government and the developers of the Hokulia project, in which the developer agreed to build the bypass in exchange for the county’s blessing on the project. When a judge ruled that Hokulia’s luxury homes were an illegal use of agricultural land, his order stopped work not just on the project, but on a section of the new highway

Discontent about traffic woes finally boiled over at recent hearings on the proposed Cliftos development in North Kona. Citizens’ anger over runaway development without enough traffic infrastructure helped persuade Mayor Kim to veto the developer’s rezoning request.

But even without Cliftos, and even with the completion of the new bypass and parkway, the West Side infrastructure appears headed into deeper trouble. The Final Report of the Keahole to Honaunau Regional Circulation Plan, completed in February of last year, projected that the population of North and South would increase by 50 percent between now and 2020 – and that traffic volumes on the region’s roads would double in the same time period. Even with the completion of Mamalahoa Bypass and Ke Ala O Keahou, “peak hour problems will be similar to existing congested conditions within the next two decades,” projected the report’s authors.

The report also noted that some of the area’s main roads were already in crisis. “Several major arterial and collector roads in the region already have a Level of Service (LOS) “E” during AM and PM peak hours,” the authors stated. “LOS ‘E’ is characterized by frequent cycle failures, poor progression and long delays.” Among the roads with LOS “E” problems, according to the report, were Queen Ka’ahumanu from Kealakehe to Palani; the Hawai’i Belt Road from Hualalai to Kuakini, and Palani Road east of Henry Street.

To mitigate the situation, the plan suggests several “Short Term Projects,” including establishing access standards for Mamalahoa Bypass and Ke Ala O Keahou; extending Kealaka’a Street and Kealakehe Parkway to intersect each other, and improving bus service and creating more bicycle and pedestrian paths. In the long term, the plan looks at possible routes for a new “North-South Transportation Corridor,” including “mauka alignment above the ‘coffee belt,’” a “midlevel alignment through existing development” from Honaunau to Kealakehe Parkway, and “expansion of existing Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway through existing development.” Estimates for any of these options range from more than $5 million to more than $10 million per mile. The plan also examines the idea of a “fixed-rail transit corridor” from Kona International Airport to Keauhou, with an initial price tag of $2.5 billion and annual operating costs of around $72.3 million – still a bargain when compared to the per capita cost of building roadways and operating automobiles, contended the Final Report.

The situation is little better in Puna, although residents may be more used to the delays than are their counterparts in burgeoning Kona. Improvements have been made on the Kea’au-Pahoa Highway, but plans for a second route out of Eastern Puna remain stalled. One 1996 study has projected that if all of the existing subdivisions in Puna reach their full build-out, the area will require at least 14 traffic lanes.

The Kim administration is in the process of gathering community input for a “Puna Regional Circulation Plan,” similar to the Kona plan, at on-going community meetings.
Councilman Bob Jacobson, who represents some of the district, says he has been “pretty pleased” with the community participation so far.

“We did get a humongous cross-section of people who were willing to work hard,” he noted.

Community-Based Traffic Relief

On October 8, with the Kim administration’s cooperation and approval, the Hawai’i Department of Transportation convened a workshop to begin a basic rethinking of traffic planning island-wide. Conducting the workshop was Jim Charlier of Charlier and Associates, Inc., a Boulder, Colorado transportation planning firm.

Some of Charlier’s conclusions were startling. In areas where there was high demand for transportation and where traffic congestion already occurred, he noted, simply improving the transportation system would, of itself, cause an increase in traffic, or “induced traffic”; within a few years, this induced traffic would swell to fill the improved system’s capacity again, leaving the system as congested as ever. On the other hand, in areas where systems were currently uncongested or where there was low transportation demand, improving the road system did not lead to a great increase in induced traffic. In other words, building new or wider roads to ease traffic congestion in areas with runaway development didn’t solve congestion; it simply spurred more development until the system is congested again. But building or improving roads where there was no development pressure before did not spur development.

Part of the reason for this phenomenon lies in a drastic shift in building paradigms that took place in the later half of the 20th Century. Before that, towns had traditionally been laid out in “grids”: streets that met at right angles, surrounding a commercial center laid out along a main street or town square. With grid traffic, if one path to a destination was blocked, there was always an alternative route, simply by turning left instead of right.

But as families began seeking new homes after the post-WWII “Baby Boom,” developers responded with a new sort of housing area: the “pod,” an entirely residential subdivision in which homes were often laid out along winding, looping streets, with only one exit onto an arterial highway. With only one way out, all the traffic would spill onto the highway at that point, creating instant congestion. This, in turn, would lead to pressure to “improve” the highway by widening it. But the wider, faster highway would mean that commuters could travel farther from their jobs in the same amount of time, providing an instant incentive to build more suburban pods, creating more congestion, creating incentive to widen the highway again, or to build a new freeway or bypass further out.

In the short term, this cycle meant profits and jobs for the construction industry. But in the long term, Charlier pointed out, there were some major negative effects, including urban sprawl, falling real estate resale values and other associated problems including, interestingly enough, obesity. (As the suburban pods spread farther and farther from commercial centers and workplaces, the ability to go anywhere on foot or bicycle diminished. Charlier showed slide after slide of map charts, plotting the accelerating spread of obesity across the nation as the pods marched outward from urban centers.)

As distance from urban centers to suburban pods increases, businesses abandon downtowns and move to cities along the arterial highways, further congesting traffic. With each new shopping center, the zone of commuting comfort expands outward again, creating new bedroom communities at its outer fringe and sapping the economic vitality out of old communities, suburbs and shopping centers until induced traffic swells to the choking point again.

With suburban pods and gated subdivisions, there were no alternate routes; the only tool for alleviating traffic congestion was to add more and more lanes to arterial highways. 
”When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” one of Charlier’s power point slides read.

His solution: a ten-point plan to develop a more balanced approach to transportation.

The first principle of such a plan, he maintained, was “mobility balance”: developing not just arterial highways, but street grids, connector roads and access routes that would take some of the pressure off the arterials – and developing alternate transportation modes, such as bike routes, pedestrian routes and bus systems.

The second principle was “connectivity.” “A well-connected network of narrow streets is safer and more efficient, and has more capacity, than a poorly-connected network of wide streets,” maintained a handout from the presentation. “Connectivity can best be achieved when development first occurs and is difficult to establish later, especially in residential areas.”

An effective transportation system, Charlier proposed, should be designed to be “community sensitive,” with adequate road and street capacity determined by community needs. “The appropriate scale and design of urban streets should be determined by network considerations and community character, not by traffic forecasts,” maintained the handout. “Transportation planning based on traffic forecasting and modeling is self-fulfilling and perpetuates the problems it was intended to solve.” Such a plan would be designed to encourage active lifestyles by creating “good walking and bicycling environments.” It would “cultivate mixed use centers” such as downtown commercial areas. And it would involve a public transit system whose purpose was “to improve mobility choices, transportation flexibility, community resilience, and economic vitality, not to reduce traffic congestion.”

It was a Zen-like approach, in a way: the best way to solve traffic congestion was not to focus on solving traffic congestion, but on meeting community needs.

“Mr. Charlier’s presentation focused on transportation planning, but the bottom line is not transportation, but community,” Kim wrote, in his follow-up letter. “We must decide what kind of community we want, and that will dictate how we address everything else: roads, infrastructure, social services, public safety, schools, etc. Too often in the past we have done this backwards: building roads, for example, and letting roads dictate what kind of community we have.”

Actually implementing such a plan will be the real challenge. For the landowners and developers who attended the workshop, it might mean developing a different model for new subdivisions: instead of gated luxury residential areas, the County could encourage more village-like developments, with small commercial centers, gridded streets and multiple entrances. But even if future developments follow a saner pattern, what can be done with the multitude of developments already approved and under construction? And how could the existing infrastructure, with its dozens of villages and subdivisions strung out along a few arterial highways, be turned into something saner and more sustainable?

Bulking Up the Bus System

One possible answer is to make an improvement on the 2000 Census’s miserable bus commuting statistics. The Final Report of the Keahole to Honaunau Regional Circulation Plan noted the island’s Hele-On public bus service had “a very limited service area and schedule due to the scattered, low-density distribution of the island’s largely rural population.”

The County is already hard at work on that. The most visible sign of that effort is the authorization by the County Council of the new West Hawai’i and Puna-Hilo “free bus-ride zones.” Beginning January 1 of 2005, passengers can ride for free on any bus within the commuter corridors from Ocean View to Kawaihae and from Pahoa to Hilo.

The new policy marks a sea-change in the Council’s approach to Hawaii’s venerable but chronically underfunded Hele-On system.

“In the past, the policy was…that the bus system had to recover 50 percent of their costs through their fares,” County Managing Director Dixie Kaetsu told the Journal. “Now they seem to be changing their policies, with the free zones and the promotional fares, which will give us a lot more flexibility.”

The system is also about to get more buses. Jacobson claims some credit for that, saying that he had approached the island’s Congressional delegation and gotten $2.3 million for new Hele-On vehicles through an appropriation sponsored by Senator Daniel Inouye.

The Hele-On system also expects to get about $320,000 between January and June of next year from its share of an increase in the vehicle weight taxes. According to County Transit Administrator Tom Brown, that money will be used entirely for “service expansion,” including new Ocean View-South Kohala and North Kohala-Waimea-Kona routes, as well as the re-routing of all existing Kona-area buses to include service to Kona Hospital.

“We’re also going to be implementing an after-school service that will shuttle Kohala and Ocean View Late January-Early February,” notes Brown. “One of our priorities actually is to provide more late afternoon services so school-age children can participate in after-school activities.”

Getting Homes Where the Jobs Are

Another area that needs to be addressed to mitigate traffic problems is the affordable housing crisis that has forced lower-income employees into the “Five (a.m.) O’Clock Derby,” racing from homes on the lava flows of Puna, Ka’u and South Kohala to jobs on the Kona-Kohala Coast, via winding mountain roads in the early hours of the morning.

As of this paper’s deadline, the Kim administration was working on a proposal to raise the required ratio of “affordable” to “luxury” housing from 10 percent to 20 percent in new developments.

“At the same time, we make it easier for developers by creating a standard mechanism to transfer credits,” read a draft of the proposed housing policy change that was obtained by the Journal. “An affordable housing developer who builds more affordable units than required can make a private sale of those credits to market developers. We expect that this will be a major incentive to affordable developers because market developers will subsidize their projects to buy the credits instead of paying in-lieu fees, or having to include affordable units in their projects, or having to do a separate affordable development. This has to be geographically limited.”

But these changes may not be enough, given the magnitude of the crisis. The county is in the midst of an island-wide real estate boom, with skyrocketing land prices fueled by luxury developers. If the definition of “affordable housing” is defined by median income, then the plethora of luxury-range homes and high-income residents will drive even so-called “affordable” homes out the reach of families who must subsist on service-industry jobs.

Another area where progress might be made is in encouraging telecommuting and home-based businesses. At the county level, this may mean relaxing zoning codes further to allow stay-at-home enterprises, even if that means a little more noise and congestion within neighborhoods. The community of Volcano may provide a spontaneously generated model for such neighborhoods: while it remains a bedroom community for Hilo, it also harbors dozens of Bed and Breakfasts, art studios, internet sales operations and other small businesses, while maintaining the appearance of a sleepy village. But the community is still smarting from a neighborhood war that erupted when residents on opposite sides of a zoning dispute started reporting each other for alleged zoning and permitting violations caused by their home-based businesses.

The Cost

The real challenge that the County may face may not be in forming its new vision of community-based traffic solutions – that vision already is becoming increasingly clear- but in implementing such a vision in the face of entrenched interests. Those interests include more than developers. When the University Terrace subdivision was proposed, for instance, it met many of the criteria for the new village-like subdivisions that Charlier’s workshop suggested. The planned subdivision was located close in to an existing urban center. It had more than one access. It contained smaller, more moderately-priced lots and had its own small commercial center. But the project was denounced by the community association in a nearby luxury subdivision, some of whose members feared that cheaper housing nearby would affect their own home values. (It should be noted that the project also raised opposition for other reasons, including its possible effect on the watershed above downtown Hilo and the developer’s plan to install high-rise housing.) Eventually the project was approved, but only after downsizing to a lower population density.

Even the bus system, despite its improvements, will still need to overcome a sort of chicken-or-the-egg dilemma caused by the self-interest of commuters in the current system. While buses move people more efficiently than cars as a whole, they’re slower than cars for individual commuters. When traffic congestion has already strained commuter tolerance to the breaking point, the extra time spent waiting for a bus could be the last straw. And on two-lane roads, frequently stopping buses can slow traffic even further. So bus ridership can prevent congestion, but existing congestion discourages bus ridership.

Some cities, including Honolulu, have mitigated this problem by using dedicated express lanes for buses and car pools. But could mountainous routes such as South Kona’s Mamalahoa Highway or Hamakua’s Belt Road be expanded for such a lane?

In the end, what may need to happen is a combination of the old and the new: more lanes to relieve immediate congestion, combined with smart planning to make use of the brief breathing space that those new roads provide. But wherever those new rights-of-way go, they will require sacrifices of their neighbors – just as riding the bus and creating affordable housing and fostering home businesses will require some sacrifices. If Hawai’i Island’s residents want to stop losing hours of their lives in traffic, they may need to pay the cost in other ways. Will they have the will to do so?

{ 0 comments }