Welcome to TheITC: The Island Traffic Critic. I'm J.
I'm from New York. With millions of people and vehicles pouring through that city every day, there are relatively few traffic foul-ups thanks to a combination of good city planning, and savvy, observant drivers and pedestrians. Somehow Oahu, my new home, with far more room and far fewer people than Manhattan, seems to be traffic-inept.
This Blog chronicles Hawaii's farcical amalgam of deficient drivers, backward pedestrians, inadequate planning, and overall substandard traffic management.
Some Hawaiians may ask what the point of this blog is, and wonder what's so wrong with their roads and drivers. That's probably because those Hawaiians have never been anywhere with normal traffic. Anyone from the Mainland who has ever driven Oahu's (or any other Hawaiian Island's) roads can tell you there is so much wrong with Hawaii's roads, drivers, pedestrians, planning, and general traffic management that it is hard to know where to start.
I'd like to get one thing out of the way, right away, here in the first post. If your first thought when reading this is "If you like Mainland traffic so much better, why don't you go back there?" then you are ignorant, and most of the points of this blog are going to be lost on you. Wouldn't everyone's lives be better here if traffic was better managed? Wouldn't it be nice to spend less time stuck in traffic, and more time at home with the ohana? How much money is wasted on gas burned by cars stuck in traffic? How much extra pollution is poured into this fading paradise because of this daily asphyxiation of every navigable cross-island route? Now I ask you, without discourse and complaint like that which I plan to deliver through this blog, how do you expect change to the traffic situation to come about? The answer is, it won't change... at least not for the better. It will only get worse. You can either sit in traffic for hours and hours a week, or you can speak up and point out idiocy where you see it. I choose the latter.
So what's so wrong with Hawaiian traffic anyway? A lot. There's the obvious... the H1 backups in both directions, every weekday between 5:30 am and 9:00 am in the morning and from 3:30 pm and 7:30 pm in the afternoon/evening should be evidence enough that something is seriously wrong with the roads here. Nearly 8 hours a day of clogged roads? That's nearly half of most people's waking hours, that the main artery through the island is clogged.
Besides that, there's a ton more that needs fixing... crammed parking lots, inadequate roads, poorly designed (or totally undesigned) signal patterns, unending construction projects, crooked and unnecessarily winding lanes, poor signage, dumb pedestrians, inadequate HOV lanes and enforcement times, and bad drivers who can't properly merge, signal, turn, yield, decide right-of-way, pay attention, select lanes, park, accelerate, brake, react to accidents/other drivers/unusual conditions/emergency vehicles, drive in the rain, drive in the sun, or avoid the pedestrians.
I will also, on numerous occasions, take serious issue with the "Honolulu Traffic Management Center" which I think should be renamed the "Expensive Center for Repeating the Same Traffic Report Daily." Many of Oahu's drivers are familiar with the guys on the radio (Jason Yotsuda, Dave Hatsuka, Danielle Tucker) who get paid to report the exact same traffic conditions every day–"there's an accident at XX blocking the XX lane, Ewa-bound traffic backed up to the H1 viaduct, Kokohead bound traffic backed up into town." We could just replace them with a recording of that every afternoon between 3:30 and 7. They never suggest alternate routes, mainly because there aren't any... so what is the point of wasting our tax dollars on their salaries, to tell us the same damn thing every morning and afternoon? Shouldn't they spend more time devising solutions to all these problems, and less time reporting what never changes and what we already know? Would you report that grass is green and the sky is blue? So why report that there's a traffic jam on H1 at 5:30pm?
Each post will focus in on a specific problem, and hopefully we'll find some solutions to the mess that is Hawaii's roadways.
Thanks for reading!
-JFab
