Another too-slow H-1 Freeway project

The prospect of a wider H-1 off-ramp at Punahou Street has its appeal, but its price does not.

The price is a serious disruption of transportation and commerce in our urban core for eight or nine months. "Time is money" is the principle being violated here, a principle that seems to have little currency at our state Department of Transportation.

First, about the Punahou off-ramp:

To the good side, the ramp (from eastbound H-1) will be widened from a one-lane exit feeding into three lanes intersecting Punahou Street, to a two-lane exit (similar to the Vineyard or Middle Street exits from westbound H-1) feeding into four lanes at the top of the ramp.

The Punahou off-ramp is the city’s busiest (this is, for instance, the way tourists are directed to Waikiki), and it traditionally backs up as far as Ward Avenue, slowing through traffic even in the left lane. The DOT project promises to ease, if not eliminate, that backup, if for no other reason than the widening will offer considerably more room to stack cars on the off-ramp instead of on the freeway.

The downside is that cars using this exit, whether they get there in the present three lanes or the planned four, must still contend with the Punahou Street intersection at the top of the ramp. Most of these cars, whether they plan to turn mauka or makai, must stop when the traffic signal is red. Only drivers in a single, far-right lane would be able to yield and proceed on the red light, and only drivers planning to turn right on Beretania Street from Punahou would use that lane.

Putting a stoplight on any off-ramp defeats its purpose, but it’s unavoidable without building a flyover to carry mauka-bound traffic over the makai-bound lanes of Punahou Street. But that’s "out-of-the-box" thinking for Hawai‘i traffic engineers and would create a planning nightmare.

Second, there’s the disruption:

Even now, the mix of cars backing up to use the Punahou off-ramp and those entering the freeway from the Ward Avenue and Pi‘ikoi Street on-ramps is unsafe and frustrating. Construction on the Punahou off-ramp will back cars up even farther, so the DOT is obviously correct that something has to give.

So the DOT will close the Ward and Pi‘ikoi on-ramps during construction hours, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. That means that during those hours, there will be no access to the east-bound freeway for a distance of more than 2 1/2 miles, from the Vineyard on-ramp near Punchbowl Street to the King Street on-ramp in Mo‘ili‘ili (unless, that is, one wished to drive mauka on University Avenue, under the freeway, make a U-turn at Lutheran High School and enter the freeway from arguably the tightest, most dangerous on-ramp in the nation).

The cost of this disruption to our already struggling economy, not to mention our serenity, is right off the map.

The remedy is not to abandon the Punahou project, even if its benefits aren’t a total slam dunk. The remedy is to figure out why projects like this one take weeks in progressive cities on the Mainland instead of months and months here.

It will take bold leadership indeed to nudge our DOT away from business as usual.

[back to top]