Double-decked Nimitz a non-starter for sure

Call it the Creature from Ke‘ehi Lagoon. It is back and it is just as terrifying as the last time it raised its scaly head.

Once again, transportation planners have put on the table an idea whose time has long come and gone: double-decking Nimitz Highway as it comes into downtown Honolulu.

Granted, it is just one of several proposals being studied as part of O‘ahu’s long-range transportation planning effort. And granted, also, that traffic engineers have to look at a variety of options as they try to work their way out of our congestion headache.

But this one should be a non-starter. Double-decking Nimitz Highway would speed up traffic as it comes into Honolulu and would offer a relief valve for commuters coming out of the Zipper lane on the freeway.

But all it really would accomplish is to move the point of congestion a few miles closer to the urban center. And the trade-off would be huge.

Honolulu celebrated when the double-decked, or second-story flyover, in front of Aloha Tower was taken down. All of San Francisco celebrated when Mother Nature, in the form of an earthquake, helped remove the Embarcadero Freeway that cut off San Francisco from much of its beautiful waterfront.

That should be enough of a lesson for us. We need to open up our waterfront, not block it off with a transportation project that would achieve relatively little good.

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