'Aina Haina tackles speeding head-on
By Suzanne Roig
Advertiser East Honolulu Bureau
'Aina Haina — Cars speed regularly past the old homes set back from the street here, tires humming on the asphalt.
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser
A few residents, watering their lawns, look up with furrowed brows as the motorists whiz by.
'Aina Haina residents and police have organized a traffic-awareness program that includes roadside monitors reminding rush-hour commuters that they are driving too fast.
One of those residents is Marie Riley. A resident of West Hind Drive for three years, Riley said she now has a heightened awareness of how fast the cars are going.
Just two months ago she was about to walk her dog when she heard a terrible sound of metal smashing and trees falling. She ran outside to find a car crashing into her fenced-in yard.
The car pulled out and left quickly, dragging behind a twisted mess of what had been her front yard: a juniper tree, a palm and several yards of chain-link fence.
Over the next couple of weeks, Riley saw and heard other crashes into other people's walls and hedges on West Hind Drive, part of the U-shaped main street that becomes East Hind Drive on the kokohead half of the community.
Fed up with the destruction, Riley went to the neighborhood board, wrote her city councilman and called police.
Two weeks ago, a CTAP — Community Traffic Awareness Partnership — was organized for two of the worst streets in the area: Hao Street and West Hind Drive.
Riley and about 19 others lined up with police officers on the two streets in the morning and afternoon with warning signs and radar gear.
"People are heartless," Riley said. "Some people were irate we were stopping them. People were going 45 mph or more here (where the speed limit is 25 mph)."
The speeders are Riley's neighbors, not strangers to 'Aina Haina. They're residents on automatic pilot trying to get home, said Sgt. Gary Kawasaki, a Honolulu Police Department community resource officer for East Honlulu.
During the CTAP, police issued tickets to two motorists who were going 15 mph over the limit, Kawasaki said, and officers stopped 15 more.
"A lot of people don't realize they're speeding," he said. "People put blinders on and there's a magnetic pull toward home. It's a behavioral habit and 40 mph feels safe. CTAP is designed to shock them into making them aware of their behavior."
The solution is to put in traffic calming measures such as roundabouts or speed humps, said Eric Fong, a Honolulu Police Department community resource officer. These are solutions that communities around O'ahu are crying for, but only a handful have obtained city money, among them Laukahi Street in Wai'alae Iki and Kealaolu Avenue in Kahala.
The City Council approved $8.9 million for traffic calming islandwide for this year. That money is for measures previously approved and not built, and for roughly one traffic calming plan for each of the nine City Council districts.
More than $2 million was earmarked for East Honolulu, but no projects have started.
West Hind Drive residents say they will keep organizing CTAPs until it can get city money for traffic calming.
