Posted on: Monday, February 24, 2003

State, city at odds over new traffic hub

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Transportation Writer

State and city transportation officials disagree over a proposal to build a $15 million traffic management center on O'ahu.

State officials say the high-tech center will ease the travel woes of thousands of motorists every day. City officials say they have such a center and fear the new one will duplicate its efforts.

The proposed center would serve as a one-stop headquarters for many state and city agencies and departments that deal with traffic management, including communications and dispatch workers for traffic managers, tunnel monitors, tow-truck services and police and fire emergency medical teams.

"These traffic centers work," said state Transportation Director Rod Haraga. "I've seen them in action and they really help."

A city transportation management center provides many of those services, monitoring traffic cameras at nearly 200 locations, controlling traffic signals, notifying police, and using radio traffic reporters to quickly spread the word about trouble spots to drivers, said Cheryl Soon, director of the city's transportation services department.

"We've got some concerns with the proposal," Soon said. "Should we have a brand-new facility that just replaces or duplicates what we already have?"

Soon said O'ahu might be better served by a new system that electronically links several existing operations, including the city's traffic management center, the state's traffic control center in the H-3 tunnels, and police, fire, EMS and bus dispatchers.

The O'ahu Metropolitan Planning Organization, which coordinates city and state transportation projects that use federal money, last week deferred action on a $176,000 proposal to develop a concept for the center after Soon and four other city department heads raised their objections.