Traffic on O'ahu only getting worse
By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Transportation Writer
Despite plans to spend more than $3.6 billion on transportation projects in the next 20 years, Hawai'i's freeway congestion will double and clogging of highways will increase fivefold, according to computer projections.
The latest computer models indicate that the biggest problems will continue to be on freeways and major arterial roads, such as King Street and Farrington Highway, where congested lane-miles could rise from about 25 today to more than 125 miles in 2025.
Based on the projections, state and city officials have allocated more than $1.1 billion of the transit money specifically for congestion relief over the next 20 years. Among the projects that commuters are likely to see starting in the next few years are:
• Widening of heavily congested Fort Weaver Road from Farrington Highway to Geiger Road and the antiquated Pu'uloa Road in Mapunapuna.
• A widening of the H-1 Freeway from Waimalu to the Pearl City off-ramp in the westbound lanes, and later, a widening of the eastbound lanes from Waiawa to Halawa.
• A contraflow lane for morning traffic on Nimitz Highway.
Dozens of other projects are waiting in line as money becomes available, with the bulk of new money going to aid drivers in Central and Leeward O'ahu, where congestion has increased the most in recent years.
The money includes more than $500 million for H-1 Freeway work, as well as a long-range plan to build a $300 million tunnel connecting Fort Armstrong and Sand Island.
Even with all the spending, however, O'ahu's congestion will continue to get worse, according to the O'ahu Metropolitan Planning Agency, which coordinates transportation projects on the island.
"We just don't have enough money to do everything we need," said Gordon Lum, executive director of OMPO. The group estimates it needs about $7 billion — or twice the expected money — to address all the congestion and safety issues.
"You don't need to be a rocket scientist to see the problem," said Benson Chou, a planner with the state Transportation Department's Congestion Management Office. "Sometimes it just comes down to too many cars and not enough roads."
Projections in a recent OMPO report show the island's population is expected to grow to more than 1 million by 2025, an 18 percent jump from 2000.
That will translate into O'ahu residents and visitors taking more than 4.1 million trips and logging more than 17 million miles over 688,000 hours in a car each day. Time spent stuck in traffic will add up to 284,565 hours per day, a 53 percent increase over today's rate.
New U.S. Census figures show that the mean travel time for Hawai'i commuters stayed about the same from 1990 to 2000, but the number of people who spend 45 minutes or more on the road to work rose by more than 12 percent, suggesting that rush hour is starting earlier and ending later.
The number of people who drive alone in their cars rose 4.8 percent, while the number of people who used public transportation declined more than 15 percent, adding to the congestion, the Census figures show.
Later this year, state and city officials plan to work together on an effort to break down those statewide Census figures into more than 700 traffic analysis zones on O'ahu, providing a new view of transportation habits.
The idea is to give the clearest picture yet of how people choose to get around O'ahu.
"Human behavior has changed and so has driving," Lum said.
Officials said that the driving patterns programmed into computers 10 years ago aren't the same as today, Lum said. Increasingly, Honolulu residents are "trip chaining," combining two or more purposes every time they leave the house.
The old home-work-home trip has been replaced by one that might go home-school-work-school-shopping-home, Lum said.
That's making planners change their projections about where and when most people will be on the road.
Hawai'i officials hope to use the new data in a report that will project travel patterns in 2030. That, in turn, will help determine where future transportation money and construction will occur.
Despite the sophisticated traffic predicting tools, planners can't always be sure that projects will produce the expected results.
To be sure, transportation officials sometimes return to old-fashioned legwork to measure changes.
The state's congestion management office, for instance, recently sent teams of drivers down Farrington Highway at programmed intervals to check the effects of newly synchronized traffic lights and then compared average speed and travel time to those obtained before the changes were made.
The result: a savings of about 1 1/2 minutes on the 4 1/2-mile trip between Ko Olina and Hakimo Road in Nanakuli.
While that might not sound like much, it's sometimes seems like a lot more to a frustrated driver, Chou said. "Perception is important when you're stuck in traffic," he said.
Sometimes, too, drivers take traffic problems into their own hands.
"Drivers have an internal clock," said Wayne Yoshioka, manager of transportation planning for the Parson Brinckerhoff firm in Hono-
lulu. "Sometimes they'll put up with a 30- or 40-minute wait, but if it starts to get longer than that, they'll make their own adjustments."
That might mean leaving a little earlier or later for work, choosing to ride the bus or in more dramatic cases, changing homes or jobs, he said. For instance, the number of people in Hawai'i who leave for work between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. increased more than 26 percent from 1990 to 2000, according to Census figures.
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