DRIVE TIME

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Sometimes you can't see the highway for all the cars.

As bad as traffic is these days (and it doesn't get much worse than Christmastime, does it?), transportation officials say it's possible to forget some of the big improvements that are being made or planned around O'ahu.

Planners are counting on those big projects to keep traffic from at least getting any worse, even as projections show hundreds of thousands of new cars arriving on the island in the coming decades.

No one knows where we're going to put all those cars or how many other transportation projects are needed.

For now, though, Honolulu's traffic planners — who are in the midst of developing a new report showing what traffic congestion will be like in the year 2030 and what we can do about it — are assuming that there's going to be at least some relief in the form of work being done now.

Unlike a lot of the best-intentioned plans, these are not likely to go astray. They call them The Baseline, 10 projects that can be counted on, one way or another, to be in place when the driving gets tougher in the coming years.

Here's the list. Some have actually begun. Others are in the works.

1. Fort Weaver Road widening. From A'awa Street to Geiger Road. Widening the road to six lanes.

2. Freeway Management System. New high-tech projects to monitor and manage traffic operations.

3. Zipper lane extension. Lengthens the current H-1 Freeway zipper lane from the vicinity of Radford Drive overpass to Kalihi Stream.

4. Kamehameha Highway bikeway. Creates a new bikeway and other road improvements from Radford Drive to the Arizona Memorial.

5. North/South Road. Constructs a three-lane roadway from Kapolei Parkway to H-1.

6. Traffic Control System. Expands the current network of cameras and fiber-optic lines that link outlying areas to a central Traffic Control Center.

7. Kamokila Boulevard extension. From Franklin D. Roosevelt Avenue in Kapolei.

8. Salt Lake Boulevard widening. Completes the widening project from Maluna Street to Ala Lilikoi Street.

9. Dillingham Boulevard transit improvements. Creates seven new bus pullouts between Pu'uhale Road and North King Street to improve traffic flow.

10. E-Transit. The original plans call for a new rapid transit bus line from Iwilei to Waikiki. Mayor-elect Mufi Hannemann says he's going to dismantle this project, but officials say they're still counting on some type of bus improvement in its place.

OK. That's the list of big projects the experts are counting on. So clip it out and tuck it into a time capsule. And on Dec. 21, 2024, we'll all meet back here and see if all the work got finished as planned. And whether or not it helped.

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadveriser.com or 525-5460.