Widening of a key stretch of traffic-choked Fort Weaver Road will begin in the next two months, and the $59.9 million project can't come soon enough for long-suffering 'Ewa residents.

The roughly 2.5 miles from Laulaunui Street to Geiger Road will go from four lanes to six lanes. The addition is expected to ease the bottleneck that occurs during morning and afternoon peaks.

Benjamin Marquez, who lives in 'Ewa, said he and his wife leave for Honolulu at 5:30 a.m. to get to work by 7. They take the car-pool lane on the H-1 to his parents' house in Kalihi where his wife drops him off and he takes a second car to his job at the Hawaiian Tel baseyard in Moanalua.

"If you leave any later, say at 6, just getting out of the side streets to Fort Weaver is a mess — 15 minutes or more," said Marquez, a longtime resident of Soda Creek, the first subdivision of 'Ewa By Gentry. "Honestly, we're looking at moving back to town."

If traffic is the No. 1 concern for 'Ewa and 'Ewa Beach residents, Fort Weaver is the galvanizing point. It's practically the only way in and out for the tens of thousands living in the region. And hundreds of motorists even do the impractical to avoid Fort Weaver — driving three to five miles west into Kapolei — to enter the freeway eastbound in the morning, and making the reverse trek in the afternoon.

TWO-YEAR PROJECT

The Fort Weaver widening project is being developed in two phases and will take two years, state Transportation Department spokesman Scott Ishikawa said in a presentation to the 'Ewa Neighborhood Board this month.

Utility work is slated for June, Ishikawa said, with actual construction beginning in September. The first segment will consist of widening the section from Laulaunui to the Child & Family Service facility less than a mile down the road. The section is made more difficult because new pedestrian bridges will have to be constructed over Honouliuli Stream and an existing cane haul road near Asing Park, Ishikawa said.

"The good thing is instead of waiting to open up the whole road at the end of the two-year project, we'll open that first phase once it's done," he said. "So at least we can kind of loosen up the bottleneck in that area."

The second phase will run through a point just beyond the Geiger Road/Iroquois Point Road intersection with Fort Weaver on the southern end of the 'Ewa Town Center, in the thick of the Gentry development.

Both sides of the expanded thoroughfare will have 5-foot shoulders. There will also be a 6-foot concrete pedestrian path along the Wai'anae side of the road, as well as 10-foot path on the diamondhead side to be shared by pedestrians and cyclists. Concrete curbing will be placed along the median of Fort Weaver to discourage illegal U-turns.

Synchronization of the Fort Weaver traffic signals will be re-examined after the improvements are done, Ishikawa said.

A segment of the widening — from Farrington Highway to Laulaunui — was completed in July 2005 for $6.3 million. The lengthy delay between the end of that project and the start of this one was largely because the original design consultant for the project, Fujita & Associates, went out of business, forcing the state to start the process over again. To speed up the project, Ishikawa said, current developer Hawaiian Dredging was given a design-build contract.

Once the Fort Weaver improvements are completed, it will be classified as an urban road from its current rural designation. That will mean the speed limit will be reduced from 45 mph to 35 mph. "Because pedestrians will need to cross a much wider road, we want the drivers to travel at a reasonable speed," Ishikawa said.

RELIEF FOR KAPOLEI

David Rae, senior vice president of Kapolei Property Development LLC, the successor to the Estate of James Campbell, estimated that a majority of the traffic along Kapolei's Fort Barrette Road during peak hours comes from 'Ewa residents seeking to get on and off the H-1.

Rae said the widening of Fort Weaver will help not only 'Ewa and 'Ewa Beach residents, but folks in Kapolei as well. "Anything that assists 'Ewa/'Ewa Beach residents is positive for Kapolei traffic," he said, noting that traffic along Fort Barrette Road leading toward 'Ewa Beach sometimes backs up into Makakilo during afternoon peak hours.

But longtime 'Ewa Neighborhood Board member Jeff Alexander, an 'Ewa Beach resident since he was a child, is dubious that the road widening will result in a significant improvement for 'Ewa and 'Ewa Beach residents. "It's obsolete and it was obsolete five years ago when they first proposed it," Alexander said. "What's needed is a second-level expressway on top of Fort Weaver Road" to handle demand from all the new homes being built.

Alexander said too many homes have been built in the 'Ewa region without the necessary roads, schools or other infrastructure to support them. "Everybody's to blame," he said, "especially the politicians. They are in the construction industry's pocket."

It's a feeling shared by other longtime 'Ewa residents, including motorist Benjamin Marquez. "I think we should have worked on the infrastructure and how we could accommodate all the residents before we permitted all the development," he said.

Development in 'Ewa is not done. Gentry Homes officials say they've completed about 6,500 of 8,500 planned units. Officials with Haseko, developers of Ocean Pointe south of the Gentry properties, say they've built about 2,200 of 4,850 homes for a project that saw its first residents in December 1998.

Meanwhile, the Schuler Division of Texas-based D.R. Horton Inc. is seeking approval to develop up to 11,700 residential units on 1,600 acres of former sugar cane land between Kapolei and 'Ewa, a development known as Ho'opili. The state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands and the planned University of Hawai'i-West O'ahu campus are being developed on the Kapolei side of the Ho'opili site.

Alexander said there should be a moratorium on new home projects on the 'Ewa plain until adequate roadways and other infrastructure can be developed.

NORTH-SOUTH ROAD

Some other road projects are also in the works.

Ishikawa noted that the $17 million North-South Road, designed to run parallel to Fort Weaver, is under construction. An additional $118 million second phase will lead up to new on- and off-ramps to H-1 in the vicinity of the proposed Ho'opili, DHHL and UH-West O'ahu projects. Initially, the road will carry four lanes but a future plan calls for six, he said.

Several area residents, including Alexander and 'Ewa Neighborhood Board Chairman Kurt Fevella, said at a recent neighborhood board meeting that the North-South Road will be too far west to be convenient for 'Ewa and 'Ewa Beach motorists. "We will use it," Alexander said. "But they should've paralleled it to Fort Weaver Road as it was planned."

Alexander said another parallel road is needed through a series of cane hauling roads and the Ho'opili project.

Registered nurse Maureen Evans, who until a few months ago worked at the former St. Francis Medical Center-West which has its main entrance off Laulaunui, said it would take her half an hour to inch her way up the four miles of Fort Weaver from her 'Ewa Beach home to the hospital at 7:30 a.m. "If I hit the lights right, it would take me 25 minutes," she said.

Evans' husband, who has been starting his shift at Pearl Harbor at 4:30 a.m., has been noticing the number of vehicles on the road when he leaves the house at 4 a.m. has been steadily growing.

Evans believes the Fort Weaver widening and the upcoming North-South Road are both too-little-too-late remedies. By the time they actually come up, she said, "they're going to need more roads than they're giving us," she said.

Reach Gordon Y.K. Pang at gpang@honoluluadvertiser.com.