North King Street - a potential traffic solution.mov

Описание: http://www.honolulutraffic.com A complete look at North King Street and how it can help solve Honolulu's traffic problems at very little expense -- a more effective and cheaper solution than building an elevated heavy rail through town.

You might think you are familiar with North King Street, between Middle Street and downtown, but did you know that it changes width 23 different times during its two-mile length? It widens from two lanes to four lanes to five lanes to six lanes and then narrows again, up and down.
Most of King has six lanes but parking is allowed all day, effectively reducing this wide pavement to a four-lane road with two lanes in each direction. This often gets further reduced to one in-bound lane due to cars waiting to turn left, or a bus stop blocking the right lane. King never does experience six actual lanes of through traffic, which is a waste of a precious transportation resource.
However, North King could very easily be made six lanes throughout the entire length, and with proper management, four of those lanes can flow together in the rush-hour direction. This would provide a major enhancement for traffic coming in from the Leeward side, with much better results than building a train, at perhaps 2% of the expense; and these improvements could be done quickly, providing immediate relief.
North King Street begins at Oahu's worst traffic bottleneck, the dreaded Middle Street intersection, where it exits the freeway just before the crunch. An improved North King could provide an alternate route to get around this critical choke point and zip travelers to downtown in minutes. Relatively minor construction and sensible planning could more than double King's capacity, providing a new lane for express bus and carpools, while better serving local traffic and helping relieve the burden on H1.

The frequent choke points where the road narrows are caused by simple obstructions, including parking lots, overly-wide sidewalks, empty dirt yards, garbage dumpsters, storage spaces, and arbitrary curb extensions. Road space is further wasted by the arbitrary way lanes are painted on the surface: sometimes a lane is striped very wide, taking up 1 ½ or 2 actual lanes; at other places there is a useless "keep out" zone painted in the median where cars are prohibited, without any apparent safety purpose. Nearly all of the widening suggested here involves relatively easy lane additions, and there will still be excellent sidewalks for the entire length of the renewed street.
. Let's make it six lanes all the way and prohibit parking during rush hour.

These six, unobstructed lanes could then be put to the best use by our creative traffic engineers. Considering the directional flow, a.m. inbound, p.m. outbound, it would be efficient to have four lanes coming in during morning rush, then four going out in the afternoon, easily controlled with removable traffic cones and synchronized traffic lights. The two center lanes can be reversible, morning inbound, afternoon outbound. During non-peak times, the lanes flow as usual in each direction, with parking allowed. This would provide four lanes in the peak flow direction: 1. A left turn/passing lane, 2. Express bus -- HOV lane, 3. Local traffic, 4. curb lane for local traffic, local bus stops and right turns. Currently when a bus pulls away from a stop it needs to cut back into the traffic lane, slowing everyone down.

King could easily have a true dedicated bus lane, also for HOV for carpools, with tremendous capacity of 10,000 people per hour that would revolutionize our daily commute. Compare this with a maximum of 6,000 passengers per hour carried by rail, most of them standing.

This improvement to King can be part of a new approach to comprehensive traffic solutions for Honolulu with similar kinds of innovative measures on our other streets. With this approach we don't need to build an elevated train -- we've got enough capacity on our existing streets if we manage them properly. An official corridor traffic study is urgently needed to sort this matter out and develop an engineering solution as soon as possible.

King Street needs planning and care instead of being ignored the way it has been for decades, as much of Kalihi has been generally neglected. This road improvement can help revitalize the neighborhood while at the same time easing Oahu's regional traffic problems, especially for those residents coming in from the Leeward side.
This modernized North King Street would seriously improve commuter traffic, while also creating an enhancement to the quality of life for the people of Kalihi that would increase their mobility, revive retail businesses, and stimulate pride in a renewed neighborhood.