North King Street part 2 - a detailed look.mov

Описание: http://www.honolulutraffic.com North King Street could be easily made 6 lanes for the 2-mile length, improving traffic flow in Honolulu.
North King has just two lanes at the start, then quickly widens to four lanes and then six upon reaching Umi Street. It continues wide until just past Mokauea Street, seven blocks later, where it narrows to five lanes. It remains narrow for the next four blocks until reaching Kalihi Street. This narrowing is caused by a very wide sidewalk, a garbage dumpster, some parking lots, with no actual buildings in the way. It would be relatively simple to add a lane here and move the utility poles.

Beyond Kalihi Street, in the long block passing Farrington High School, King breezes along as six lanes, but a lane of parked cars reduces this to five. At the intersection with Houghtailing it is still six lanes but striped as five, with a very wide right-turn lane that two lanes of cars usually squeeze into -- another example of the inefficient, thoughtless "planning" of this roadway.

The intersection on the other side of Houghtailing is partly blocked by an old wooden building on the makai side that juts into the roadway, taking up a lane and obstructing traffic. This is one of only two small, old wooden structures that probably need to be removed for the widening project -- not bad for a complete 2-mile enhanced corridor. A major bus stop is just beyond the building, yet the buses have to snake and twist their way around the protrusion to reach the curb.

Beyond Houghtailing things get rather chaotic for a couple of blocks, becoming in turn, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, and then 5 lanes wide, for no apparent reason other than a sidewalk that keeps changing width. You can better understand this bizarre irregularity from an aerial perspective. The width changes are caused by several curb and sidewalk extensions, which do nothing but create a couple more free parking spaces. A paved lane on the mauka side beyond the sidewalk hosts a garbage dumpster and an unused parking lot remnant. None of this makes any sense.

Just after this, at Wolter Lane, we've got about 5 ½ lanes, but suddenly the road narrows to four lanes when it reaches Long and Mao Lanes, creating the narrowest section of King as it approaches downtown. This restriction is caused on the makai side by another widening of the sidewalk, used by an automotive repair shop to double-park cars and store their dumpster. The mauka-side obstruction is perhaps the strangest of all blockages on North King -- a short block of diagonal parking fronting the shops that juts into the street right-of-way. It's like a little stretch of quaint New England village with angled parking, convenient for customers but not very appropriate for downtown Honolulu.

At the end of this four-lane block, King jumps back out to six lanes, suddenly widening to the proper dimension that it should have been for the whole length, but one block later at Morris Lane, we are back to five. Fortunately, the bridge across Kapalama Canal is six lanes, so that avoids any serious reconstruction. Past the bridge, a "keep out" section painted in the median reduces us back to five, then we continue another couple of blocks at six-wide until reaching the Palama Fire Station at Austin Lane, where it's back to five lanes for the block at Tamashiro Fish Market. Part of the narrowing on the mauka side is due to a residential front-yard used for parking cars.

After this, at Kaumakapili Church we are back out to six, but then two blocks later at Pua Lane, you guessed it, back to five. This narrowing of the street is created once again by an arbitrary extension of the sidewalk, which here is littered with abandoned shopping carts, with a small used car lot on the corner of Akepo Lane. The makai side then expands to three lanes but the mauka half of King goes down to two because of a parking lot and storage area for slabs of marble -- not a very important use of land for a main road in our primary urban center. In the final block before Liliha Street we are back out to six lanes and then King rolls into downtown where it meets Beretania Street at Aala Park, briefly enjoying a grand combined width of twelve lanes.
North King Street needs to be fixed. 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.