Our roads are some of the most dangerous in the state. Kauai has about 4 percent of the total roadway in the state (394 miles of 9,864 miles total), but has 15 percent of the total road fatalities. That means
Our roads are some of the most dangerous in the state. Kauai has about 4 percent of the total roadway in the state (394 miles of 9,864 miles total), but has 15 percent of the total road fatalities. That means you’re 3.75 times more likely to die on a given mile of Kauai road than a mile of “average” Hawaii road.
That’s because our roads are old, narrow, have no shoulders or sidewalks, and were constructed when the population was less than half what it is today. Our County Council is debating on whether to raise our sales tax from 4 percent to 4.5 percent to help make improvements to the roads and public transportation: there’s a debate over how to split up the $250 million this will raise.
Councilmember Yukimura is pushing to spend a quarter of all that money on the Kauai Bus. Right now, less than 1 percent of the transportation on this island is provided by the Kauai Bus. Her plan is to spend $64 million for a service that will provide transportation to only a tiny fraction of the people on the island — yet we all pay for it.
The system currently spends a huge amount of money just to move a small number of people. We subsidize every rider trip to the tune of $8.16 each way — a person riding the bus twice a day five days a week gets over $4,000 each year of our tax money as a subsidy — a freebie basically — just for doing so.
And despite predictions to the contrary, adding more service has been proven not to be an incentive to gain large numbers of new riders — as service has been added the “boardings per hour” have gone down, not up. That means that the buses that are running are even more empty than before; thus efficiency went down and the impact on traffic congestion was minimal.
Yukimura wants to vastly expand the bus service — pouring more of our tax dollars into a project that has been based on flawed logic and flawed research. Is that what you want? An example of the flawed studies: the Multimodal Plan predicted that between 2010 and 2020 ridership would increase from 0.4 percent of total trips to 1.3 percent of total trips. That’s a 325 percent increase in ridership in 10 years — a huge increase.
We’re over halfway through this time period and ridership has increased only 60 percent — far below the study’s predictions. To reach these numbers now we’d have to more than double ridership by next year and then double it again before 2020 — and that’s simply not going to happen.
Another study predicts that by 2035, ridership will be over 1,000 percent higher than in 2014 — that means going from 700,000 rides per year to 7,000,000 rides per year … on a island with a population of 70,000. Does that make any sense at all? The council already wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars preparing these studies and what we get in return are numbers that just don’t add up.
I agree we don’t want to “pave paradise.” However, when you speak to old-timers and realize it took 36 years to build the three mile Kapule Highway between the airport and Hanamaulu; that the roads we drive on now are basically the same as they were in the 1950s; that many of our rusted bridges are from the 1930s WPA projects; and that we have a narrow dangerous three-lane highway between our two largest towns — it’s not a matter of ruining our island with asphalt, it’s a matter of making our roads safe and wide enough to handle the traffic we already have.
Use 100 percent of this revenue to improve the roads and make them safe for everyone — once there’s a four-lane road between Kapaa and Lihue and our keiki no longer have to walk on dark roads because we can’t afford sidewalks — that’s the time to discuss adding more public transportation.
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John Patterson is a resident of Wailua.
