Without a doubt, the roads on Kauai are crowded. When Joni Mitchell sang “… they paved paradise and put in a parking lot” in the hit song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” she wasn’t too far off the mark of today’s problems.
Without a doubt, the roads on Kauai are crowded. When Joni Mitchell sang “… they paved paradise and put in a parking lot” in the hit song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” she wasn’t too far off the mark of today’s problems. Rather than pouring more asphalt over our precious island to solve the very real traffic problem, it would be wise to study and implement solutions that are already in place in other parts of the world.
I just took a trip to Thailand and let me share with you how the Thais deal with traffic.
If you go to any Thai city, you will see some cars, some taxis, plenty of scooters and motorcycles and a multitude of songthaews (pronounced: song tao). A songthaew is a cross between a bus and a taxi. Essentially, it is a pickup truck with an Asian style top and two benches in the truck bed. A songthaew can seat 10 people.
They have set routes or directions that they travel each day, every day, back and forth. There is no schedule, per se, and the fare is cheap and always the same, whether a person goes one mile or 20.
They are always on the road, though there are fewer on the road in the middle of the night when more people are asleep. There are no official “songthaew stops” like buses have bus stops.
A traveler can flag down a songthaew anywhere that it can pull over safely. Passengers first ask the driver if he can take him or her to the destination, the driver either says yes or no. In case of yes, the passenger pays the fare, jumps on board, and the songthaew goes on it’s way, stopping in between to pick up other passengers headed in the same direction, dropping each passenger off close to or in front of the very door to their destination.
Given that Kauai has its share of neighborhoods, the Department of Transportation could commission the development of a Kauai Songthaew app. Anyone with a smart phone could enter on their app that a pickup is needed and enter their destination, and a GPS panel in the driver’s cab would signal that a passenger needs a pickup. The closest songthaew driver to the pickup, headed in the direction the passenger wants to go would signal back “I’m on the way.”
The trick is to have a large enough fleet of songthaew on the road that potential passengers actually grow confident that this transportation solution is worth using. If you look at the private vehicles on the road, you will see that many of them are driven by one driver and there are no passengers. If implemented correctly, one songthaew could eliminate a dozen cars from daily traffic, maybe more. The taxi/bus combo solution has been implemented in other countries as well. It is not only in Thailand where such solutions are in place. Russia has had a similar system in place for a while.
Songthaew would create jobs on Kauai. Most songthaews in Thailand are also stocked with tourist information card that show things to do and places to go on the island so in this sense, it can benefit those businesses which cater to visitors.
I hope the department of transportation consider this type of solution, not just on Kauai, but also on Maui and Oahu. Let’s solve Hawaii’s traffic problem creatively before we, yet again “…pave paradise and put in a parking lot.”
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Krisztina Samu is a resident of Koloa.
