I find myself thinking about: “What time should I leave my house to be on time? Will traffic congestion only get worst, like it has over the last few years? When will things get any better?” It seems that we are leaving home and work earlier and earlier (or later and later) to “beat the traffic” here on Kauai.
To digress a bit, driving cars on roads is about 100 years old and is one of the highest levels of agreement we have achieved as people living on planet Earth. I believe it is a privilege rather than a right for any one individual to operate a motor vehicle. As a privilege we are compelled, if not required, to look and listen for others as we fly along in our 5,000-pound machines at 50 mph directly towards each other seemingly with little thought to the obvious danger.
Rarely, if ever, when sitting in traffic do we see ourselves as a part of the traffic problem, and although automobiles are an “invasive species” we do not treat them as such.
What exactly is a “traffic problem”? Too many vehicles on the road in the same vicinity at the same time. Or maybe: Not enough road space to accommodate the number of vehicles that need to use it at the same time.
To create a solution, we should begin scientifically: We cannot measure what we do not count so, let’s count the number of vehicles on this island so we can measure the size of our problem.
First goal: Count the number of vehicles on Kauai.
Second goal: Count the number of miles of roads on Kauai.
Third goal: Divide the number of miles by the number of vehicles, giving us the number of vehicles per mile of road.
That number (vehicles per mile of existing road) becomes a baseline that can be guide line for us to create laws and decisions we make about the limitation that our island can provide. An example might be: Kauai has 40,000 vehicles and 4,000 miles of roads. So our baseline becomes 10 vehicles per mile.
If that baseline could stay constant over the years, we could solve our traffic problems by coordinating movements of our traffic (i.e., school and business start and finish times, traffic circles, bypass roads). Additionally, if we citizens could agree on a guiding principal eventually being made into a law: “One car comes on our island — One car is decommissioned or goes off our island.” After all, we are an island, which defines limitation.
For every car that is brought here and sold here, an existing registered car must be taken out of commission and shipped away or recycled. A straight-up, new law, including government, military, car dealers and rental car companies abiding. The current cycle of simply adding new cars and increasing the burden on our road systems backfires on a regular basis, causing traffic jams.
We could set a trend of sustainability as an example for all the Hawaiian Islands to follow.
I hope we all vote for folks who are thinking and talking about this problem.
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Mark Jeffers is a resident of Hanapepe.
