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Honolulu Lite
I'VE complained for years about Hawaii's crummy drivers and now that the police are launching several major programs to bring order to the highways, I'm mad as hell. Scary new (polite)
world of drivingI think it's really selfish of the police at this late date to force people to behave on the roads. What do they expect me to write about now?
There are a few staple subjects of column writing such as dogs, cats, geckos, politicians and cockroaches. Whenever ideas aren't flowing, I can always fall back on one of those subjects and squeeze out a column. The old saying is that you can't write a bad column about pets or a good one about religion.
But no one subject has generated more column inches in this space over the years than driving craziness. Obnoxious drivers and traffic terror are the bread and butter, the meat 'n' potatoes, the life's blood, the (insert favorite cliche here) of Honolulu Lite. Even when I can't drag up one more stupid pet trick or political outrage, there's ALWAYS the roadways. It's just one of those subjects that involves everyone. We all use the roads. We've all had to deal with the idiots, who are everyone on the road except us.
I've written about the idiots who deliberately block people from passing them, driving the exact same speed as the car beside them. I've written about the idiots who don't know how to use a freeway on-ramp. Instead of using the ramp to get up to speed and flow into the traffic, they stop at the very end of the ramp and try to join the 55-mph river of metal from a complete standstill. I've written with alarm and indignation about the uninsured teen-age drivers who put everyone's life at risk just so they can race each other. Then there's the curious Hawaii practice of using the right-hand lane of a multilane highway as the FAST lane and using the left lane, which is supposed to be for passing, as the cruising lane.
The one thing that I haven't written about is people who run red lights, because I rarely see it happen. Hawaii does seem to be a place where drivers respect the stoplights. You see people zip through yellow lights and occasionally through "re-llow" lights but you seldom see someone deliberately run a red light. In big mainland cities, drivers consider a red light as a mere suggestion that stopping is a possible option.
NOW the city and the Honolulu police are launching a multipronged traffic control program that would make George Orwell proud. Using state-of-the-art cameras, speeding drivers and red-light runners will be automatically photographed and fined by mail. In addition, Big Brother cops in unmarked cars will catch obnoxious drivers who tailgate or engage in random acts of road rage.
These efforts, no doubt, will bring civility and safety to our highways. People will be kind to each other. They'll go the speed limit. There'll be fewer crashes. But will it be FUN?
More importantly, what will I be able to write about? Some jerk was going 38 in a 35-mph zone? Some idiot going through an intersection while the light was turning from green to yellow? Some stupidhead who let TWO cars merge ahead of him instead of the required one?
This is very bad. A city where people don't speed, don't tailgate, don't flip each other off, don't blast their horns and don't race each other; a city where drivers actually behave ... that is a cruel, heartless thing to do to a newspaper humor columnist.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to cmemminger@starbulletin.com.
The Honolulu Lite online archive is at:
https://archives.starbulletin.com/lite