Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
View Point
THE number of pedestrians killed while crossing Honolulu's streets and highways continues to increase at an alarming rate. Traffic lights and marked crosswalks have not prevented this carnage. Pedestrian overpasses
will save livesWhile engineers have installed state-of-the-art crosswalk warning lights, pedestrians will continue to die on the streets like cats and dogs because humans cannot be programmed for perfection like robots. We cannot factor in the propensity for human error into our overall traffic safety equation.
The situation will only worsen as the growing number of vehicles and pedestrians compete for a finite space. What's the answer? Pedestrians and motor vehicles should not share the same space at the same time.
There's a great pedestrian overpass on Kalihi Street that allows pedestrians to walk over busy H-1 freeway with their pets and bicycles. Is that the only one in the City and County of Honolulu? Was it constructed as a prototype?
Granted, it is quite massive, but it serves the great purpose of separating people and vehicles.
Smaller versions could be built in congested places such as North King Street in Kalihi and Palama, as well as on School Street, Pali Highway, Ala Moana and Waikiki, by adding a third dimension to our traffic engineering design.
BY this, I mean an up and down, or undulating design in our roads, streets and highways. There would be a slight dip with a maximum depth of seven feet, not on every city block, but on every other block instead.
If those overpasses are seven feet above ground level, the motor vehicles flowing under those bridges will have a 14-foot clearance, which ought to meet any safety standard.
Thanks to technology, we now have steel alloy with great strength. Those could be used to build streamlined and unobstrusive pedestrian overpasses, even in busy downtown Honolulu.
Pedestrians can cross without fear, and traffic can flow more smoothly resulting in a net savings of time for everyone.
These overpasses of the future will be sleek, and artfully designed with graceful curves arising from their anchor points at either end, so as not to impede normal sidewalk traffic to any significant degree.
It will have no sharp corners to cause injury to people sharing that same sidewalk. Of course, it would help if those sidewalks could be widened a bit at those points.
This could be done with greater ease on streets where parking is allowed, by curving the sidewalk outwardly at those anchor points. Only a minimal amount of parking space will be sacrificed.
THE implementation of this idea will have a positive impact upon Hawaii's society in many ways. It would result in less stress and road rage, as well as a dramatic decline in pedestrian fatalities, because motor vehicles will move along more smoothly, with shorter waits at intersections that will no longer be used by slower-moving pedestrians.
People will be required by law to use those pedestrian bridges whenever they want to get to the other side of the street. It will be advantageous to do so because they will never have to wait for walk signals at intersections again.
They will be able to cross anytime, even though they may have to walk a little further to get to the closest bridge. Walking does have its inherent health benefits, as we all know.
What a utopian concept! Imagine if you will: No more pedestrians being struck and killed while crossing a street, traffic flowing smoothly beneath those bridges, and traffic lights that will control only motor vehicles.
How wonderful! Oh, and by the way, this concept has implications for cities and townships on the neighbor islands as well, because Honolulu does not have a monopoly on pedestrian fatalities.
Hideo Yoshimoto is an Oahu resident.