Planned projects to offer
relief for Big Island traffic

The latest plans deal with a 3-mile
stretch from Honalo to Captain Cook

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By Rod Thompson
rthompson@starbulletin.com

KAILUA-KONA >> Hawaii County's Kona administrator Peter Young and other officials will drive to South Kona on Friday before 3:30 p.m. to look at traffic.

They know if they leave any later, they'll be stuck in the traffic themselves.

"There are times that I've been out there that you don't move," Young said.

As Kona's traffic gets worse, state, county and private projects are moving ahead to solve the problem. As always, money is an uncertainty.

Young has identified 26 projects that are planned or under way to help Kona's traffic. On Friday, he and a consultant will be looking for long-term solutions for the 3-mile bottleneck from Honalo to Captain Cook.

The county also has immediate plans to repaint road stripes there to create "turning pockets." A single car waiting for a left turn there during afternoon rush hour can stack up others far behind it.

That problem will decrease significantly on completion of the 5 1/2-mile, $26 million "Mamalahoa Bypass" around the area being constructed by the developers of the 1,550-acre Hokulia project. That could be complete by mid-2003, but court challenges to Hokulia could also delay it, said spokeswoman Karin Shaw.

In the heart of Kailua-Kona, the county plans a $6.5 million widening to four lanes of a half-mile of Kuakini Highway where it serves as a city street.

The state classifies traffic there now as "level of service F," the worst possible. Bad will get worse when the project starts next year, said Marnie Herkes, executive of the Kona-Kohala Chamber of Commerce.

"That's going to be a bottleneck," she said, although she supports it.

Another project is widening to four lanes of seven miles of Queen Kaahumanu Highway, from downtown Kailua-Kona to Kona's Keahole Airport.

The state has its 20-percent portion of the $25 million needed for the first half of the project, but Congress has yet to approve the federal portion, said project manager Kevin Ito.

A major new road that would link Kailua-Kona to the Hokulia project is the long-planned Alii Highway, now renamed the Parkway. Young hopes to receive $30 million for the project's first phase in 2002-03.

But history does not favor it: The forerunner of the Parkway was first proposed in 1958.