|
Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Pali Highway shakes,
rattles and rolls youI drove over one of those new "traffic calming" devices called a "rumble strip" for the first time last week and it left me feeling extraordinarily thankful -- thankful that I wasn't holding a hot cup of McDonald's coffee between my legs.
Had I been nestling a scalding cup of java where I generally house beverages while driving my pickup truck, I'm pretty sure that would have brought my branch of the Memminger line to an end. Further heir production would have been up to my brothers.
I've read about the rumble strips being installed but until you actually hit one, you can't truly appreciate their effectiveness. Calming isn't the first thing they do. The first thing they do is shake your fillings out of your teeth. They rattle your brain around in your scull. They cause your pulse to jack up to 200 beats per minute. And sometime later, after you figure out that you have driven across a "traffic calming device" in not through the epicenter of an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale, you do calm down. For me, this was about three hours later at home after several cocktails.
If you haven't had the pleasure of experiencing rumble strips, let me tell you what they are. They are basically a dozen or so small speed bumps laid out on a highway designed to get a driver's attention. And get your attention, they do. It's as if a very large man has grabbed you by the lapels and is shaking you like pair of Mexican maracas.
THE RUMBLE STRIPS were installed on the Pali Highway last week to help alert drivers that they are entering a zone where some of our less spry citizens attempt to cross the roadway. This area of Nuuanu has always been dangerous for pedestrians, of both the spry and not-so-spry variety. It's a bad idea to have a "highway" crossing through what essentially is a residential district.
I've suggested that the problem was the classification of the road as a "highway." What it really should be called is "Pali Boulevard." The term "highway" connotes unimpeded pedal-to-the-metal mass transit while "boulevard" brings to mind a leisurely Sunday drive where one must be on the lookout for baby strollers and the occasional bouncing basketball crossing your path.
A friend who had her eyeballs joggled out of their sockets while driving across a rumble strip suggested I savagely attack these jarring impediments to swift auto travel. They are, in a word, annoying, she said.
I agree they are annoying. They were designed to be annoying. And that's why I love them. Most Hawaii drivers need to be annoyed into paying attention. They need to be annoyed to the point where they concentrate on the road and not their CD player or cell phone. If more drivers had been annoyed as they raced down the Pali Highway into Nuuanu there wouldn't have been the needless waste of life that this section of road is sadly famous for.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com