I highly recommend Larry Geller’s long and detailed analysis of failed or simply missing efforts to improve pedestrian safety in Hawaii, posted yesterday at his DisappearedNews.com.
Larry picks apart, in excruciating detail, the various excuses given for bureaucratic inaction in the face of pedestrian fatalities, and adds photos to illustrate particular problems.
One issue Larry doesn’t address–the split between state roads and county roads. I presume the state Dept. of Transportation is supposed to address pedestrian safety issues (and other traffic safety issues) on those state roads, while city streets fall under the county’s jurisdiction. So although Larry calls for action by the governor, more of the pedestrian issues may actually be the mayor’s problem.
Pressure is needed for change on both sides of Punchbowl Street.
The Star-Advertiser reported Saturday on what looks like a promising venture to restore Hawaii’s local milk industry, led by a New Zealand company which has developed a system for milk production relying on local grass for feed. This reportedly can cut costs enough to make milk production economically viable.
An initial consortium called Tropical Dairy Solutions LLC is made up of Dairy Solutionz, Hawaii-based investment organization Ulupono Initiative, San Diego-based venture capital firm Finistere Ventures and Maryland-based Atlantic Dairy Consulting.
The venture is drawing on research Ulupono conducted over the past two years testing which kinds of grasses grow best in several spots around the state.
“The long-term vision is to develop a sustainable, profitable dairy industry statewide based on farming the grass rather than relying on imported feed in an industrial agriculture model,”?said Kyle Datta, Ulupono’s general partner.
Ulupono got another mention recently for its sponsorship of a survey of local foods. The S-A reported:
Ulupono initiated the survey to help it make more-informed decisions on investing in companies that will help expand the local food supply. The organization’s goal is to help the local food supply rise to 15 percent from 8 percent by 2015.
Ulupono is a “social investment” firm started by eBay founder and billionaire philanthropist Pierre Omidyar. The organization focuses on reducing waste and advancing local food and renewable energy production. Companies in which Ulupono has invested include Kapalua Farms, MA’O Organic Farms and the Hawaii Island School Gardens Network.
This seems to be a pretty exciting set of initiatives set in motion by Omidyar that can perhaps make for some real change in our often too conservative community.
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Gads, that article was already long enough and then some!
The streets that I cited, for example Pali Highway, Vineyard Blvd and Nimitz/Ala Moana Blvd are state responsibilities. It is, indeed, very confusing.
While the blog mode allows articles of any length, I had to stop someplace. There is much more to add. I had about 30 minutes of notes for a seven-minute spot on Beth-Ann Koszovich’s morning program on HPR after the HPU death, and forgot that she would talk half the time. So I’m still feeling the frustration of having too much material and too little “real” media attention to the deaths and injuries.
Think of the doctors and nurses sweating for hours over an operating table to try to save the life of someone smashed up in a crosswalk in Honolulu. How much better to have our city and state do what we pay them for and avoid these deaths, injuries and expenses?
I don’t know if I should comment here or on Larry’s blog. Guess I’m commenting here. I am SO frustrated with the attitude that cars are first and only. We live near Waialae Ave use the corridor daily. My daughter bus/walks to school, I ride my bike, sometimes we drive. The traffic study they did a few months ago was a joke — of course traffic is all screwed up if you just close two lanes of the road without any of the other infrastructure in place. No consideration that if the lanes truly were closed, then people WOULD ride their bikes or walk with more confidence. That those businesses that complain about losing customers because of no parking may GAIN customers because they can walk there from the bus stop or ride their bikes there.
My daughter wants to ride her bike to school. She’s perfectly capable. But the infrastructure scares me too much. It’s bad enough that she has to cross Waialae when she walks to school!
We go to community meetings and testify. We write letters. Yet somehow we are always drowned out or dismissed in the favor of the car.
I have never understood why there aren’t more pedestrian overpasses built especially on busy highways like where the HPU student was killed. Most major cities built these decades ago…..
Tried to comment at Larry’s blog but couldn’t do so.
Larry – great analysis & I agree with much of what you’ve written. I have a couple of suggestions:
(1) Increase the white walk signal from the standard 10 seconds to 20 or 30 seconds, to be followed by the flashing red “don’t walk.”. I have timed the walk signal at all intersections downtown and with the exception of crosswalks going in the direction of the major through streets (e.g., King Street), that signal is always set at 10 seconds. I walk a 15-minute-mile pace and I can’t cross most intersections in 10 seconds so there is no way an elderly or encumbered pedestrian (e.g., parent with small child) can do so. Increasing the length of the walk signal will definitely reduce the stress & panic created by an attempt to “win” the 10-second dash.
(2) All managers & staff in the state and city transportation departments should immediately be required to get to work either on foot or by bus – no cars whatsoever, not even for drop off or pick up. Maybe if they had to contend with what the rest of us put up with, they’d be more likely to make real improvements.
This video shows what a protected bike lane looks like: http://www.streetfilms.org/kinzie-street-the-first-of-many-protected-bike-lanes-for-chicago/. It’s what I would need to convince me that biking is safe enough for me & my elementary school kids. A community-led initiative is what it would take to inspire change; it is a difficult (tho not impossible) pitch to gov’t leaders if there are resident voices and few businesses supporting the kinds of change that would be needed to make safe bike routes.
Those protected bike lines are a great idea and it is being done in a city in which you can only ride a bike when the weather permits because of snow. Do we have room for putting these protected bike lanes, I doubt it. They took out a whole lane, no way we could do that when many times lanes are used for parking in this city. Also the city of Chicago obviously has a larger budget and operating costs to help take care of these problems.
http://www.pritchettcartoons.com/bikeway.htm
Hallelujah!
All Hail to the City and State well-paid bureaucrats and consultants and contractors!
Did not get a chance to read Larry’s blog, but the topic is always on my mind. One major problem is that drivers are allowed to drive insane now, and it is an incremental thing once it becomes clear you can run red lights, speed, do worse things, etc., with impunity. Saw this in Boston when I was in school there a while back. I don’t think a driver could get a traffic ticket there no matter what one did–like run red lights, etc., etc. When I was there, at intersections all lights would turn yellow to allow pedestrians to cross in all directions–all drivers had to stop. Didn’t matter very much. Cars at times ran those as well, and a pedestrian had a false sense of safety. The point is, part of the problem is enforcing a certain standard as to how cars are to be driven. Too many drivers here now drive with no concept of safe driving–or leaving margins for problems. I bought a bike in Boston, and gave it away in two days, after near misses. Tried riding here upon return, but gave it up for the same reason. Would love to ride a bike, but it is way too dangerous. No enforcement of a high standard of driving (don’t know why it is not done–lack of police resources, too dangerous for the police themselves, laziness–except at obligatory speed traps, apathy as long as we get by?) will make things all the worse. Lived in Tokyo, and I don’t recall pedestrian problems, but it has been awhile. Seemed drivers understood what yellow and red meant. On small streets in Tokyo, there were cheap wooden sticks at stop lights with red flags for pedestrians to wave to make themselves visible that one returned to a holder on the other side after crossing. It worked as far as I could tell, but again, there was a sense that intersections and signal lights meant something. Of course, I would never (really!) accept a ride in a car from a friend in Japan–as I was advised before going there.
In Toronto, raising your hand to cross would bring six lanes of traffic to an immediate halt–that was a long time ago–hope it still works. So I think it is the culture you create, and road enforcement. As a driver on the other hand, I notice a serious problem with the left pillar of my windshield often progressively blocking out people on the left as I begin to cross cross walks at an intersection. Also, there should be more education that if you can turn left or right at an intersection, pedestrians are likely to be there, since usually that is when they can cross. I think drivers think that if the light is green, they can turn and nothing is supposed to be in the way. I never hear anyone discuss this. Also, at cross walks, day or night, it is difficult to see pedestrians a long way off because clothes blend with whatever is on the side of the road–this is also part of a tunnel effect of concentrating on the road in front–nothing becomes apparent in terms of the cross walks. Then, one must approach each one as if there may be people there starting to cross, etc. Dark clothes don’t help at night, and the camouflage effect makes things difficult during the day. Now that cars have become silent, pedestrians in parking areas. etc., don’t hear the cars as they used to. Because of the sound-proofing inside the car, I roll down my windows enough to hear people not paying attention, little kids, cars, etc., this can be a really big help for a driver. The problem of pedestrians and the danger they face could easily be improved, but it begins with concerned drivers. Buy some piece of electronics like a laptop or anything electrical, and note the long list of safety precautions one is advised to read FIRST before using the device. These come about no doubt because of lawyers and lawsuits. One of the issues for government is the lack of interest and accountability and the fact there is free legal representation, and government will pay the bill if one prevails. Which goes back to the culture created and individual morals. (In Germany, I was chided by a friend I was following in my car for not using my turn signals though we were in the back woods, and there were no cars or anything in sight. Of course, the German autobahn may be another story.)
Pedestrians should be strongly warned often that signal lights and cross walks don’t necessarily mean safety, and they should always be watching out for themselves. Sad situation. Most of the problem I think could be stopped with the police creating a strong culture of good driving habits. And it might help if car insurance companies did not use tickets as much as they do to raise insurance rates, so that people would not be all that inclined to contest every one of them. One could go on and on. But I believe it is mainly part of the culture we create about driving–and dealing with folks who arrive with a more radical driving culture. And it goes back to the police doing their job. I have noticed the lack of police cars almost any time I drive on the H1, H2, H3, etc. I have called 911 when people pass me going over 100 mph, and the police instruct to call, but then they ask for the license tag–kind of hard to read when a car goes by so fast there is no way to read the tag, and by the time the call is over, the driver(s) are long gone.
Claire, thanks for pointing to that video. It’s shot by Elizabeth Press, possibly the same person who used to work as a producer at Democracy Now. Small world. I’ll post that video on Disappeared News. Appreciate it.
This is Dickensian. It is the best of biking worlds; it is the worst of biking worlds. Me, I’m not brave enough to two-wheel in town and I’d like to see big bunches of money taken out of the Choo Choo boondoggle and plugged into real live bikeways all over town and outside of town.
http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/news/2011/12/12/judge-cayetano-heen-roth-and.html?page=all
Me too. Maybe the Federal Judge Tashima will knock some sense into this crazy Honolulu Rail Transit project.
The jurisdictional confusion between state roads vs. county roads is a big problem for a lot of people. If there’s a pothole, which bureaucracy should you call? If you want a stoplight, or improved signage, who is responsible? A few years ago, when there were serious discussions about an agenda for a state Constitutional Convention, one topic I raised was the devolution of power from the state to the counties. My general concept was that when things by nature are restricted to particular counties, then the counties should have complete jurisdictional authority over them. Two obvious examples are roads and water. There are no roads that cross from one Hawaii county to another. And there are no streams or wells that flow from one county to another. Therefore, all road construction and maintenance; and fresh-water allocation decisions; should belong to the counties where the roads and waters are located. Perhaps the state could own expensive or rarely used equipment on behalf of all the counties and lend it (for a fee reflecting actual pro-rated costs) to counties as their needs arise; but basically, turn over all the roads to the counties. The only serious objection anyone raised is that federal highway funds are given to states, not to counties. But I’m sure some way could be found to handle that problem.
There are some other route causes at work here that I think should be addressed.
1. DTS relies heavily on computer modeling, but doesn’t balance it with human interpretation of the data. It is, without exaggeration: the models say a light should go here. The models say we don’t need a light here.
2. Tied in with this is that DTS employees seem to have no intrinsic concept of what “safe streets” are. I’ve been told too many times that a given street already is bike friendly, when it is in fact quite dangerous!
this is such a beautiful contrast between the deep cluelessness of a fumbling bureaucracy and the very enlightened and useful contributions of a philanthropist who seems to recognize that “small is beautiful”.
at the city and state level, the transportation bureaucrats seem to live in a world of scale models and maps and big plans that always seem to fizzle.
one thing that seems to characterize thinking in this town is a false sense of inevitability.
land development is seen as “inevitable”, whereas diversifying the economy is seen as “impossible”. when local politicians and bureaucrats talk about diversification, they seem to respond by citing initiatives from generations ago, like “Well, Ariyoshi tried to bring in shrimp farming on the North Shore, but that didn’t really work out, so we need to give up on diversification. We just need to focus on building new houses for families.”
maybe noel kent hit the nail on the head in “Islands Under the Influence” with the model of “dependent development” to explain Hawaii’s economic development. maybe there is a tradeoff between independence and prosperity. One sees this in other polynesian societies like Samoa, where the societies are poor but they still have their land and culture. But in all these societies, whether developed and dependent like Hawaii or undeveloped but independent like Samoa, it remains a perpetual questions of whether the right path was chosen. The poverty in some polynesian societies is crushing, so they export their young people, who are fish out of water in the mean streets of america. In contrast, the native hawaiians lost control of their destinies a long time ago, and like a retired person, they seemed to drift into living one day at a time on the fringes of a world they once ruled.
In some societies, however, economic diversification is seen as a matter of national security. here i am thinking of Singapore, south korea, taiwan, israel, china, etc. Economic diversification is the path to both prosperity and reduced vulnerability to outside forces in some countries. Perhaps Hawaii’s formative experience of development was under an earlier period of history, before the 1960s. The most dynamic countries today developed largely after that period.
i wonder if decolonization struggles, which were often marxist in orientation, actually fed this model of independence with development, or if societies that were rebellious tended to be more dynamic. (For example, “Spain” consists of five language groups. the most dynamic economies in Spain are in Catalonia and the Basque regions, which are also the most rebellious and anti-Spanish.)
if one looks at Abercrombie’s main initiatives, they are also very focused, like on updating the State’s computer system and on pre-natal and early childhood health. That’s a lot of bang for the buck, and very focused like Omidyar. Neil seems to come up with big schemes like the ‘third city’ on an ad hoc basis to please the big players, but his heart seems to be on small stuff that actually works.