Brad Main’s speed hump declarations published on March 21 in West Hawaii Today raise many concerns about the county’s enforcement of speed limits and other procedures. Speed enforcement is the responsibility of the police, and they should be held accountable to report how they are meeting this responsibility islandwide. If police manpower is short, then hire speed monitors to measure speeds and document licenses of speeding cars, sending the evidence to the traffic court for prosecution.
The most aggressive rejection of Main’s petition is from residents who know that the two parallel east-west streets, Aloha Kona Drive and Hoene Street, would become the major traffic roads if humps were placed on Nani Kailua Drive, a collector road. Traffic speeds would be greater because the road grades are steeper on these two alternate parallel roads, thus the need for more speed enforcement by the police would expand. The county would have spent money on speed humps, and also increased the challenges for the police force to enforce speed limits.
Significantly concerning, numerous county procedures or requirements were ignored in the petition, raising questions of the validity of the “assessment” by a “traffic engineer.” First, Nani Kailua Drive does not even meet the county’s requirement for consideration for speed humps because it is a collector road; it is not a “local residential road.” This petition should have been stopped based on the road classification alone. A traffic study published in 2004 identified Nani Kailua Drive as a two-lane collector road for several neighborhoods, and now it collects even more traffic from a total of 37 streets located mauka of Queen Kaahumanu, with 579 parcels/lots organized into six subdivisions, as documented on 10 tax map key parcel maps.
The “traffic engineer” also apparently missed the 12 intersections on Nani Kailua from Queen Kaahumanu to Hienaloli Road. With the 150-foot distance setback of a speed hump from any intersection, as stated by Ron Thiel at the Traffic Safety Committee meeting on March 12, there are only three places along Nani Kailua that could theoretically allow a speed hump between intersections, if the grade is sufficiently moderate and other traffic conditions are met. So how could they identify nine locations for speed humps? If a “traffic engineer” could not identify the correct road classification nor the intersections in a traffic assessment, one must ask about basic qualifications to conduct this “assessment.”
Additional county procedures were not fulfilled as required and detailed in the four-page petition. Main did not organize/announce public meetings nor did he allow the participation of 100 percent of the affected owners as required by the county, both of which were supposedly certified by his signature on the petition. Main selected only 62 lots out of 117 that should have been included. There are six cul-de-sacs that the developer used to effectively lengthen Nani Kailua in order to sell a total of 117 lots. These homes are only accessible from Nani Kailua, and speed humps on Nani Kailua impair their access to emergency services and exits. In addition, one of the lots on Nani Kailua has multiple owners, that being the Kailua View Estates Association Owners, and each individual owner who is assessed a fee for the ownership of this lot should also be counted in the survey, but they were not. The association maintains that it never approved of a speed hump, yet “SH-1” is denoted with a line painted on the road fronting this lot for which the owners did not participate in the petition.
As for liability concerns, why does our county allow speed humps on roads with an incline grade up to 13 percent, which is 62.5 percent above the 8 percent grade limit established by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, thus ignoring the engineering standard for our roads as acknowledged in our County Code and followed throughout Hawaii? Why would our county allow any petition to move forward on a collector road, ignoring the basic limitation that humps only be considered for local residential roads? Why would basic intersection setback spacing requirements be ignored for potential hump locations? The road classification and intersection spacing should have been two criteria to be quickly verified before ever letting this petition to take off. Why would the county allow for lot owners to be omitted when clearly their only access to their property is via the named street?
Traffic budgets would be better spent building sidewalks in dangerous pedestrian areas, such as Hualalai Road, to allow safe walking access from many residential areas into the heart of Kailua-Kona. Unfortunately, the special treatment for this petition raises many questions about why so much money was spent on the “assessment” and even painting of speed hump locations to satisfy special interests, and the speed at which this petition seemed to fly through the county government.
Sue Garrod is a resident of Kailua-Kona.
It is the policy of West Hawaii Today to correct promptly any incorrect or misleading information when it is brought to the attention of the newspaper.