Articles
Solving Traffic Problems - Not!
by Bill Jardine Jan 12, 2008
As our new year blooms in Waimea, we have been enjoying the most perfect weather in memory.High above us, in the alpine fields of sloping cinder and craggy basaltic outcrops, the snows of December still glisten as the warm Hawaiian sun sails slowly across the blue face of the sky. Here in the village we have been wearing our new outfits, unwrapped from fancy boxes under Christmas trees, and cheeks are rosy with the chilly morning air as the lovely Waimea wahine bustle into Starbucks for steaming coffee. It is just wonderful!
We have also been noticing that no one is complaining about the traffic delays at rush hour, since the schools let out in late December. Speaking of traffic, have you noticed how incredibly courteous the Waimea drivers are as they wait patiently for our “main” traffic light to organize the competing flows of traffic? It is really the most impressive display of community aloha and pride of place that I have seen anywhere. This sudden lack of congestion on the highway is of course due to the lack of school traffic, and as I was thinking about this the other day it occurred to me that if we were to just eliminate the schools a great deal of our traffic troubles would go away. My goodness, we really have lots of schools too! Just think about it … we have the Waimea Middle and Elementary Schools, the Kamehameha preschool, Parker School, HPA, Country Day, Small World Preschool and the Montessori schools to boot! Yikes! Maybe we can just eliminate a few of them, but eliminating all of them would be much better, don’t you think? Well, this is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but it does illustrate the current of exclusivity that has been running dangerously close to the surface this past year or two. Do you recall the analogy promoted not long ago that when traffic swells we look for more roadway yet when a fat man swells … perhaps with too much good cheer … he should go on a diet? That struck me as the sort of feel-good but backward thinking we see so often in pop culture today. We certainly don’t want to drive people out of town in order to “lose weight” and lessen the congestion on the roads any more than we should consider eliminating the schools to achieve the same result, right? We also may find ourselves waiting another 40 years for the pie-in-the-sky bypass roads that would relieve traffic while starving our retail community, which is all ready on life support. We should think about solving the problems we have within our existing roadways long before we place our hopes and dreams of a far-distant and super expensive alternative. For instance, what if the schools agreed to stagger their hours and we could get the resort employers to do the same? What if we had “contra” lanes like the other towns and villages in lovely settings across our great land? An environmentalist friend pointed out to me that roadways are one of the most environmentally destructive things we create as a society. Could that be true? If it is, we better stop to think a bit harder about encouraging the State of Hawaii to create another big one across the sunlit pastures lying at the foot of the world’s tallest mountain, no?To post an opinion of your own, visit our Big Island Buyers Brokers blog at AlohaLiving.com
Imua,
Bill Jardine
