For decades, said Rick Egged, Waikiki had been frozen in time, stuck in 1976. That’s when a set of rules was passed, laying down restrictions under the city’s Waikiki Special District ordinance (people in Egged’s line of work call it by its acronym: the WSD).

At the time the thinking was that Waikiki was overcrowded, so one of the WSD design guidelines specified that building setbacks were OK for landscaping, but little else. Sidewalk dining became a thing of the past.

“People asked me why we don’t have more sidewalk dining in Waikiki,” said Egged, president of the Waikiki Improvement Association. “The short answer was, it was against the law. … So we went back and we said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, that’s not a good thing.’ So we opened up the setback area to sidewalk dining again.”

Waikiki was partially thawed from its time freeze with a planning process that culminated 20 years ago. That yielded three bursts of regulatory amendments allowing greater flexibility in redevelopment, in the hopes of producing a more modern and open-looking tourist district.

Now the association, a 40-year-old private nonprofit, just concluded another conference titled “Waikiki 20/20,” one that examined ideas for the next stage in a Waikiki evolution. One, now under study by city transportation officials, is a change in traffic cycles, allowing pedestrians to cross intersections in all directions (a “square-dance” crossing), followed by a cycle of vehicle-only crossing.

The idea is to allow right-turn lanes to clear out rather than backing up for blocks, a phenomenon any resident who dares to venture into Waikiki for a big event has witnessed.

Egged, 60, has watched Waikiki over the years, previously as state planning director under Gov. Ben Cayetano. And he feels encouraged at the prospects for the resort district’s future.

“One of the things that came out of this conference is it gives Waikiki a vision for, ‘Wow, these are all the things we can change and make Waikiki that much better,’” he said. “And they’re not pie-in-the-sky, they’re not that far off, the things that we can do.”

QUESTION: Did this conference mirror the one like it in the ’90s?

ANSWER: That was actually kind of a planning process that took place about 20 years ago, part of which was called Waikiki 20/20. Being as it was 20 years ago, that plan was finished in 1992, we thought it was really appropriate now to re-look at what we’ve done and decide what additional direction we wanted to take Waikiki over the next 20 years. …

Q: What things do we see now that came out of that first planning process?

A: It certainly identified a lot of the problems that needed to be corrected in order to allow the redevelopment of Waikiki to take place. Beachwalk; even the Hilton Hawaiian Village, the major changes that took place there; DFS (Galleria Hawaii), when they did their redevelopment … in order to redevelop DFS, it took six variances.

What was necessary was we had to go back in and change the WSD. … The building requirements in that ordinance are very stringent, much more stringent than the rest of Oahu. …

And as we went through and decided, “OK, now Waikiki is 30-40 years old, we need to make changes,” we needed to decide how to change the governing land use ordinance, the WSD, in order to allow those changes to take place. We’ve changed the law three different times. One was in ’96, one was in 2003, and the other was just recently, in 2011.

Q: So now in this new planning effort, you want to gain more flexibility?

A: No, at this point, 2011, we rezoned all of Waikiki; it was a very sweeping change in the law. The next step that we’re working with the city on, and that was one of the subjects of this conference, was to go back and redo the design guidelines. …

Q: Just broadly speaking, these guidelines have to do with, what, setbacks? Ocean views?

A: Basically those design guidelines are what architects, when they’re designing or redeveloping buildings in Waikiki, go to, to get an idea of what the city’s going to let them do. By the same token, when they bring their designs to the city, then the city officials look at those guidelines and say, “OK, is this consistent with the design guidelines?”

It covers everything from the way the building is shaped, to its orientation towards mauka-makai, to the color of the building, to the shape of the roofs, all those kinds of things are talked about in the design guidelines.

Q: Would you say there’s an overarching goal for the new guidelines?

A: Yes. The overall objective, of course, to those design guidelines, was to create more of an open feel to Waikiki, more of a green feel to Waikiki, more of a Hawaiian feel to Waikiki.

Q: Do the developers get more density here, too?

A: If you don’t allow some flexibility on the density, people are never going to redevelop their places. They’ll say, “If I redevelop, I lose density, I lose money. So I’m better off just doing the best I can with what I’ve got,” which means the building never changes.

So what we’ve been trying to do is allowing that density that they’ve got now to be retained and allow them to redevelop the building as long as they do certain things, like create more public open space, create green roofs, open up the property to the public with arcades, like places where people can walk through, open up the ground level so it’s more visual so you’re not just looking at walls and windows, you can actually see into the property, that kind of thing.

Q: So it would give a better flow-through effect?

A: Right, and a more open feel on the ground level.

Q: What do you mean by green roofs?

A: The idea is being able to landscape on the roofs, for example. That It costs money, and so what we want to do is you give them incentives, by saying, “If you have a green roof, or you do this and that, we’ll allow you to redevelop and retain your density.”

Q: So you get more if you give more here?

A: Right … Part of the difficulty was that our design professionals believed that the WSD and the WSD design guidelines really had kind of handcuffed them in terms of being able to be creative in what they brought to Waikiki. So we’re trying to build more flexibility into the law.

But the WSD portion of it is one piece. The other thing that has really been an incentive to the redevelopment of Waikiki is when the city has come in and improved particular areas. We usually point to Kuhio Beach Park expansion as kind of the key project that opened up Waikiki, because it brought that whole Kapiolani Park green feel right into the center of Waikiki.

And then the landscaping and the new street fixtures on Kalakaua Avenue. Remember the old rust-colored ones that we got rid of, and all those junky publication racks? So those things were removed, and the nice, green Victorian lampposts were put in, more trees were put in, more grass was put in. I kind of describe it as “the greening of Kalakaua Avenue.”

That was done, 2002 … (Former Mayor Jeremy) Harris had a lot to do with that, really kicking into the revitalization of Waikiki, because he viewed Waikiki as Honolulu’s crown jewel, if you will, and so believed it needed a lot of attention. …

The point I always make is that over about a 10-year period the city put about $100 million into Waikiki. And that helped spur $3 billion worth of private-sector reinvestment. And that reinvestment wouldn’t have come if the city hadn’t started the ball rolling. And then, of course, there were also city and state tax incentives that were helpful as well. …

Q: Looking forward, the design concepts were discussed at the conference? What else?

A: A new transportation plan for Waikiki. We’re looking at trying to be able to create a circulator system for Waikiki that would tie the bus routes together, to create an easy way to take a bus route that would take you around Waikiki and connect Waikiki to Ala Moana, because Ala Moana’s the terminal point of the transit system.

And also looking to tie in pedestrian pathways, bikeways and the like, to try to create that whole mobility feel in and around Waikiki. …

Transportation is such a big piece. And we wanted to improve access to Waikiki,  for residents, for visitors, for people who work here. This transit plan goes a long way toward doing that.

Q: Any other highlights?

A: One of the suggestions that came out of the conference was to create a parking district for Waikiki, to improve parking and to build more parking. That’s something we’d like to pursue.

One of the things they do in other places, one of my goals, is to tie all the major public parking together on the Internet so that if you want to come to Waikiki, you go to “Waikiki Parking” and figure out where the best place to park is. Because that’s one of the big problems: A lot of people don’t know where to park in Waikiki. …

You know, these things may take several evolutions before they become part of a final proposal. Right now, the whole idea behind the conference was, hey, let’s talk about all the things we need to do. As a kickoff let’s put them all together, and then we’ll have stakeholder meetings to discuss these ideas, and then we’ll launch it, go forward from that.

One of the problems that kind of slowed the redevelopment of Waikiki down was there was a lot of friction between business interests and residents. We’ve been very successful over the last 10 years of bringing the business interests together, working with the residents, so that we’ve been able to come to agreement over a lot of the changes that need to be made. …

Because we’ve been successful in the commercial area, the neighborhood board came to us and said, “You know, don’t forget about the residential areas. We’re part of Waikiki, too.” So from the very beginning, planning the process, we worked with the neighborhood board so that when we went to the (City) Council, we went shoulder to shoulder.