In July 2012 state officials publicly launched an $82 million "PM Contraflow" project, with plans to include a 7.2-mile zipper lane on the H-1 freeway between Pearl Harbor and Waikele to help ease Ewa-bound rush-hour traffic.
But months later, they now acknowledge, state Department of Transportation officials began to privately reconsider whether a zipper lane was the best use of taxpayer dollars to ease congestion along one of the most notorious commutes on Oahu.
"We’re not really confident that it’s going to provide the kind of relief that the people expect or that it would show anything major as far as relief, so we are concerned," Highways Administrator Alvin Takeshita said in a recent interview.
Nonetheless, DOT spent months forging ahead with the planned zipper lane. By the time construction was suspended pending further evaluation, in either August or September, the state had spent an estimated $5 million on it, officials say.
That included about 2,000 zipper barriers and building a "crossover" section, where cars heading in the reversed lane would be routed back into the normal Ewa-bound freeway lanes, according to transportation officials.
They say none of that construction directly caused any of the lane closings evening H-1 commuters traveling between Aiea and Pearl City have endured for months now.
All the lane closings thus far have taken place so workers can repair the H-1 — a necessary task whether the state opts for a zipper lane or takes a different course, they said.
The agency hopes to know by the early part of next year whether it will resume building the zipper lane or scrap the idea.
Either way, it plans to widen H-1 westbound in two locations, re-stripe westbound lanes from the Aiea pedestrian overpass to the Pearl City offramp and provide a shoulder lane that would be used only during the afternoon commute.
The question the department continues to evaluate, Takeshita said, is whether those efforts alone without the zipper lane would reap the traffic benefits the state hopes to gain. A zipper lane would cost at least $3 million a year to operate, he said.
"The goal is to provide congestion relief," Takeshita said. "That’s the bottom line."
Repeatedly asked to explain the timing of the decision to halt work on the zipper lane, officials emphasized that the PM Contraflow project’s "design and build" contract, awarded to Hawaiian Dredging Construction Co., gives the state the extended flexibility to consider the best way to curb traffic congestion — whether that’s a zipper lane or not.
"You don’t have the data. You don’t have the information. You don’t have a final design … when you bid it out," Jadine Urasaki, DOT’s deputy director for capitol improvement projects, said of the contract. The recent change was "based on the data that we were getting" from Hawaiian Dredging, she said.
The construction firm has been providing the department with congestion data for the Aiea-Pearl City corridor since late last year, and DOT began to consider canceling the zipper lane design early this year, Urasaki said. Hawaiian Dredging provided the state with its most recent round of data in September, but "it’s not final yet," she said.
To consider potential traffic benefits, officials use a method called "levels of service," Takeshita said.
It measures how many vehicles are packed into a section of roadway at a given time, and the delays to get from one point to another. Takeshita called it a more "appropriate" approach than simply counting cars with tubes stretched across the road.
For freeway traffic, DOT considers a six-point scale that rates traffic congestion from best to worst. Category "A" has free-flowing traffic, moving at 55 mph or faster. In an "F," the worst category, drivers are traveling less than 20 mph.
Conditions during the Ewa-bound rush-hour commute are firmly mired in category "F," Takeshita said.
The goal of the $82 million project — whatever form it ultimately takes — is to boost that commute by a single notch, to category "E," where traffic moves at up to 35 mph, he said.
"Instead of having to drive 20 miles (an hour), now you’re going to be able to drive 30 miles," Urasaki said. "You’re reducing the amount of time that people are stuck in the p.m. peak period."
From the data the department has seen so far, with a zipper lane by itself, "we don’t even know if you’ll get out of the 20 mile-an-hour range," Takeshita said. "We don’t know; we’re still looking at it."
Some sections of the commute might even be worse with zipper lane only, he added.
Whatever the department ultimately decides, it’s still aiming to finish the congestion-reducing project in August, Urasaki said.
