More H-1 shutdowns planned for summer

This is "carmageddon," Hawaii-style.

The state’s busiest highway, in the heart of town, is now blanketed almost nightly with barriers, construction equipment and lane closures so that work crews can complete long-overdue repairs and repaving on the H-1 freeway.

And overnight closures shutting down the H-1 entirely in one direction — an inconvenient side effect of the project that state transportation officials warned of last year — finally hit drivers full-force this week. Workers are allowed up to 120 of those full directional overnight closures during the entire project, which is expected to wrap up in July.

They used up only two of them in 2013.

The $42 million H-1 rehabilitation project is in the midst of a two-week stretch of those overnight full closures of the westbound side from Vineyard Boulevard to Halona Street. Drivers have reported backups on and around the freeway in the first several nights.

The shutdowns are necessary, though, transportation officials say, to help workers reconstruct the freeway pavement, widen the Nuu­anu Stream Bridge, upgrade freeway lighting, install drainage improvements and resurface and re-stripe the roadway.

On Wednesday night, Gov. Neil Abercrombie was slated to join state transportation officials for a briefing, update and site tour of the freeway work during the full westbound closure.

This week’s overnight freeway closures will conclude at 5 a.m. Friday. Then, they’ll skip most of the weekend and resume at 8 p.m. Sunday. This series of westbound H-1 closures coincides with many local schools’ spring break to lessen the impact, and it is expected to wrap up at 5 a.m. March 28.

However, there’s a good chance the full directional closures will become somewhat routine during the early summer. State Department of Transportation officials already have warned that as the project nears its July completion crews will likely close the freeway in one direction for about two months of night work, excluding weekends.

The H-1 freeway work further coincides with extensive city road repaving and repairs (also after years of neglect, similar to major state-operated roads) and construction moving Diamond Head into town to erect the island’s 20-mile, 21-station elevated rail transit project.

All that work will require coordination between state, city and rail authority officials. As the westbound H-1 again shuts down Thursday night, Nimitz Highway — one of the listed alternate routes for drivers — will have its left westbound lane closed between Alakea and Bethel streets from 9:30 p.m. Thursday to 4:30 a.m. Friday for soil testing, according to rail officials.

Officials with the Hono­lulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, which is overseeing rail construction, said they consulted with state transportation officials last week ahead of those closures.

"We did coordinate with H-DOT on this," HART spokesman Scott Ishikawa said Wednesday. "We actually postponed the work."

The state told HART to monitor traffic flows on the state-operated Nimitz Highway during the overnight H-1 closures this week, and crews found no significant impacts on Nimitz during those hours, Ishikawa said.

Nonetheless, Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s administration hopes to hire a traffic consultant in the coming fiscal year to help better coordinate all the construction amid the various public agencies across the island.

"The mayor’s not convinced that they’re not happening in silos," city Department of Transportation Services Director Mike Formby said recently of the various road work projects underway. "That’s what concerns him. Nobody seems to be looking at the big picture. We want to get something done."