APEC summit and rail effort led 2011 transportation news

Traffic is crazy in Hawaii. It got crazier during 2011.

Everyone has their top stories of the year, and here are my top three when it comes to traffic.

» The APECalypse: The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting was the biggest news story all year for many reasons.

But only one reason really stuck with your average Tom, Dick and Kalani: the traffic hell it ended up causing for pretty much all of us.

Looking at the metrics for our website at the time, I can tell you that our most popular stories were not about the finance ministerial meeting on the debt crisis in Europe.

It was about the Waikiki detours, the ghost town that parts of Kapiolani Boulevard became and all those military vehicles that transformed our idyllic vistas into a police state.

But we made it through. It wasn’t as bad as many people feared, thanks to a good public outreach effort by the city and the state. Now, how about them potholes?

» Rail: It’s the story that won’t quit, even as recently as Thursday, when the Federal Transit Administration accepted the most ambitious public works project in the history of the state into final design.

It was a nonstop news factory for the year I covered it, producing everything from controversies with rail-car maker Ansaldo Honolulu to establishing a rail agency, to the lawsuit that could cripple the project forever.

The story won’t end until the project is finished, one way or another.

» The price of driving: Vehicle costs went up. Gas prices went up. This story mattered because it hit everyone in the pocketbook. We were all victims.

Annual vehicle registration fees went up, and so did the weight tax. Couple that with the rising cost of gas, and many people were forced to cut back.

Those increased state fees are being put to good use, assures state Department of Transportation spokesman Dan Meisenzahl.

Numbers were not immediately available, but Meisenzahl says the state highway fund, famous for being raided by lawmakers for other uses, is now pretty flush with money. And the state has hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of projects planned for 2012, including establishing an afternoon Zipper Lane on Oahu and a Kahului Airport access road on Maui.

And that wraps up 2011 for "Parkway." Mahalo to you all for reading, and for sending in great questions.

I dedicate this column to John Heckathorn, renowned Hawaii journalist and food critic, who died Wednesday. He was a regular reader of mine for whom I had admiration and respect, and a dear friend.

Reach Gene Park at gpark@staradvertiser.com or Twitter as @GenePark.