A Facebook friend described a recent 4,000-mile driving trip on the mainland and reached the conclusion of many from Hawaii after such travels: "It suddenly occurred to me with shocking clarity that not once did we encounter more potholes anywhere on the mainland than I bounced over on the Pali today."
Her friends were in full commiseration.
"Manoa’s heinous these days, too."
"On Kapalama Heights we’ve had our Third World roads for … forever."
"President Obama must have thought he was back in Indonesia."
Others who travel in other states say much the same: While road conditions vary greatly from state to state, nowhere else does overall degradation seem as bad as here.
Such reports are anecdotal, but they’re backed by surveys that show Hawaii drivers pay more for car repairs caused by poor roads than motorists in other states.
A recent city program to map all 3,517 lane-miles of city roads with high-definition cameras found 27 percent of our roads fail to meet acceptable standards, and nearly 16 percent more have some degree of degradation.
I was sensitized to our rutted roads over the holidays when a side-view mirror fell off my van and was tenuously reattached with duct tape while I awaited a replacement.
Driving gingerly to avoid shaking it off was impossible on the bumpity-bump of local roads.
An errand run in Kailua town found streets where virtually every inch was rutted with potholes, jagged patches more rattling than speed bumps, cracks and steel plates.
On the Pali, a major state highway, there’s barely a stretch with no potholes, cracks or jutting patch jobs.
Mayor Kirk Caldwell tried to show he’s on top it by going out with a city crew his second week in office to personally fill potholes.
It was a nice photo op, but the last thing that will solve this problem is an unskilled person shoveling loose asphalt into a hole to be washed away again by the next big rain.
As Caldwell admitted, we need extensive road rehabilitation and repaving to achieve the city’s modest goal of getting city roads to an average of "adequate," with none falling below moderate degradation.
The $100 million the city has tentatively budgeted for the task next year is a drop in the bucket compared with, say, the $5.26 billion being spent on rail, and not nearly enough to get the job done any time soon.
Road maintenance is a most basic city function, and we’ve diverted taxes and fees collected for the purpose for too long.
What’s needed now is a disciplined commitment to setting priorities, dedicating the funding, embracing best practices that have worked elsewhere and coordinating with the state to end this nagging embarrassment.
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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.
