North Shore gridlock

Each year, hundreds of thousands of tourists and island residents dart across the highway at Laniakea Beach to marvel at the sea turtles that swim ashore there — a chaotic scene that often imperils pedestrians and grinds North Shore traffic to a halt.

After an especially bad summer for traffic at Laniakea, many on the North Shore say they’ve hit their limit, and the now-daily delays, lasting 30-40 minutes in both directions on Kamehameha Highway, have grown intolerable.

They’ve renewed calls, dating back almost a decade, for transportation officials to come up with short- and long-term fixes to ease the traffic and make Laniakea safe.But even though the problem has been around for years, it’s still not clear when they’ll see relief.

"It’s kind of like the No. 1 quality of life issue on the North Shore right now," said Carol Philips, chairwoman of the North Shore Neighborhood Board’s transportation committee, which recently was re-formed after several years off to respond to the growing problems.

"It’s just been getting worse and worse every year," said Philips, who’s lived on the North Shore more than 30 years. "This place is masquerading as a little country town and it’s turned into a tourist mecca."

An online petition dubbed "Save Laniakea Beach," which asks for the state and city governments to take action to protect the spot, fix the traffic problems and make it safer for pedestrians, has garnered nearly 1,200 signatures since Aug. 11.

And the traffic’s effects have spread across the North Shore. At Ace Hardware in Haleiwa, managers say they get cellphone calls from angry would-be customers stuck on the highway, telling store employees that they’re turning around and going to another store because the traffic is unbearable.At Turtle Bay Resort, parking valets tell of guests who arrive agitated because of the hour they spent sitting on the highway to get there.

State transportation officials say they’re finally poised to act. But the solution they’re considering — blocking off parking at Laniakea altogether — isn’t sitting well with many on the North Shore who think that only kicks the problem further down the road.

"I hesitate to even call it a solution," said Blake McElheny, also a North Shore Neighborhood Board member."One of the things that makes the North Shore special is the access to the beautiful beaches and the ocean."

Many residents would be appalled to learn "that’s the best that DOT can come up with" after several years of study, including creating a 19-member community task force to look at the issue, he said.

Other short-term solutions, such as creating an entrance and exit for the cars at Laniakea, wouldn’t work because that would involve other property owners, state Department of Transportation spokeswoman Caroline Sluytersaid.

State Rep. Richard Fale, who represents the North Shore, said city and state transportation officials can’t agree on a plan to fix the parking situation over liability issues. The land mauka of the beach is city property and could eventually become a park.

"They can’t agree, and that’s unacceptable," said Fale, a Republican. "If we had the director of transportation, or senior members of government who lived out there, I guarantee (the traffic problem) would be solved in one day. We’re kind of out of sight, out of mind."

Traffic woes at Laniakea have grown with the beach’s sudden rise in popularity in the past decade as it became known by visitors from around the world as "Turtle Beach" — a unique pocket of shore, with natural protections from sharks, to see honu in the wild.

Malama Na Honu, a nonprofit whose volunteers daily look to educate visitors and keep them from harassing or feeding the animals, estimates more than 600,000 people visit the site each year. Most access the beach after parking on a dirt patch, some 200 yards long, on the other side of Kamehameha Highway.

People cross the road on foot and pull out their cars at random.

"There’s no central crosswalk," said Dennis Pang, a surfboard shaper in Pupukea. "The tourists are like walking across Main Street Disneyland. They don’t give a rip."

As for the drivers, "everyone gets stuck" making sure they don’t hit pedestrians, Pang said.

Philips and other North Shore residents question why state transportation officials haven’t done more to solve the problem.The state has allocated several million dollars to study the issue since 2007, officials say, but it hasn’t yet decided on even a short-term fix.

"Everybody’s life is being altered and there’s been no action by the DOT," said Gil Riviere, Fale’s Republican predecessor in the House, who represented the North Shore from 2010 to 2012.

In 2007, the Legislature approved $1.2 million to address traffic alternatives at Laniakea, according to Riviere. "For two years it kind of languished and nothing was done," so the funding eventually was taken off the table, he said.

Then, in 2009, another $1.7 million was approved to look at the problem, Riviere said.With those funds, the DOT announced in May 2011 the launch of an 18-month process to study the best way forward, including a task force that would meet eight times during that period.

The state found it hard to find members for the group, so the first meeting didn’t take place until January 2012, he added.

At that meeting, said Riviere, a task force member, he and his colleagues were given a homework assignment by state consultants: take photos around the North Shore and bring them back to the next meeting with written thoughts on what makes the area unique.

Riviere said he and his colleagues were stunned by the request and asked the DOT and the consultants if they could speed up the process, but were ignored. The task force next met in April 2012.

"They’ve not had a meeting since," Riviere said. It’s the DOT’s call to schedule the meetings and it’s not clear when the next one will take place, he added.

DOT officials say they’d like to meet first with the task force before finalizing the plan to block off parking at Laniakea, Sluyter said.She wasn’t sure when that meeting would take place.

A plan to move the highway slightly mauka at Laniakea could come up under DOT’s efforts to address highway erosion there, Sluyter said.The move wouldn’t be to address the traffic directly, although such a realignment might help with that issue, too, she added.

"Realignment projects are big," Sluyter said. "They’re expensive."

She added, "there’s not an easy, quick fix" to the traffic woes. "The community needs to come to some sort of consensus before we move forward."

Doug Cole, executive director of the North Shore Community Land Trust, called closing off all access to the beach "short­sighted." There have to be better solutions to the traffic, he said.

"It’s good that people are getting out there and enjoying a beautiful place," Cole saidThursday.

By closing off the parking strip, "you’re not just stopping visitors from accessing the beach, you’re stopping residents of this island," he said. "I don’t think that’s right."

Fale said he hopes transportation officials can still come up with a better plan.

"We’re glad the tourists are here," he said. "It’s a huge source of income for the state … but we need to make sure it doesn’t become an unbearable burden on the community that they’re visiting. I believe this is a challenge that can be easily overcome."