The concrete barriers at popular Laniakea Beach were supposed to be a temporary fix to help keep the traffic flowing along Oahu’s famed North Shore, but six months after workers installed them, it’s unclear how long "temporary" will be.
When the barriers went up in late December to block cars, vans and buses from parking along a patch of dirt some 200 yards long, state transportation officials said they would study the impacts of the move and decide whether to keep the concrete in place.
But it’s not clear what, if any, studies on the barriers the state Department of Transportation has completed. Agency officials declined to comment last week when pressed for details, citing an ongoing lawsuit to bring the barriers down.
"You almost feel like you’re stuck in this crazy land where they’re not being upfront and forthright," North Shore Neighborhood Board member Blake McElheny, an outspoken opponent of the barriers, said of the DOT on Friday. With no studies on the barriers to share with the community, "what is really going on here?" he asked.
Meanwhile, some North Shore residents report that traffic has improved somewhat since the barriers went up, after they had watched the traffic along Kamehameha Highway steadily worsen in recent years.
The barriers, however, haven’t stopped the estimated 600,000 visitors who flock each year to Laniakea. They now simply park farther away from the beach along the highway’s tight and potentially hazardous shoulder, and then they haphazardly cross the highway at Laniakea as they did before.
"The former situation, even though it had many problems, was safer," McElheny said. The barriers did not eliminate the demand to park and visit Laniakea, he said. Instead, "they shifted it into a very dangerous spot."
The vans and buses that used to come to Laniakea have mostly disappeared because they no longer have enough room to park, he added — and he contends that’s a key reason that North Shore traffic is moving more swiftly.
A long-term effort to move the highway because of coastal erosion remains in its infancy despite years of study.
Realigning the highway farther mauka at Laniakea has long been flagged by the community and public officials as an important way to curb the beach erosion, ease crippling traffic and address pedestrian safety problems — mainly caused by visitors who flock to Laniakea to encounter sea turtles that serenely swim ashore each day.
State transportation officials have been looking into potential solutions since at least 2007. Nonetheless, they say the push to realign Kamehameha Highway at Laniakea remains in the pre-design and early planning phases.
It likely will be at least several years before the project breaks ground. Despite being identified as one of the North Shore community’s top priorities, the Laniakea highway project so far hasn’t been included in the 2015-2018 draft Transportation Improvement Program.
That document, compiled by the Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization, lists all of the road projects on the island that will rely on some share of federal dollars in the coming four years.
"It’s a ways out," DOT spokeswoman Carolyn Sluyter said in a phone message Friday. "That’s why it’s not on the TIP yet."
The agency is still mulling just how sharply it would curve the highway away from the beach, according to a DOT map she provided.
A comment period for the public to weigh in on the draft document ends Thursday. Once it’s passed, the document can be amended in subsequent years, OMPO Executive Director Brian Gibson said Friday.
Back in December, as the barriers were being erected, state transportation officials said they would "be monitoring the traffic flow to gauge the effectiveness of the short-term project to determine whether it should be extended beyond the one-month period."
The barriers were extended past that one-month period and have remained up ever since.
The lawsuit that DOT officials cited last week was filed in Circuit Court in January by a collection of North Shore residents and surfers looking to compel the agency to remove the barriers. In April the state attorney general’s office filed a motion looking to dismiss the suit.
Two bills introduced by state Sen. Clayton Hee (D, Heeia-Laie-Waialua) aimed at spurring meaningful action from DOT on the highway realignment stalled in this year’s legislative session.
However, the effort did help get $7 million in design and construction for highway realignment in the state’s 2014-2015 capital budget passed this year — an outcome Hee characterized Friday as arguably better than if the bills had passed. DOT will have six years to act on that funding, according to emails with local transportation officials that Hee provided.
"This is a project that’s inevitable" because of the erosion caused by sea rise, Hee said Friday. "It’s in the best interest not just of the people who live out here, but the whole island."
Asked whether he thought DOT would act with more urgency now that it’s part of the state’s latest capital budget, Hee threw up his hands.
"If DOT does not take advantage of the legislative mandate to move forward with this, I believe they will be in serious dereliction of their duty."
Public comments on the island’s draft TIP report can be emailed to OahuMPO@ OahuMPO.org.
