Pitiful state of main roads reveal government gridlock

Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s road crews recently came to Enchanted Lake to repave the miles of roads and side streets in our sprawling Kailua subdivision.

I’m not an engineer, but it looks like they did a good job.

Past practice seemed to be pouring new asphalt on top of the old, leaving a leaky surface often 3 or 4 inches higher than the gutter.

Pity the poor kids on skateboards.

This time, crews scraped the old asphalt down to the road bed, then laid a fresh new layer that lines evenly with the gutters and rides so smooth I wish I could take up skateboarding myself.

It’s part of Caldwell’s promise to repave all substandard city roads in five years; unlike another big city transportation project, this one appears to be running on time and on budget.

Sadly, sometimes I must leave the velvety roads of our cozy neighborhood and drive Oahu’s primary arteries, as I did this week on a trip to Ala Moana Center.

The main roads, many the state’s responsibility, are Exhibit A of government futlessness at its worst.

The Pali Highway, which carries Windward commuters cross-island, is a disgrace, with ruts, potholes and haphazard repairs jarring the joints with nearly every revolution of the tires.

When they tried speed bumps in Nuuanu awhile back, some mornings they seemed the smoothest part of the drive.

Lanes are closed most days for weed wacking and stopgap repairs that don’t improve the ride; promises of full rehabilitation keep getting delayed.

The bumpity-bump continued on Bishop Street, an aged and rutted downtown thoroughfare with axle-busters everywhere you turn.

Ala Moana Boulevard was more of the same, a rough ride on worn asphalt, and what could have been a nice drive in relatively light traffic became a bone-jangling ordeal.

Most distressing was when I got home and found a press release from the Reason Foundation rating Hawaii’s highways the worst-performing in the nation.

We had the most deficient pavement, the worst congestion and were the least cost-effective.

The study found that we spend $90,000 in administrative costs per mile of state road, compared to states such as Texas and Kentucky that maintain better roads for administrative costs of $4,000 and $1,000 per mile.

In other words, we have lots of state employees getting nice salaries, generous pensions and lifetime health insurance to deliver woeful results.

Road maintenance is as basic as government gets, and if the state can’t do it competently we can have no confidence of anything being done right.

For the next two months, gubernatorial candidates David Ige, James "Duke" Aiona and Mufi Hannemann should be peppered with questions about how they’re going to convert that $90,000 per mile into roads we can be proud of.

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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.