A hit-and-run accident at Laniakea Beach that sent three people to the hospital with serious injuries is again raising questions about pedestrian safety where scores of tourists and visitors often walk lengthy distances along a narrow shoulder to get to the popular North Shore destination.
Police took a 32-year-old Waipahu man into custody at Haleiwa Beach Park on Sunday afternoon about 30 minutes after he was believed to have struck a 63-year-old woman, and then moments later a 35-year-old man and 31-year-old woman, near a Laniakea bus stop while driving toward Waialua on Kamehameha Highway.
Lifeguards stationed nearby tended to the victims until paramedics arrived. Police arrested the man on suspicion of three counts of accidental injury, driving under the influence and failing to stop and render aid.
Local police said they didn’t have more details to share Monday about the incident, so it’s not yet clear if those struck Sunday had been walking to the beach or crossing to cars parked across the highway, as visitors and tourists often do there.
However, the accident happened along a stretch of North Shore highway that’s long been flagged by residents as a safety hazard, where they say pedestrians have already been hit. The traffic and safety situation at Laniakea remains a sticking point in a community that has seen little action from public agencies to fix the problem.
State transportation officials have been looking into potential solutions for years to curb the beach erosion, curb traffic and reduce the hazards there. But the push to fix and realign Kamehameha Highway at Laniakea remains in the early planning phases, and that continues to irk many North Shore residents.
Visitors are drawn to the beach to watch Hawaiian green sea turtles, often lazing on the sand or in the shorebreak. Formerly, tourists would park across the road and then dart through traffic.
In late December state transportation officials took the controversial step of erecting a 200-yard-long concrete barrier at Laniakea to block cars from parking on the mauka side of the road. The move, those officials hoped, would help ease the crippling traffic along Kamehameha Highway and prevent beachgoers from crossing there.
At the time, they said the barriers would be temporary while they studied their effect for a month. The barriers have remained ever since, and it’s still not clear what, if any, study the state Department of Transportation has done at the Laniakea site.
DOT officials did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
Some North Shore residents have said the barriers improved traffic somewhat. But they’ve also said for months now that the new configuration has only made the situation less safe.
Visitors now simply park farther away from the beach and walk longer distances down the highway’s narrow, potentially hazardous shoulder.
"They’ve made it extremely dangerous just to go to the beach there. That’s what I see," said Clay Valverde, a Manoa resident who said he’s visited and surfed the North Shore for the past 20 years. Valverde said he had to park about 50 yards up the road during a family visit to Laniakea two weeks ago — his first since the barriers went up.
"There’s really no place to run and hide," he said. "People are just zooming past you the whole time, and there are no other options."
North Shore Neighborhood Board member Blake McElheny has been making the same point at least since June.
"I think everyone’s first instinct is, ‘Are they OK?’" McElheny said Monday of the three accident victims. Even with the suspect allegedly being under the influence, "the accident adds to the frustration of why isn’t anything getting done."
State lawmakers did add $7 million in design and construction funds for highway realignment in the 2014-2015 budget passed earlier this year. But state officials have been looking into highway realignment since at least 2007.
Some 600,000 people are estimated to visit Laniakea each year.
"People feel we get the short end of the stick" by state officials despite the community’s catering to tourists and residents looking to get out of town, McElheny said Monday.
Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed in Circuit Court in January by a collection of local residents and surfers to get the state to remove the barriers is still ongoing.
