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State Department of Transportation officials hope that Wednesday morning’s commute will go smoothly — with the H-1 ZipperLane still open for town-bound traffic — but there’s no guarantee that pau hana drivers won’t see a repeat of Tuesday’s carmageddon that caused widespread gridlock.
The fix depends on whether a mainland technician expected to arrive at 11 a.m. Wednesday will be able to get either of the state’s two ZipMobiles running again to return the ZipperLane to its normal operation in time for the afternoon commute.
On Tuesday the ZipperLane remained stuck, cutting off two of the H-1’s four lanes from the airport viaduct at Sand Island to the Waiawa overpass, where the H-1 expands to six lanes.
By midafternoon it took drivers more than 40 minutes to travel 5 miles from downtown to Honolulu Airport, DOT officials said.
And it took more than three hours to get from downtown to Mililani and to Kapolei. Westbound H-1 traffic backed up as far as Waialae Avenue in Kaimuki.
The technician from the ZipMobile vendor, Zip U There, was slated to arrive from the mainland with fresh battery packs to replace the ones that inexplicably failed Tuesday.
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THE ANSWERS
1. More than three hours to get from downtown to both Kapolei and Mililani; more than 40 minutes to drive just five miles from downtown to Honolulu Airport.
2. DOT officials hope a mainland technician fixes the underlying problem that resulted in both ZipMobiles going down Tuesday morning.
3. Yes. According to data released Tuesday, Honolulu has only the third-worst traffic in the nation, behind Los Angeles and San Francisco.
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Ed Sniffen, deputy director of the DOT’s Highways Division, said he hoped the technician can solve the underlying problem that caused the battery packs to fail in the first place — and get the ZipMobile running to put the ZipperLane back in time for Wednesday’s pau hana traffic.
The snag did not mark the first-ever ZipperLane problem.
On Jan. 17, 2014, one ZipMobile shut down the eastbound ZipperLane for the morning commute when its brakes locked up, and an axle had to be removed from the backup machine to return the first ZipMobile to its barn.
Tuesday’s daylong traffic troubles began while the ZipMobile was closing the town-bound ZipperLane at 8:30 a.m. in the Waikele area.
Then at 9:30 a.m. "the ZipMobile died," Sniffen said.
ZipperLanes normally increase the H-1’s capacity by an additional 2,200 vehicles — or 25 percent — every hour during the morning commute, Sniffen said. An estimated 4,600 vehicles use the H-1 ZipperLane every weekday, he said.
After the ZipMobile died Tuesday, technicians swapped out a battery pack from the state’s other ZipMobile, but the replacement battery pack also failed.
"So the computer can’t run the ZipMobile," Sniffen said.
By the time the disabled ZipMobile was towed away at 3 p.m., traffic was already terrible.
Then it got worse when a traffic accident in front of Kahana Bay closed lanes in both directions on Kamehameha Highway for roughly one hour, starting at about 4 p.m.
"We absolutely apologize to the public," Sniffen said.
DOT’s two ZipMobiles are 17 years old, and officials are working with Zip U There to figure out how much it would cost to overhaul them, Sniffen said.
The life span of a ZipMobile is estimated to be 20 years, Sniffen said.
Construction crews from the city and the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation halted work along the H-1 on Tuesday night to help ease congestion.
Nanakuli High School softball coach Tony Dela Cruz said he left Sand Island at 11:15 a.m. and did not get to Waialua until 2:20 p.m. Tuesday.
Brendon Hanna, 49, of Mililani works on Waialae Avenue and planned to have dinner in town Tuesday night to ride out the commute before getting on TheBus with his bicycle to brave the ride home.
Hanna said Oahu’s traffic "was absolutely the straw that broke the camel’s back" for some of his friends who moved away to the mainland.
"We live on a fairly small island, and I just don’t see that we’re going to have a lot more infrastructure," Hanna said. "Political inertia" prevents people from trying something different in Hawaii, such as toll lanes, he said.
"New ideas get so much pushback from everybody," Hanna said. "As long as people don’t start thinking about this in a real way, it’s just going to get worse and worse."
The ZipMobile failed just as the annual TomTom Traffic Index found that traffic in Honolulu has gotten worse by an additional 3 percent, giving Honolulu drivers the third-worst commute in the country, trailing only Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Looked at a different way, Honolulu drivers face congestion 32 percent of the time, compared with 39 percent for drivers in Los Angeles and 34 percent in San Francisco.
Motorist Daniela Jordan, a 21-year-old junior at Chaminade University majoring in criminal justice, said, "There’s always construction, always roadwork going on, and it backs everything up."
Jordan works as a nanny at Hickam Air Force Base and has tried every route to get herself back home quickly to the McCully area — with no luck.
Without traffic the Diamond Head commute should take Jordan 15 minutes. But she normally spends 90 minutes to two hours driving home in her 2002 Audi A6.
"I’ve tried all of the different routes, and they’re all awful," Jordan said. "Traffic has definitely gotten worse."
In the 1970s the H-1 freeway was designed to carry 70,000 vehicles per day, said Sniffen of the DOT.
The H-1 now sees 250,000 vehicles every day just through the Pearl City/Waimalu area, he said.
