Bike lanes laid out on McCully Street

Work crews started striping new two-way bike lanes on McCully Street this week — the latest step in the city’s gradual efforts to make Honolulu more bike-friendly, and to encourage more of its residents to get around by bicycle.

The McCully lanes will be the first mauka-makai spur linking to the South King Street protected bike lane, a 2-mile pathway that Mayor Kirk Caldwell described in 2015 as “the most controversial thing we’ve touched — maybe even more controversial than rail.” The new lanes will also create a bike route from Waikiki to the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The city will scrap some 30 cramped parking spaces between Kapiolani Boulevard and South King Street for the McCully lanes, and there are no plans to replace them. However, at a gathering with reporters at McCully on Wednesday, Caldwell and other city transportation officials said that the street was too narrow there to park anyway. Aides held up pictures of cars that had partially parked on the sidewalk there.

Tim Streitz, chairman of the McCully-Moiliili Neighborhood Board, said he supported the move.

“It removes the substandard parking where the few cars that are actually using it are getting swiped and damaged,” Streitz said Wednesday. “It’ll improve the traffic flow by being able to fully utilize both lanes in each direction.”

Michael Packard, the city’s Complete Streets program administrator, said the city added a designated loading zone on a nearby corner to help accommodate small businesses.

Cyclists represented just 1 percent of all commuters on Oahu in 2014, and have hovered there since 2006, U.S. census numbers show. However, Caldwell has said he aims to increase the city’s share of bicycle commuters with these changes, and that he would consider it a victory if that number climbed to 5 percent.

“I believe that people will ride if we make it safe for them to ride,” he said Wednesday. Crews are slated to install the next bike lane, on South Street, in February. City traffic counts from November recorded 983 daily bike trips on the South King Street lane, which runs from Alapai Street to Isenberg Street.

Meanwhile, Bikeshare Hawaii CEO Lori McCarney said Wednesday that the nonprofit is “finalizing its discussions” with a potential funding partner, and that it aims to finally start offering bikes for rent this summer at about 100 stations across the urban core. The system was originally slated to launch in 2015.

The McCully Street lane is expected to be completed by next week.