Early Tuesday afternoon as he headed home from Haleiwa, Pupukea resident Sanford Lung got caught in backed-up traffic “because the parking lot at Lani’s is closed,” he said, using a nickname for Laniakea Beach. “Cars were parked on both sides of the highway.”
It took him 40 minutes to make the 5-mile drive.
After a parking area across from Laniakea, also called “Turtle Beach,” officially opened in November following the addition of roadside barriers, signage and crosswalks, many North Shore residents were hopeful it would relieve a chronic traffic bottleneck and improve public safety over the winter holidays and peak tourist and big-wave season by corralling and keeping pedestrians from darting haphazardly across two-lane Kamehameha Highway.
But since last week the undeveloped parking area has been closed “due to hazardous conditions brought about by heavy rain,” Nathan Serota, spokesman for the Department of Parks and Recreation, which owns the property, said Thursday in an email.
“Vehicles were getting stuck in the mud, which was also causing a hazard on the highway,” Serota said, adding the closure is temporary until conditions improve.
Meanwhile, some contend the closure is making the situation more unsafe during a time of peak use, and that recent additions by the state Department of Transportation fall short of improving public safety and traffic flow.
“It actually appears that safety and ‘turtle traffic’ are now worse than before the parking closure,” said Bill Saunders, attorney for the Save Laniakea Coalition, which brought a lawsuit in state court in 2014 seeking public parking and safer beach access at Laniakea, where in 2013 barriers were installed by the state preventing parking mauka of the highway.
The court issued a temporary injunction in the plaintiffs’ favor, and in 2015 DOT removed the barriers but installed “no parking” signs, which were removed in November after the mauka parking area was refurbished under an interim agreement overseen by 1st Circuit Judge Jeffrey Crabtree.
“Since the parking was closed due to the unsafe, muddy conditions,” Saunders said, “even on a weekday, hundreds of people are parking on the roadside from Papailoa Road on the Haleiwa side (of Laniakea) up to and past Chun’s Reef on the Waimea side, and walking along the narrow highway shoulder carrying surfboards and other ocean gear.”
He added that the majority of parking lies on the mauka side, so “every parked car results in at least one haphazard crossing to the beach side.”
The erratic crossings, and resulting traffic congestion, are precisely the problem the parties to the lawsuit agreed to solve by having DOT make separate entry and exit drives to the Laniakea parking area and paint two crosswalks across the highway.
However, as the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported in November, the plaintiffs, state Sen. Gil Riviere (D, Heeia-Laie-Waialua) and several area residents complained the state placed the crosswalks in such a way that people have to walk along the narrow road shoulders to access the beach, resulting in general disregard of the crosswalks as people dart into the road between the barriers and cause continued traffic slowdowns.
They also said too-short, abrupt entry and exit ways and “no left turn” signs into and out of the parking area pose additional safety risks and cause overflow into adjacent neighborhoods where motorists go to turn around.
Jessica Malcolm, a resident of Pohaku Loa Way, a short, narrow street that stretches makai of Kamehameha Highway between the Waimea end of Pupukea Beach and Chun’s Reef, said Friday an unsafe situation has been caused by Haleiwa- bound vehicles turning around there after exiting the parking area.
“Because there’s now no left turn, people who are exiting turn right, miss the first entrance to our street and go to the second entrance at the Chun’s side,” she said, “where there’s not enough room to turn left into Pohaku Loa from the far side. And so you have big trucks having to back up into oncoming traffic” to make the turn.
“And so we have drivers late for work racing down our street where we’re walking our dogs, moms are pushing strollers and another older neighbor is pushing his walker,” Malcolm said.
She added she liked having the crosswalks but thought it would be safer to have people cross the highway by the lifeguard tower at the Haleiwa side of Pupukea Beach, and if brush were cleared to allow passage to the beach at its Waimea end, where a city bus stop stands.
“I was concerned about the turning movement restrictions and possible effects from the moment I heard of them,” Riviere said Wednesday in an email.
“Some people are ignoring the ‘no left turn’ signs,” he added. “Perhaps the ‘no left turn’ policy should be reconsidered.”
At the end of November, after making a site visit with the parties to the parking area, Crabtree proposed extending the exit lane and adding a new crosswalk to the left of the new exit.
“HDOT is coordinating with the City and may make adjustments based on any planned modifications to the City’s unimproved area,” DOT spokeswoman Shelly Kunishige said Thursday in an email, adding notice will be provided if highway lane closures will be required to make modifications.
While DOT has long expressed its intent to relocate the highway mauka at Laniakea, “I am very concerned that DOT’s proposal to wiggle the road just around Laniakea will not be enough,” Riviere said, “(because) the beach traffic and pedestrian activity at Chun’s is also problematic.”
Lung, the Pupukea resident, agreed, lamenting that congestion has become “virtually a permanent feature of this stretch of Kam Highway and will probably be worse this winter’s surf season,” which seems to be shaping up to be a good one.
North swells have been favoring Laniakea with well-shaped, moderate-size waves, drawing locals and visitors alike, Saunders said.
