With a tough re-election contest behind him, Mayor Kirk Caldwell and his administration will soon resume work on one of Honolulu’s hottest issues: bike lanes in the heart of the city.
In January the city’s Department of Transportation Services will replace up to 30 cramped parking spots on McCully Street between Kapiolani Boulevard and South Beretania Street with striped bike lanes on both sides of the street, according to DTS Acting Director Mark Garrity.
The move, city officials say, aims to create a bike route between Waikiki and the University of Hawaii at Manoa — as well as the first mauka-makai spur with the city’s first protected bike lane, on South King Street.
“They never should have allowed parking there. There just isn’t sufficient space,” Garrity said of that stretch of McCully Street. Each side of the road would need to be at least 17 feet wide to fit a lane of travel plus parking based on nationally recognized standards — but McCully is only 15 feet wide on either side, he said.
“It’s a very dangerous situation,” he added. “Striping it for a bike lane is actually the best thing we can do.”
DTS further plans to install a protected bike lane on South Street as early February, he said. Caldwell first announced in August 2015 plans to install that lane by the end of that year, but city officials later put the project on hold indefinitely because they said they needed to gather more community feedback and tweak designs.
While Caldwell has made clear his goal of creating a robust network of bike lanes in urban Honolulu, the issue rarely came up during this year’s competitive mayoral race against Charles Djou, a former congressman.
DTS officials were slated to brief the McCully/Moiliili Neighborhood Board on the McCully Street bike lane plan Thursday, about three weeks after Caldwell won re-election.
“It’s true, the mayor always says that bike lanes were the most contentious thing he’s done and has created a lot of feedback, both positive and negative,” Gar-rity said earlier in the day Thursday. “And now that the election season is over … he definitely wants to leave as a legacy a network of protected bike lines.”
The approximately 2-mile-long bikeway on King Street has received a mix of praise and scorn from the community in its first two years, but city officials say that by giving cyclists their own space, the protected lane has made that major town thoroughfare safer than it was prior for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians to travel together.
DTS traffic counts from last month recorded 983 daily bike trips on the King Street lane, and city officials expect that more riders will use the lane if they have more mauka-makai spurs, such those on McCully and South.
“McCully is very narrow. … Going into traffic as a bicyclist with cars parked is very hard to do,” said Natalie Iwasa, a community advocate and cyclist. She added that she hoped the city might find a way to replace the parking lost there “because I know that’s going to be an issue.”
Drivers “end up parking on corners, they end up parking in front of fire hydrants because they have to have a place,” she said. “It’s really kind of a tough issue on that particular street.”
City officials are also considering bike lanes for Piikoi Street, Garrity said.
Correction: The maximum amount of parking spaces to be eliminated along McCully is 30. An earlier version of this story contained incorrect information provided by the city.
