Just a couple of days after the state Department of Transportation narrowed some H-1 freeway lanes this month, a dump truck driver pulled up alongside Ken Harmeyer’s big rig and their side-view mirrors actually touched.
"We were both in our lanes but you could hear the click of the mirrors," said Harmeyer, a commercial truck driver for 20 years who drives tour buses and big rigs up and down the H-1 freeway.
Then the same thing almost happened several days later with another big-rig driver, Harmeyer said.
"We got really close," he said. "He got scared and I got scared."
If Harmeyer ruled the H-1, he would abandon the new, narrower 10-foot wide lanes and go back to their old breadth of 12 feet along 1.38 miles of one of the most heavily traveled stretches of Oahu’s freeway system.
But Harmeyer will have to wait a year before DOT officials decide whether this month’s $200,000 demonstration project will become permanent, affecting an estimated 148,700 cars, trucks and SUVs every day near the Lunalilo onramp.
Reaction to the changes is mixed.
And still more changes are coming. In late September or early October, DOT crews will remove the morning cones at Lunalilo Street — yet another "change in traffic patterns that drivers will need to adjust to," DOT spokeswoman Caroline Sluyter said in an email to the Star-Advertiser.
Before the Lunalilo Street cones are removed, Sluyter said, DOT engineers will drive up and down the H-1 freeway during peak hours in September — and again in October after the cones are removed.
To help determine whether to continue with the narrower lanes, DOT crews also will monitor traffic in person or via city and county traffic cameras. And DOT officials will compare accident data from before and after the lanes were reduced, Sluyter said.
Sluyter said drivers can email their feedback to the DOT’s public affairs office at dotpao@hawaii.gov.
Sluyter did not respond when asked how many comments DOT officials have received but said, "As with any change we have received both positive and negative feedback. So far the feedback appears to be more on the positive side. We realize that restriping is not a perfect fix, but the DOT wanted to do something to try to help alleviate the bottleneck in this area. This demonstration project was chosen because it is a relatively inexpensive project ($200,000) that could be completed in several weeks as opposed to a build-out of the freeway, which would cost an estimated $650 million and require a complete shutdown of the freeway for an extended period of time."
Several companies and organizations that dispatch drivers told the Star-Advertiser that they have no complaints about the narrower lanes and have not experienced accidents.
"We have no issues with it," said Roger Morton, president and general manager of Oahu Transit Services, which operates TheBus.
"We haven’t heard anything negative regarding re-striping," said John DeLong, president of Hawaiian Cement.
Dale Evans, president of Charley’s Taxi, said, "I think it’s working well. It’s good we have the extra capacity."
Gary McCarty, a Realtor from Nuuanu, also supports the project and applauds the efforts by the DOT to do something to ease congestion along the H-1 freeway.
But McCarty has concerns.
He makes a minimum of four round trips per day in the narrower lanes. And on the first day of the re-striping, McCarty found his BMW X3 SUV squeezed alongside "an admittedly unusually large tractor trailer, one of the big boys," McCarty said. "His mirrors were wider than the lanes. I could have reached out and touched one."
If McCarty had been driving his three-quarter-ton, 4×4 Chevrolet Silverado truck, "I would have definitely hit him. The scary part is finding yourself between these massive trucks. I haven’t witnessed an accident yet, but I expect to. You’re required to pay a little bit more attention because your margin of error has definitely diminished."
Patrick Boisvert has been driving a cab for Charley’s Taxi for four years and likes all of the new changes along the H-1.
"The new, four lanes have made a tremendous improvement," Boisvert said. "Usually you get a bottleneck by the Pali/Punchbowl area, especially Diamond Head-bound. Now the bottleneck has disappeared."
Smoother traffic means Boisvert can shave 10 minutes off of a fare from Honolulu Airport to Waikiki, which saves tourists a couple of extra bucks.
"Once people realize the difference, they’re going to adjust accordingly," Boisvert said. "When you drive all the time, everyone gets frustrated. But at least the traffic is moving."
