Tour buses were cause of traffic
The Laniakea barriers appear to demonstrate that without tour buses illegally unloading large groups in the undeveloped city-owned Laniakea Support Park, traffic flow improves.
The barriers’ elimination of the parking and turn-around area in the city’s park has resulted in large numbers of individual cars parking along the highway shoulder so people can access Laniakea.
The haphazard parking along this shoulder is both unsafe and too narrow for tour buses.
With so many individual beachgoers now parking personal vehicles along the highway shoulder, it is clear it wasn’t this group of beachgoers causing the traffic congestion at "pre-barrier" Laniakea.
It was the tour buses and tour groups that were illegally parking and then crossing from the support park parking area.
The state Department of Transportation might use these observations to work with the city on a solution that prohibits the commercial tour operators but allows individual vehicles to once again safely utilize the existing 3-acre support park parking area.
Blake McElheny
Haleiwa
Park regulations applied unfairly
So we can camp for one day at Ala Moana Park to enjoy the July 4 fireworks. No tents or pets allowed. However, if we are homeless we can stay in a tent with our pets in the park forever.
Something is wrong with this picture. Are we ever going to enforce our park closure and/or pet rules?
Larry Mackey
Waikiki
Kingdoms come and go, always
Whether the fate of Native Hawaiians should be decided by the U.S. Department of Interior or Native Hawaiians themselves, and whether toppling Queen Liliuokalani’s kingdom occurred with complicity from theU.S. government, are non-issues regarding the long-term status of the state of Hawaii.
The state was created by a majority vote of Hawaiian residents and isa partof the United States, from which it cannot secede.
Hawaiian natives lost their kingdom to the powerful United States. It is probably true that they got the short end of the stick in the process. However, kingdoms, civilizations and governments come and go. That will never change.
The question is, how are you going to deal with it?
A few have persisted in their thinking that their kingdom can be restored.
That has about as much chance of happening as the restoration of the French monarchy.
The people of Hawaii need to move on. Build the state for the future and leave the past behind.
Gordon Wolfe
Waikiki
Corporations get special status
Our Supreme Court conferred religious rights on an artificial person — a for-profit creation of a state — in the recent Hobby Lobby decision.
Businesses can now impose their owners’ religious views upon employees (natural persons) of this for-profit corporation.
As in the Citizens United decision, rights thought to belong only to natural persons are now granted to an artificial but all-powerful moneyed entity. But with rights come responsibilities and liabilities.
A corporation’s purchase of another corporation sounds like slavery.
Stripping a purchased corporation of assets and then dissolving it sounds like murder.
Many other criminal acts come to mind within this context. What was the Supreme Court thinking?
George Nakamura
Mililani
