Island Breath: Kauai Transporttion

empty highway interchange near Oudenrijn in the Netherlands has famous traffic jams

Improve Public Transportation
by Ken Taylor on 28 May 2006 for The Garden Island Forum

Is building new highways and making other roads four or six lanes the only way to solve the traffic problems on Kaua‘i?

Would new highways and bigger roads add to the enjoyment of our unique natural beauty and the rural lifestyle we all need and enjoy?

How about a different approach?

Use the $380 million road-widening budget to improve public transportation to a degree those rental cars will not be needed to get around on the island.

Perhaps we should take seriously Will Rogers’ suggestion: “Take all the cars off the road that are not paid for.”

No community has ever solved their long-range traffic problems by adding new lanes.
Professor Albert Allen Bartlett, a retired professor of physics from the University of Colorado in Boulder, asks this question: “Can you think of any problem, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way, aided, assisted or advanced by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?”

We all must remember that Los Angeles or any other big city did not just happen. It happens one project at a time.

Our quality of life depends on making changes before it’s too late at the county building, where they have never seen a project they didn’t like.

see also:
Island Breath: Kauai Traffic
Island Breath: Coco Palms Traffic