Road eats car - now what?

[hotzcatz]

Too bad they can't put the train back in place between Pahoa and Hilo. The rail bed is probably still there. A railway between Puna and Hilo would get a lot of those cars off the road and wouldn't take the same amount of bridges that the railway up the Hamakua coast would require.

Making the one road wider just makes a bigger parking lot. There should be more than one route, there should also be zoning changes that allows for more services and shopping closer to houses. Hawaii Island has been totally clueless about the concept of "walkable neighborhoods". If folks could go to a small corner store to pick up day to day items, they wouldn't need to drive down the road, now would they? It would also provide employment - in their own neighborhood that they could walk to - for the shopkeeper and assistants. Which would then keep even more cars off the roads. Why is this concept so hard for city planners to understand and use?

[Rakin]

Originally Posted by OpenD

Here's a different report on the original incident, a video with a brief interview with your friend Velma about the incident, and more pictures.

LOL at the reporter... that sinkhole "Sucked" the truck into the hole. She repeated that several times like it's some evil sucking sinkhole. Swallowed I can believe.

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

Too bad they can't put the train back in place between Pahoa and Hilo. The rail bed is probably still there. A railway between Puna and Hilo would get a lot of those cars off the road and wouldn't take the same amount of bridges that the railway up the Hamakua coast would require.

This idea is getting tossed around locally, but I don't think it has legs. I understand that after the 1960 tsunami key parts of the railroad right of way were lost. That's why the bike path along the old railroad ROW has gaps in it. And the cost to create a railroad from scratch is mind boggling. Look at the Oahu project... At least Honolulu has a large enough population to justify the Federal Transportation Grant that project needed to get started, plus the bond issue that followed. The 40K+ inhabitants of Puna are just not even remotely in the same league.

Why is this concept so hard for city planners to understand and use?

And what city planners would those be?

[hotzcatz]

April 1st, 1946 at 7:30 in the morning is when the train died in Hilo. If they were gonna rebuild it, they would have done it long before the 1960 tsunami. It was built to carry cane, not passengers, but since the railbed is already in place it would seem easier to rebuild than to build new like the one on Oahu. Although they've been ditching right of ways and accesses willynilly for ages so this probably is just a continuation of the way things are always done.

Hmm, do we not have city planners? I've never looked. There's the Planning Department who check to make sure what you want to build is an allowable use, but I'm not sure who puts the zones in place.