Hawaii traffic may never be the same after COVID-19

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    HONOLULU (KITV) — From a health and economic perspective the COVID 19 pandemic has been a disaster.
But there has been one bright spot to it all: Hawaii’s roads have cleared up.

The number of cars and trucks on our highways has slowly been increasing, after being cut in half at the start of the pandemic.
While many things are now returning to normal, traffic may not be one of them.

For drivers used to Oahu’s bumper-to-bumper traffic, recent road trips have been a delight.

“The H-1 freeway westbound, we typically see about 270,000 vehicles per day. There has been a 30% reduction, so traffic is free flowing when it is usually congested,” said State Highways Division Deputy Director Ed Sniffen.

This time of year congestion usually clears up a bit, as schools are no longer in session.
During summer, roads will still get the same number of vehicles, the difference is they are spaced out throughout the day instead of largely during rush hours.

“Some people change their drive time because they don’t have to drop off kids at school. So they can go in earlier or later. They don’t have to go in at any time, so they can spread out their trips throughout the day. This is nothing like summer, this is a removal of those trips during the day. We don’t see them dispersed throughout the day – thousands of vehicles are just gone,” added Sniffen.

Fewer cars and trucks fill up the roads because tens of thousands of visitors no longer arrive each day, hundreds of thousands of residents are now unemployed, and thousands of working employees do their jobs from home.

“I think people can work from home, and they do work from home,” stated Office of Enterprise Technology Chief Information Officer Douglas Murdock.

Instead of having to drive to offices, thousands of state and city employees head out on the information superhighway to tele-commute.

“This could be a part of future culture for Hawaii workers, where they don’t have to drive into work for hour and a half, they could work from home and be more productive,” added Murdock.

State efforts are underway, from changes in technology to policy, to encourage more workers to clock in from home.

“Three hundred people, a third of our Department of Transportation employees, are working from home. We put a lot of effort into it so we are going to keep that going forward. We are working with other departments too, so other workers are eligible for tele-work in the future,” stated Sniffen.

If a third of Oahu’s city and state employees tele-worked, that could take 10,000 cars off the road during rush hours.

“That would be comparable to the reduction we see in the summer. If we did that with public employees that would be a tremendous improvement in the traffic itself, but if the private industry also had a third of their employees tele-work…this could be a huge transformation for Hawaii from the transportation perspective,” added Sniffen.

Sniffen stated more people tele-commuting would also make our roads better and safer, because with a reduction in traffic, it would allow DOT to focus more on maintaining and improving Hawaii’s highways and bridges.

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