Sniffen said he hopes the “work-from-home” culture that’s developing during the pandemic will largely persist once it ends, helping to reduce cars on the roads.įor years, DOT has been pushing more flexible work schedules and working from home as ways to take the strain off of Oahu’s overburdened roads and highways. On the right, cars cruise past Pearl City in March 2020. On the left, cars travel eastbound toward Aiea in November 2018. Traffic during the morning commute on the H-1 is virtually nonexistent during the COVID-19 crisis.
Right now, the checkpoints used for DOT’s traffic counts mostly reflect commercial centers where locals work, Sniffen said.Īs the economy rebounds and visitors return to the state in greater numbers, the agency plans to add more checkpoints at popular tourist destinations, he added. The counts, he said, can help gauge how well stimulus dollars and other economic strategies work to get things moving again. State officials also hope to eventually use that traffic data to measure how well Hawaii’s economic recovery goes once the coronavirus crisis passes, Sniffen said. Last week, Hawaii’s DOT started to post recent traffic counts on its website, chronicling the steep dive to show how the virus is taking a toll on everyday life. The COVID-19 pandemic also offers a glimpse of what’s possible when employment isn’t so dependent on transportation, with so many people working from home these days. This unprecedented pandemic shows just how well traffic conditions can illustrate a tanking economy. “Everything has just nosedived,” he added. Cities like Los Angeles that are notorious for traffic have no traffic. Nationwide, “we’ve never seen anything like what we’re experiencing right now,” said Trevor Reed, an analyst at the Kirkland, Washington-based traffic consulting firm INRIX.īy mid-March, the nation’s 25 largest metro areas - places usually snarled by traffic - were all in a “free-flow” during rush hour, Reed said. Meanwhile, on the neighbor islands, which rely more heavily on tourism, the traffic counts have decreased by more than half in some places. “You see it every year when UH is out of session,” Sniffen said. But transportation experts say a mere 5% reduction is the difference between gridlock and smoothly flowing traffic. Maybe you thought the number would be higher, given the circumstances. The state’s Department of Transportation reports that daily traffic counts are down nearly 50% along some of the H-1 freeway’s most heavily traveled corridors compared to last year. However, a lot of those missing cars represent the staggering 160,000-plus jobless claims that Hawaii has seen as of Thursday, just a few weeks into the pandemic crisis.
Public health experts say that will help ease the strain on hospitals, giving those people severely stricken by the respiratory disease a better chance to recover. The clear roads suggest Oahu residents are largely following state and county orders to stay home in attempts to slow the spread of COVID-19. To be sure, that’s not entirely a bad thing. Instead, the traffic cruised along faster than I’d ever witnessed at that hour. Normally, that spells doom for west-siders trying to get into town. On a recent weekday morning, it took less than 20 minutes to get from Kapolei to the Vineyard Boulevard exit on the H-1. “It’s a horrific situation, where all of us will know somebody who gets affected by this because they lost their job or lost hours.” “This is definitely not the way we want to get to a free-flow condition,” said Ed Sniffen, deputy director for the state Highways Division. Turns out a global pandemic involving a highly contagious virus - one that has prompted mass quarantine and erased thousands of local jobs - was not a great way to solve Oahu’s traffic woes. Yet driving around the island these days is eerie and somber. It has never been easier to get into town in the morning and then get home to your family at night. Pearlridge, Middle Street merge, Punahou exit - it’s all wide open, all the time. No need to use the Waze app to find the fastest route. There’s nothing but little green lines weaving across the screen to indicate clear roads. Go ahead, pull up Google Maps on your phone. It should have been the best news ever: Traffic, vanished across Oahu.
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