Increasing a road speed limit naturally increases the number of vehicles that can drive along it, right. Whoa!!, slow down. That is not necessarily the case, say the experts.

On Thursday (12/19/13) at 6:00PM, renowned transportation innovator Dan Burden and his team from Walkable and Livable Communities Institute http://www.walklive.org/about-the-institute/our-team/ offered a power point presentation at Lokelani School attended by about 25 very interested and concerned Maui residents composed of more than half of the KCA BOD, with many additional members and volunteers. Entitled Kihei High School, Active Transportation Connections, the hour long presentation moved beyond a pedestrian route study for the high school, to include all of North Kihei and much beyond into the South side as well.

The State Land Use Commission (LUC) set a condition for the land use change for the proposed DOE Kihei High School site requiring a pedestrian and bicycle over or underpass of the Pi’ilani Hwy to reach the school mauka of the highway near Kulanihakoi St. Because of this and hopefully other progressives reasons, the DOE contracts with Group 70 and Munekiyo and Hiraga to facilitate this aspect, & these firms decided to pursue Dan Burden to achieve these objectives.

Burden has made several trips to Maui before, and your Association offered reports of two prior presentations on this website. SEE https://www.gokihei.org/?s=Dan+Burden&submit=Search

This personable trio composed of Project Coordinator Samantha Thomas and Traffic Engineer Tom Bertulis supplementing Burton offered their national (including Hawaii) experience to show how much of Kihei can offer a very positive example of a walkable/bikeable community based around the high school now projected to open in 2018.

Our understanding is the team was assured by Maui County that the “missing segment” of the N-S collector Rd on the north side will begin design this MARCH.

Prior to this public meeting, the trio, accompanied by Christine Mendes Ruotola of Group 70, retired HDOT engineer Charlene Shuboya, now with Munekiyo and Hiraga, and Nick Nichols from HDOE, met with several “stakeholders,” including KCA in a series of brainstorming meetings throughout the previous day.

KCA expects this process proceeding can have a huge positive effective in South Maui going into the new year, and we will be urging both County and State governments to work together to facilitate this.