Thinking about Traffic in West Maui

West Maui’s long-time residents, tourists, and day workers alike have spent hours sitting in their cars, frustrated, as they ask the ubiquitous modern-day question, “why can’t they do something about this traffic?” Thinking about Traffic in West Maui explores possibilities for solving this very complex and mundane problem by compiling thought experiments from experts in planning, transportation, engineering, community organizing, and law. Each author addresses a community-originated proposal for a solution to West Maui’s traffic woes: encouraging more people to use bicycles, widening roads on an alternate route, tunneling a new road through the mountains, implementing rideshare carpooling applications, managing the retreat of coastal roads, and constructing a ground-level light-rail system from Napili to Kahului airport. Readers will appreciate the patient attention to practical details alongside informed-analyses of the economic and technological landscapes in which they are nested.

Thinking about Traffic in West Maui is singular in its reasoned, interdisciplinary approach to a practical, place-based problem. The chapters and findings detail a process that illuminate West Maui traffic as comprised of a host of interconnected issues—affordable housing, overtourism, displacement from ahupuaʻa-based traditions, sea level rise, international migration, international corporate markets, class inequality, and, most of all, the contours of the physical environment of West Maui. Maui residents, tourists, academics, and everyone who has thought seriously about how to optimize traffic patterns will enjoy the novel, perceptive approaches taken in each chapter.

• Bianca K. Isaki, Editor

  Bianca K. Isaki is a writer, solo legal practitioner, community activist, and a director of the North Beach-West Maui Benefit Fund. She received her PhD from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Department of Political Science for research on Asian settler colonialism and plantation labor organizing, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, returned to Hawai‘i to teach Women's Studies, and then graduated summa cum laude from the William S. Richardson School of Law. She has contributed to the following West Maui oriented books: Tourism Impacts West Maui (2016), Social Change in West Maui (2019), Civil Society in West Maui (2021), and Water and Power in West Maui (2021).

• Lance D. Collins, Editor

  Lance D. Collins is an attorney in private practice on the island of Maui. He also holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He was the compiler and indexer of the seventeen-volume Proceedings of the Charter Commissions of the County of Maui (1966–2012). He coedited Tourism Impacts West Maui (2016) and Social Change in West Maui (2019) and edited Civil Society in West Maui (2021). His research interests focus on the Philippines, Hawai‘i, American colonialism in the Pacific, and legal and political history.

Contributors

• Lauren Armstrong
• Lance D. Collins
• Dawn Hegger-Nordblom
• Bianca K. Isaki
• Albert Perez
• Ryan Tam
• Benjamin Treviño
• Victoria Larson Treviño
• Mason M. Yamaki
• Matthew Thayer