Long-awaited greenway moving forward with potential as Lahaina evacuation route; but project still years away

LAHAINA — Lee Chamberlain of the Maui Bicycling League stands at the locked gate of an old cane haul road near the Kahoma Stream bridge in Lahaina, where he is surrounded by a cluster of neighborhoods that were a nightmare to evacuate on Aug. 8, 2023.

The wildfire spread so fast in the high winds that residents struggled to get out of town on the narrow and gridlocked roads — with many people dying as they tried.

The unpaved path where Chamberlain is standing is slated to be part of a 25-mile greenway for walking and biking that traverses nearly the entirety of the west side, from Ukumehame to Līpoa Point north of Honolua Bay. It has been in various planning stages for decades, but funding and other issues have kept it on Maui County’s backburner.

That has changed in the wake of the fire. The long-awaited project has taken on new life as a potential evacuation route and firebreak through Lahaina town. In January, Maui County received a $15.4 million federal grant to build the first phase, which includes three of seven total segments.

But despite all the work that already has gone into the project, the greenway’s first 5.25 miles may still be nine years away from completion.

Advocates like Chamberlain say the county needs to move more quickly to prepare for the next emergency and secure its funding at a time when the Trump administration is slashing the federal budget.

“It’s happened many times with many county projects — perpetual planning,” said Chamberlain, who is part of the bike league that has been advocating for the project for more than a decade. “It’s an accepted way of doing business in the county.” 

But Maui County, which is eyeing several street expansion and connection projects across town to improve evacuation routes, says building the greenway is a “big, complex project” that is going to take cooperation with multiple landowners along the way. 

NEW PUSH FOR AN OLD PROJECT

Evacuations in Lahaina on the day of the fire were a mad rush through thick smoke and strong winds. Residents stymied by downed power lines and traffic jams turned to old cane haul roads and broke through locked gates alongside police officers in search of alternate routes out of town. 

An incident analysis report released by the Fire Safety Research Institute in September found that Lahaina’s narrow roads made timely evacuations and emergency vehicle access difficult. For example, on the narrow, dead-ended Kuhua Street, legal and illegal parking in a densely populated area made evacuations difficult, the report said.

Police maps showed that 29 of the 102 known fire victims died on Kuhua Street, and overall more than 40 died in Kuhua Camp, an old neighborhood next to the Pioneer Mill Co. smokestack and industrial area. Extending the road was something the county had planned a decade ago.

The Kuhua Street extension and the West Maui Greenway were among the 40 priority projects included in the county’s long-term recovery plan for Lahaina. The projects are interconnected — one of the greenway’s top design options would connect to Kuhua Street, according to the 2022 master plan. 

Before the fire, Jennifer Maydan, who worked in the Planning Department’s Long-Range Division for eight years, was the project lead for the West Maui Community Plan update that included the greenway. She said it’s not just a government project but a community effort that’s going to continue to need public support.

“To people who are critical about the time that it’s taken, I hear you, I feel you,” said Maydan, now an executive assistant with the Office of Recovery. But, she said, “let’s look at the progress that we are making now.” 

The greenway and many other county projects were paused after the fire in order for the county to deal with more urgent recovery efforts. But as the county heard more calls for alternate routes, they started researching the role that greenways could play in fire mitigation, emergency evacuation and emergency vehicle access. They talked to experts in Paradise, Calif., where the town incorporated more open space and greenways as a buffer against wildfires after the deadly and destructive Camp Fire in 2018.

Maydan said a paved greenway could also serve as a firebreak and as a corridor to build underground utility lines, which Hawaiian Electric told the Hawai‘i Journalism Initiative it would consider.  

With the attention on the recovery, Maydan said they realized there would be potential for funding the greenway as part of the rebuild of the town. Last year, the county applied for a grant for the project under the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity program, known as RAISE, in 2024. The greenway wasn’t selected, but was labeled as a “project of merit,” which bumped it to the priority pool and helped it land a $15.4 million grant earlier this year in the same program.

The funding will cover the first phase of the greenway, which includes three segments spanning 5.25 miles from the Lahaina Civic Center to Launiupoko Beach Park, a route through downtown Lahaina that was prioritized after the fire.

The top route alternatives would run along state-owned lands mauka of Wahikuli before intersecting with Keawe Street above the Lahaina Gateway Center. It would then continue across the Kahoma Stream bridge, connect to Kuhua Street and Mill Street before looping back to Honoapi‘ilani Highway on the way down to Launiupoko Beach Park. 

But those are still just options — Maydan said the plan is conceptual and that the exact route hasn’t been nailed down yet.

The plan outlines alternative routes for each of the seven segments. After phase one, the project would still need to complete segments from Līpoa Point to Maui Preparatory Academy, Maui Prep to the Lahaina Civic Center, Launiupoko to Olowalu and Olowalu to the Lahaina Pali Trailhead. Cost estimates range from $1.3 million to $2.5 million per mile, and the county would have to seek additional funding for future phases.

The southern portion’s final design will also likely hinge on the state’s plans to move Honoapi’ilani Highway away from the coastline, a massive effort expected to start construction by 2027. The state has said it doesn’t currently have funding for the long-awaited northern section of the bypass to Kā‘anapali, so the greenway could provide another means of transportation north of Lahaina town if it’s built out earlier.

Maui County has nine years to tackle the first phase of the greenway. The RAISE grant gives the county until September 2029 to finish pre-construction work such as planning and permitting, right-of-way acquisition, the design and the construction contract, and until 2034 to complete construction. 

Maydan said one of the most crucial sections of the greenway will be in the area of Kuhua Street and Mill Street, which were both heavily populated areas that would benefit from alternate routes in and out of town. When asked if the high fatalities were part of the importance in improving evacuation routes in the area, Maydan said, “absolutely.” 

“Whether it’s an emergency or whether it’s just everyday flow of traffic or kids riding their bikes getting somewhere, the more that you can have a grid and have street connectivity, the healthier the community is going to be,” Maydan said. 

She added that the connection to the Lahaina Recreation Center also will be important and provide a safe alternative route for youth to access the facilities there.

Maui County Council Member Tamara Paltin, who holds the West Maui seat, said the greenway could also help get cars off the road. The council is considering a bill that would allow residents to build more homes on less space, which could mean more units, people and cars in neighborhoods. Paltin said having another route for walking and biking could lessen the impacts.

“If we really integrate multimodal transportation into our lifestyle as a way to get away from so much cars clogging our limited infrastructure, then the greenway plays a really important role as another transportation corridor,” Paltin said. 

Last week, the council committee that Paltin chairs backed a bill to purchase a half-acre of land on Limahana Place, near Kuhua Camp, which Managing Director Josiah Nishita said could potentially be used as a stop on the greenway. 

WAITING GAME

Chamberlain is “elated” about the funding, but he’s frustrated at the possibility of waiting another nine years, especially when the greenway primarily plans to use existing roads and abandoned cane haul routes.

“These are all roads that are established,” he said. “All we have to do is just basically open them up, resurface them, make it easier for all kinds of different types of bicycles or pedestrian traffic.” 

Chamberlain has lived in Kahana for two decades. On his first bike ride into Lahaina in 2014, he was approaching the intersection near Safeway when a car passed him and took an immediate right hook in front of him, sending him straight into the side of the car. He sustained a wrist injury that still lingers. 

The accident first piqued his interest in the greenway and its mission of encouraging walking and biking, alleviating traffic and reducing pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities. When he got involved, talks had already been rolling on the project as far back as the 2003 statewide bike plan, and the project was included in several long-term plans for West Maui. 

In 2017, a group of advocates including Chamberlain, Maui Bicycling League Chair Saman Dias, and retired Maui Land & Pineapple Co. official Donna Clayton, formed the West Maui Greenway Alliance to push for the project. 

The greenway, Chamberlain says, is especially vital for less-experienced riders who would be more comfortable and safer on a greenway than the open highway. And now, its potential in helping during emergencies is even more heightened.

Chamberlain has a thick white binder full of documents he’s used in his research and advocacy. He thinks the old cane haul roads, some of which are locked, should be open to the public under an 1892 law that puts abandoned former public roadways under government ownership and was used in a recent court case. He leafs through pages of quotes he’s gotten from contractors on the cost of paving the greenway and the list of tax map keys he compiled himself for every landowner lining the project route. 

Dias, his wife, thinks the county should be focused less on “piecemeal land purchases” for the greenway and more on negotiating a right-of-way with landowners like Kaanapali Land Management Co., which owns the industrial lot next to Kuhua Street. The company did not respond to questions by Friday. 

Chamberlain and Dias also worry about the funding, which was awarded days before the Trump administration took office and started making major budget cuts. But their sense of urgency is not just about the money, but about the possibility of another emergency striking Lahaina in the next decade.

“There’s a lot of pressure from the community, and especially when we lost all these lives,” Dias said. 

The couple spent the day of the fire cooking beans and rice for dazed evacuees.

Even Paltin thinks nine years is a long time. “Kind of disappointing for how long we’ve already been working on the greenway,” she said. 

Maydan said one of the factors that’s slowed the project is that it’s never had a home in a county department, so there was no one to shoulder the responsibility through changing administrations. 

That’s why the 2022 master plan done with the Maui Metropolitan Planning Organization was a huge step forward. But even after that, the project required a work plan as well as a data collection and site selection report in 2024 that Maydan said outlined the steps from the master plan to breaking ground and construction. 

She said the nine-year timeline will include more community engagement, right-of-way acquisition, making road crossings safer, environmental review and permitting, and construction design plans, all of which is “far more complex, comprehensive and detailed than any plans or drawings completed in previous phases.”

The environmental permitting process is the next step and typically takes 1-2 years, according to the county Public Works Department. Land acquisition and design will follow, and the timeline will depend on the property owners. If the owner isn’t open to it, or there are title issues, the process could take over a year. The department said the typical requirement for federal funding is to acquire and own the right-of-way needed for the project, not easements.

When asked if she was concerned about the funding, Maydan said, “it’s just day to day, right?”

“There’s uncertainty, so we’re just moving forward at this point and we can’t speculate what might happen,” she said. 

The greenway is included in the latest Statewide Transportation Improvement Program plan, but that’s just so it can be eligible for federal funds, the state Department of Transportation said. No state funding has been set aside for the project. 

The state is working on evacuation routes of its own in Lahaina. In October 2023, the department graded a 2.5-mile emergency route for Lahaina public schools and plans to finish paving the route by this summer, the department told the Hawaiʻi Journalism Initiative via email on Friday. It also provided an emergency entrance from North Hakau Place and a construction access at the top of Keawe Street that can be used as an emergency access route connecting to the Ka La‘i Ola temporary housing project, the cane haul road and Pu‘ukoli‘i Road.

Chamberlain thinks the fire will finally push the county to take action on the greenway, but the 74-year-old says: “I don’t know if I’ll be alive by the time it actually does get completed. Just the way the government moves.”