"It can be quite a burden on a neighborhood."
That's how Christian de Quevedo, chair of the Waiʻalae-Kāhala Neighborhood Board, described what happens on a Saturday morning when a dozen extra cars show up looking for a place to leave themselves before sunrise. If you live anywhere near the ridge trails that back up to Waialae Iki and Kalani Iki, you already know the scene without needing it described to you. Cars nose along both sides of a narrow street. Someone's mailbox gets clipped. A driveway gets blocked long enough that the homeowner has to knock on a stranger's window to get their own car out.
What you may not know is that this exact complaint has been sitting in front of the city for nine years, and the fix currently working its way through City Hall might not do what most people assume it will.
A Complaint Nine Years in the Making
The specific flashpoint is Kalaʻau Place, the dead-end street at the base of the Kuliʻouʻou Ridge and Valley trails. Residents there brought their frustration to the Kuliʻouʻou-Kalani Iki Neighborhood Board back in 2017, and the board passed a resolution laying out exactly what the problem looked like: hikers parking too close to driveways restrict access to homes, make it harder to see oncoming traffic when backing out, and slow down emergency vehicles trying to get down an already-crowded street.
Nine years later, that resolution is still the clearest description of the problem on file. What's changed is that Council Chair Tommy Waters picked it up and turned it into Bill 54, which passed its second reading in early September. As of that reading, it hadn't yet been scheduled for a second committee hearing, so the bill is still very much in motion rather than settled law.
"I believe that neighborhood streets should belong to the neighborhood."
That's de Quevedo again, making the case that residents who pay property taxes on a street should get some say in how that street gets used. He's not a neutral bystander on this one. He's lived in the Kahala side of this corridor since 2006, founded the Waiʻalae-Kāhala Neighborhood Board, and started the Kahala-Diamond Head Neighborhood Security Watch in 2018, which now connects hundreds of households across two subdistricts. When he talks about congestion near trailheads and beach access points, he's describing something he's spent two decades organizing around, not reacting to for the first time.
What Bill 54 Actually Changes
Here's the part that gets lost in most coverage of this fight: it is already illegal in Honolulu to park in front of a driveway or within four feet of one, on either side. That's existing city code, not a new rule. Bill 54 doesn't create a new prohibition. It creates a mechanism for making the existing one visible.
Specifically, the bill would:
- Let a property owner or resident request that the Department of Transportation Services paint the curb near their driveway with "no parking" markings
- Apply only within a quarter mile of a public trailhead
- Limit the painted zone to four feet on either side of the driveway, matching the distance already covered by city code
DTS itself isn't thrilled about it. Deputy Director Hong Li testified to the Committee on Infrastructure, Transportation and Technology in August that the bill would create what she called a significant maintenance burden, since curb paint has to be tracked, maintained, and repainted over time. Enforcement, meanwhile, still falls to the Honolulu Police Department, the same department that's had the authority to cite and tow illegally parked cars all along.
So the honest way to describe Bill 54 is not "new parking rule." It's "clearer signage for a rule that already exists, funded street by street, at a resident's request." That's a meaningfully smaller fix than the headlines suggest, and it's worth knowing before you assume painted curbs are coming to solve this for good.
Even the Hikers' Advocate Isn't Sold
Shilo Garner runs the Honolulu Hiking Club, which meets every Sunday morning at a different trail somewhere on Oʻahu. He's spent enough time standing at trailheads that he's built an entire etiquette code around it, something he calls hiking pono: don't block driveways or mailboxes, keep your voice down once you're in a residential street, stay on marked trails, clean your shoes before and after, and use headphones instead of speakers. He also pushes hikers to carpool whenever they can.
Garner isn't hostile to what residents are asking for. He told Aloha State Daily he understands the safety concern and the frustration that comes with a street getting swallowed by other people's cars every weekend. But he also made the one point that undercuts the bill's premise most directly: painting curbs where parking is banned makes it clearer where hikers can't park. It does nothing to solve where they're supposed to park instead. His read is that the pressure doesn't disappear, it just shifts a quarter mile down the road, onto whichever street becomes the new edge of the restricted zone.
That's the detail that should change how residents think about this bill. If your street sits just outside the quarter-mile ring around Kalaʻau Place, painted curbs upstream don't reduce the number of cars looking for parking on a Saturday morning. They just change which block absorbs them. Depending on exactly where your driveway sits relative to that boundary, this bill could make your immediate stretch of curb quieter or considerably busier, and there's no way to know which until DTS actually draws the lines.
Two Ridges, Two Very Different Answers
Zoom out one ridge over and you can see what a fully different answer to the same problem looks like. The Hawaii Loa Ridge Owners Association manages access to the Wiliwilinui Trail through a gated entry point. Hikers have to check in at a security post, register, and sign a waiver. Each car gets assigned a numbered stall in a dedicated hiker's lot near the top of Puuikena Drive, and once that lot fills up, no more passes go out for the day. Security patrols the ridge and can ban anyone who ignores the rules or wanders into resident-only areas.
That's a fundamentally different model than the open, unmanaged streets around Kalaʻau Place. It works because Hawaii Loa Ridge is a private, gated community with the infrastructure and authority to control who drives past a certain point in the first place. Kuliʻouʻou never had that option. Its trailhead sits on a public street in an open subdivision, which means the only tools available are the ones the city provides, which is exactly why this fight ended up in front of the City Council instead of an HOA board.
Waialae Iki sits somewhere in between. The Waialae Iki Ridge Community Association represents 625 homes running from Kalanianaole Highway up to the gated community at the top of the ridge, and it actively manages its own paving, security patrols, and neighborhood watch program. That's real organizational muscle, but it's built around the homes themselves, not around a public trailhead the way Hawaii Loa Ridge's system is. If a similar parking crunch showed up on a WIRCA street tomorrow, the association would have plenty of infrastructure to organize a response, but no existing permit system to point to as a ready-made fix.
What This Means If You Live Near One of These Trails
The practical takeaway isn't to wait on City Hall. The four-foot rule already exists and already gives you standing to call it in if a car is blocking your driveway, bill or no bill. If you want painted curbs on your specific stretch of street once Bill 54 clears its next hearing, that request starts with you, not with a citywide rollout. And if you want a voice in how this plays out for your block specifically, the Waiʻalae-Kāhala Neighborhood Board meets the third Thursday of most months at the Ala Wai Golf Course clubhouse, and testimony on bills like this one gets read into the record there before it ever reaches full council.
Nine years is a long time to wait on a fix that, by its own advocate's admission, might just relocate the problem rather than solve it. Knowing that going in is worth more than assuming the paint truck is coming to make it all disappear.
If you're weighing a move in this part of East Oʻahu and want a clearer read on how a specific street, ridge, or association fits into all of this, I'm happy to walk through it with you. Schedule a Free Consultation with Mavis Nellas and let's talk about what your street actually looks like on a Saturday morning.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
