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.

In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Civil Society in West Maui pieces together key political controversies that have animated the social and political life of West Maui. The book is a recounting of struggles. Working within the long shadow cast by the plantation system, and against those who now dominate life in West Maui, the book is concerned with acts of resistance, recovery, and inspiration. There have been amazing people and social movements whose stories must be told. Diverted streams have been restored. Attempts to destroy the landscape have been stopped. Sometimes the successes are grand, while sometimes they are on a smaller scale but have had a lasting impact on our society. Sometimes the struggles fail in the face of overwhelming political and economic power. The playing field is not level and the less powerful, often local, people are at a disadvantage. But the struggles continue, and West Maui is better for it. Taken together, the collection of essays offers a mosaic of perspectives on civil society in West Maui. Civil society is complicated and fragmented. There are tactics and resources that can be shared between people and groups: a social value can support several movements; a legal precedent can be used by others who are threatened; a technical access-to-information rule can improve how much people understand what is happening in their community. Sometimes social movements succeed; sometimes they do not. The editor and writers hope the contribution of Civil Society in West Maui encourages people to recognize that such political activities have taken place-and that the struggles for a just society continue.