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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.
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