Kauai County Invites Residents to Traffic Safety Workshop in Lihue

Maluhia Road in Kōloa claimed 35-year-old Brandon Nakahiki on March 20, Kaua'i's second traffic fatality of 2026, just weeks after 21-year-old Talia Jimenez was killed on Kuhio Highway near Wilcox Medical Center on New Year's Day. A 33-year-old Kōloa woman riding with Nakahiki also suffered serious injuries in the collision. Those deaths, and a string of serious crashes across the island, are now the backdrop for a countywide reckoning that reaches a public decision point five days from now.

The Kauai Planning Department will hold a Comprehensive Safety Action Plan workshop Wednesday, April 8, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. in the Planning Commission Room at Līhuʻe Civic Center. The CSAP is the county's data-driven blueprint for reducing traffic deaths and serious injuries, and the April 8 session is its first major public-engagement milestone.

The stakes extend well beyond goodwill: a completed CSAP is the foundational document required to apply to the federal Safe Streets and Roads for All program, which allocated $5 billion over five years under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Counties without a qualifying safety action plan cannot access those implementation grants for projects like crosswalks, protected bike lanes, upgraded signal timing, and road lighting improvements.

At the workshop, attendees will work in small groups to identify dangerous corridors and intersections and help planners rank competing priorities. The county's framework covers four areas: engineering changes to road design, traffic enforcement and compliance, public education, and emergency response. The overarching target is Vision Zero, the international standard that treats every traffic death as preventable.

Walk in with specific roads in mind. The most productive questions to put to planners: which corridors in your area appear in the county's crash data; what engineering interventions are already under consideration for those stretches; and what the timeline looks like from an adopted plan to funded construction. Those answers will determine which projects move forward and which wait another budget cycle.

Residents who cannot attend in person should contact planner Alan Clinton at 808-241-4978 or aclinton@kauai.gov about alternative participation options. Accessibility accommodation requests for the Līhuʻe Civic Center event should also go through Clinton's office ahead of April 8.