Parking at Ala Moana Center

To say that parking is a problem in Honolulu is to understate the problem.

Do the math. 60,000 new automobiles hit Oahu each year without a corresponding increase in parking spaces.  From what I can determine by the purely scientific measurement of “Whoa, where we gonna park?” at Ala Moana Center, the parking problem is about to hit holiday shoppers as never before.

Ala Moana Center and the area surrounding the state’s largest shopping arena has never, ever been an event in pleasurable driving during the holidays. This year will be worse.

How do I know? I tried to find parking at Ala Moana Center this weekend, a non-holiday weekend, a weekend weeks away from a real holiday. Parking was ludicrously difficult to find. Shaded, covered parking required a relative to feign illness and fall down comatose in an empty parking stall just to prevent a kid-packed SUV from slipping in ahead.

Wal-Mart is a block away. Walgreens just opened a block away. Kapiolani’s answer to Crazy Eddie’s Furniture City is a block away. Four huge condominiums opened in the past two years. They’re a block away. Kapiolani Boulevard is rife with potholes, speed bumps, and Hawaii Electric trucks and equipment, placing more pressure an a nearly gridlocked grid around the shopping center.

With luck, the huge Nordstrom’s store won’t open their Hawaii doors until later in 2008, long after dozens of people went missing while leaving Sears or Macy’s in search of their vehicles and were never heard from again.

If you think parking at Ala Moana Center is bad now, just wait. It will get worse before it gets better.