Certain North Kohala roads could become off-limits for bicycle tours under a bill intended to improve road safety in the district.
Bill 125 — which Kohala Councilwoman Cindy Evans will introduce Tuesday during a meeting of the council’s Policy Committee on Planning, Land Use and Development — would prohibit commercial bike tours on Kohala Mountain Road and the roughly eight miles of Akoni Pule Highway stretching east from Kohala Mountain Road to Pololu Valley Lookout.
Evans said the presence of large groups of cyclists on those winding roads has been a safety concern among her constituents.
“People in the community starting asking me about this like two months after my term started,” Evans said. “It can be horrifying to go up Kohala Mountain Road, which is windy, narrow, there’s no sight distance — it’s stressful enough to drive on its own — and then round a corner and see six, eight, 10 bicyclists right in front of you.”
Evans added that the stretch of Akoni Pule Highway leading to Pololu Valley is even more hazardous, given that route’s narrow bridges and cliff-obscured curves.
Evans said the measure will not prohibit cycling on those roads in general — she added that such a prohibition probably wouldn’t be legal — but will simply ban commercial tour groups from using them.
“Also, we’re not even touching Ironman. This doesn’t have anything to do with Ironman,” Evans said, referencing the annual Ironman World Championship in Kona, which features a bike course up the Queen Ka‘ahumanu Highway, but doesn’t traverse the roads named by the bill.
A similar prohibition on Maui was implemented last year, when commercial bike tours were banned on Haleakala outside of a single 6.5-mile route. While Evans said that law has some differences compared to her bill, given the involvement of federal agencies such as the National Park Service on Haleakala, it served as a model for the Kohala measure.
While several tour companies do offer bike tours on the roads in question, some operators took the potential ban in stride.
“We might take a handful of groups up there per year, with no more than eight people at a time,” said Tom Sheehan, owner of bike tour company Pedalers. “I think we might take about 30 people per year.”
Sheehan said Kohala Mountain Road already is a fairly advanced route for cyclists which is positioned as the last leg of Pedalers’ weeklong Big Island of Hawaii Bike Tour, and many participants simply choose to skip the final leg entirely.
“It changes some people’s plans, but people are looking for shorter tours already,” Sheehan said.
Pierre Campana-Jourda, co-owner of Lifecycle Adventures, said the Kohala Mountain component of his company’s Big Island tour can be easily excised with little impact, adding that the Big Island tour has fewer than 100 riders per year.
Even though Lifecycle’s tours are self-guided, with no defined “groups” and no company tour guides, the bill would still prohibit those tours, because there is no distinction in the proposed ban between guided and self-guided tours.
“Honestly, if it’s a safety concern, it probably shouldn’t matter if they’re commercial tour cyclists or not,” Campana-Jourda said. “If it’s about safety, maybe the ban should just be for all bikes.”
The committee meeting in which the bill will be discussed is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. Tuesday.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
