Oahu Traffic

Moving to a new city or place can sometimes be confusing. However in most places, you can ask for directions and have a general sense of North, South, East, and West.

In Hawaii, local people rarely refer to directions by using the basic four points of a compass. Nor do they use the road or highway numbers very often. People give directions by using Mauka (towards the mountain) and Makai (toward the ocean) and other landmarks (Diamond Head and Ewa) to give directions. This can be a bit confusing for the newcomer to Oahu.

Additionally, people refer to roads as the Pali Highway or Likelike (not pronounced like like, it sounds more like leakyleaky) by their name and not the State assigned highway number. Again, this is confusing for the newcomer with a map.

There is a good system of traffic camera's (accessed by clicking here) to view current traffic conditions. This is provided by the City and County of Honolulu, Transportation Services. There are also links to live web cams of Waikiki beach from this site. Click here for one of them.