HAWAI'I KAI — Five years after Mariners Ridge residents first made it clear that the road leading to their homes poses a hazard to motorists, there still hasn't been any work done to make their main road into and out of their community safer.

There were three accidents in February along the same stretch of Kaluanui Road, a sharp curve midway down Kaluanui Road between Hawai'i Kai Drive and Kaahue Street. About 70 percent of all the accidents on this road have occurred there, said Mariners Ridge resident Andy Constantaras.

"Slippery when wet" signs were installed about four years ago, but they've done little to prevent accidents, Constantaras said.

"Nothing has been fixed," said Tai Hong, a resident of the ridge community of more than 400 homes. "The city has studied the problem to death. The city keeps saying it will do something in 30 days, but I haven't seen anything."

Over the years, these accidents have knocked down trees and signs and single-car accidents have taken out sections of the rock wall. The city has stopped replacing the trees along the roadway because they are knocked down so frequently and now the community has been paying for their replacement, Constantaras said.

"At least once a month there's an accident on the road," he said. "Most of them go unreported to the police. I'm really concerned about the safety. It's a very steep hill and people speed up and down the hill all the time."

Residents have been urging the city since 2000 to rebank the road to make it safer, or to install speed bumps, tables or other traffic calming measures to slow cars coming down the steep hill. City Councilman Charles Djou has $100,000 set aside to fix the problem, but no one can decide on what the right course of action is.

Earlier this year, residents of this ridge community were surveyed and three solution options were chosen: install a stop sign in both directions on Kaluanui Road at the intersection of Kaahue Street, groove the pavement to make it less slippery, or replace the roadway with a banked road.

The city has settled on restriping the roadway to make the lanes appear narrower and adding plastic markers to the road, Constantaras said. So the cars coming down the hill will be moved more toward the center of the roadway, where the road is better engineered, Constantaras said. But when that will be done is still unanswered.

The money budgeted for the project expires at the end of the year. If a contract is not awarded, the City Council will have to appropriate new funds in the 2007 budget.

"The safety issue of the road just hasn't been addressed," Constantaras said. "The issue is the city wants the community to come up with a technical solution and that doesn't make any sense to me. It should be up to an expert."

Reach Suzanne Roig at sroig@honoluluadvertiser.com.