Oh, and there’s another one and oh, my, there’s one over there.’” “It was incredible and to see it live happening in front of me like ‘Oh my god, that’s an accident. She said the sun was so blinding that while watching the traffic cameras she couldn’t make out the lines in the road, so it must have been much worse for those driving with the sun in their eyes. It was one of those mornings when it had rained, and then the sun came out.” “The largest pile up I saw in Hawaii was a 44-car pileup on H1-H2 merge, coming Honolulu-bound direction,” said Tucker. “Now it’s kind of normal for it to get backed up from the Kualakai Parkway overpass in Kapolei.” “When I started 20 years ago, the traffic getting backed up to Waikele was a really big deal,” said Tucker, while laughing. Tucker described seeing traffic at its worst: backed up from Honolulu into Halawa and to the west side. “Every time you said a report, you had to say that it was a public service announcement.” “We all had to say ‘from the City and County of Honolulu’s Traffic Management Center.’ That was our ticket in,” Tucker explained. She said Mayor Jeremy Harris invited radio reporters to the Traffic Management Center to report on traffic, and in the beginning there were at least five reporters who would use the center, but by the end of Tucker’s tenure she was the only one left. The Traffic Management Center was built in the late 1990s, using fiber-optic cables to bring real-time footage and data into one hub, according to Tucker. Tucker reported on the traffic for 20 years, sitting in the control room for the Traffic Management Center in Honolulu and looking at live footage from about 250 cameras. The four other stations played traffic reports that Tucker recorded and put into the computer. “Traffic is never fun if it gets bad, and I’d have to pull myself back from fun and become much more, you know, ‘we’re not we’re not gonna laugh now kids because we’ve got somebody down - a pedestrian’s been hit.’ I wouldn’t say that, but my tone of voice said that,” Tucker explained. (Courtesy Hawaiian 105, Tucker would often make jokes with the hosts Mele Apana and Shannon Scott, although if there was an accident, she knew to maintain her composure. “Then I would do what’s called a generic out, ‘from the City and County of Honolulu’s Traffic Management Center, I’m Danielle Tucker,’ without mentioning a radio station at the end.”ĭanielle Tucker (right) at the Traffic Management Center. “I had it down to an art where I could start on one station and if another station came to me, I would just continue,” said Tucker. When the stations did overlap, she would summarize what was happening, so the traffic report would make sense to the station that was just joining in and then she would add what she had said on the first to her close. While she was talking to one station, Tucker could tell if the second was going to ask her to start her traffic report because she was listening to both on her headset. “It got a little bit shaky if one station was running late and the other one was running early,” she said. On KRATER and Hawaiian 105, Tucker delivered her traffic reports live starting at 5 a.m., and every five minutes she would switch between the two stations. Tucker’s traffic reports were played on six different radio stations: Hawaiian 105 KINE-FM, KCCN-FM 100, Power 104.3 FM, KRATER 96 FM, KKNE 940 AM and KPRP 650 AM. “‘Who’s going to tell us which way to go?’” they said to her. People were stunned to hear Tucker was laid off, because they rely on her traffic reports. I did what you told me to do, and I didn’t get stuck in it, and I got to my destination on time.” “When I feel like I’m not doing anything for the planet, somebody walks up to me … and says, ‘You rescued me today. Because of you, I didn’t get caught in that.’ Those three statements have been said to me over and over and over again,” said Tucker in an interview with Spectrum News Hawaii on Tuesday. Tucker said people who listened to her traffic reports would stop her at the grocery store, bank, on the street or in parking lots after recognizing her voice. HONOLULU - The voice of Danielle Tucker is iconic for Oahu residents, as she navigates us through the island’s constant traffic problems and ends her reports with the phrase “from the City and County of Honolulu’s Traffic Management Center, I’m Danielle Tucker.”ĭuring the first week of January, she was laid off - along with 19 other Summit Media employees - from her radio job as the island’s traffic reporter, leaving many locals devastated.
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