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It is enough to prove the stronger planar Kakeya maximal function boundWe first work with a $\delta$-separated net of unoriented directions $e_1,\dots ,e_M$, with $M\asymp {\delta }^{-1}$. Write ${\alpha }_{ij}$ for angular distance modulo $\pi$. Choose arbitrary length-one, width-$\delta$ rectangles $T_j$ in these directions. The permitted rectangle intersection fact isThe first alternative includes parallel rectangles. Their locations are arbitrary; only separation of their directions matters.

Define $Af(j)={\delta }^{-1}{\int }_{T_j}f$, and put $\Vert a{\Vert }_{{\ell }_{\delta }^2}^2=\delta {\sum }_j|a_j{|}^2$. With these weights the adjoint operator is $A^{\ast }a={\sum }_j{a}_j{1}_{T_j}$. Since a separated angular net has only a bounded number of directions at each distance scale $k\delta$ from $e_i$, its overlap matrix satisfiesThe diagonal term is of size $\delta$. Using $|a_i{a}_j|\le (|a_i{|}^2+|a_j{|}^2)/2$ and symmetry gives the Schur test estimateBy duality of Lp spaces, $\Vert Af{\Vert }_{{\ell }_{\delta }^2}\lesssim \sqrt{\log (2/\delta )}\Vert f{\Vert }_2$. This is uniform over every choice of the translated rectangles. For each direction choose a rectangle approaching the supremum for $|f|$, then take the limit. That gives the same estimate for the discretized Kakeya maximal function.

To recover all directions, partition the direction circle into arcs of length comparable to $\delta$, each with a net direction. A tube in an arc is contained in a rectangle in its net direction with width $C\delta$ and length at most two. A bounded subdivision in the length direction reduces this to the same averaging operators; the wider tubes obey the same overlap estimate with fixed-factor changes. ThereforeFinally $\sqrt{\log (2/\delta )}\le C_{\epsilon }{\delta }^{-\epsilon }$ for every $\epsilon >0$. The planar Kakeya maximal estimate therefore has the required arbitrary small power loss.

For a separated angular net, two translated unit rectangles of width $\delta$ intersect in area at most a constant times ${\delta }^2/(\delta +\alpha )$, where $\alpha$ is their unoriented angular distance. Each row of their intersection matrix therefore has sum at most $C\delta \log (2/\delta )$. Applying the Schur test to the adjoint averaging operator gives the displayed bound. A wider-tube comparison extends it from the net to all directions. Since $\sqrt{\log (2/\delta )}{\lesssim }_{\epsilon }{\delta }^{-\epsilon }$, this proves the planar version of the Kakeya maximal conjecture.