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Nowadays, when I drive through Kapaa, I treat it like I’m in a long-distance canoe race. I hydrate, I bring electrolyte snacks, and I visualize the finish—in this case, the stoplight at Coco Palms.

I once had the crazy idea to ride my bike up Kokee and then coast back down. The exhilaration and freedom of that downhill ride with the cool wind drying the perspiration off of my face—that’s pretty much the same feeling I get when I accelerate out of Kapa’a and over the Wailua bridge.

Traffic on Kauai is out of control. But other than the State Department of Transportation shuffling our bottlenecks around by building periodic stretches of four-lane highway, nobody has done much to alleviate it.

To be fair, the county is repaving Puhi Road. But I don’t count repaving a treacherous road as a government success—that’s like saying that paying your taxes on time is a sign of a successful business.

Actually, given the state of Puhi Road, that’s like saying that paying your taxes a decade late is a sign of a successful business.

, then fixing government must be our main priority.

In an effort to rectify the problem of underfunded transportation networks, our state legislature passed  with the intent of improving public transportation. The bill gives each county the option to establish a surcharge on the state general excise tax that can only go towards operating or capital costs of public transportation, which includes “public roadways or highways, public buses, trains, ferries, pedestrian paths or sidewalks, or bicycle paths.”

When fixing potholes is our government’s main priority, then fixing government must be our main priority.

And so, Wednesday our Kauai County Council will begin receiving public testimony on Mayor Bernard Carvalho’s proposal to add .5 percent to our existing 4 percent state GET.

The mayor’s proposal uses 25 percent of the money raised to fund public transportation and 75 percent to go towards roads. Of the 75 percent, from what I can tell, 37 percent will go towards new transportation projects, 45 percent towards road resurfacing, while the remainder will go towards bridges (matched with federal grants) and an auto shop (matched from the general fund).

There are two clear issues with this proposal.

The first: Too high of a proportion goes to new roads.

 argues that “states are still spending on expansion at the expense of repair.”

The report shows that between 2008 and 2011 the State of Hawaii spent 41 percent of our road funding for road repair and 59 percent on road expansion. That means that the majority of the funding for roads in Hawaii went towards only 15 miles (the new roads built between 2008-2011). In other words, 59 percent of the money went towards 0.6 percent of the infrastructure, while the remaining funds had to cover the other 99.4 percent of existing roads.

That monetary imbalance explains why 39 percent of Hawaii’s roads are considered to be in “poor” condition. Which gives us the distinction of having the fourth worst roads in the country.

While Hawaii represents an extreme example, this is a trend that is repeated nationwide with 55 percent of funding going towards 1 percent of new roads while 21 percent of our country’s existing roads are in poor condition.

�ѱ𲹲Էɳ󾱱�����,��, and Honolulu still has the .

While the data above regards only our state roads, it highlights an important national trend: too much money is being spent on new roads for negligible benefits.

As early as 1947, studies were proving that new roads and new lanes don’t reduce traffic.

Hawaii has the distinction of having the fourth worst roads in the country.

“Traffic generation’ was no longer a theory but a proven fact: the more highways were built to alleviate congestion, the more automobiles would pour onto them and congest them and thus force the building of more highways,” writes Robert Caro in his groundbreaking book The Power Broker, “which would generate more traffic and become congested in their turn in an inexorably widening spiral.”

The evidence is so prevalent that it’s called the 

Economists view traffic as a cost of driving. The more traffic, the higher the cost. As traffic increases, less people are willing to incur the high cost of wasted time—and they either drive at a different hour, take the bus, or avoid driving all together. So traffic always reaches equilibrium. Which is  in Los Angeles never materialized.

When new roads are built, they simply fill back up to their equilibrium point. Just to be clear, an important corollary of this is that increased public transportation does not reduce traffic either—as cars will just fill the void—but more on that later.

The only way to reduce traffic is to increase the cost of travel.

Which gets us to the second fundamental problem with this proposal: Excise taxes should not fund road construction

Transportation funding is complicated. The federal government pays for the interstate highway system and provides grant money to the states and counties. The state DOT pays for state roads (the majority of the roads on Kauai), and the county is left to cover the expenses for public transportation and the remaining county roads.

The only way to reduce traffic is to increase the cost of travel.

The majority of that funding typically comes from gas taxes. We pay a federal gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon, and  gas taxes are 17 cents per gallon each.

However, Americans are driving less, cars are getting more efficient, and gas taxes are failing to keep up with inflation—so our roads are becoming chronically underfunded.

Gas taxes have many benefits. They directly tax users of the roads (the more you drive, the more you pay); they are more cost-effective than stricter fuel-economy standards at reducing gasoline consumption; they can be  (because gasoline use rises with income, so they disproportionately affect rich people); and, most importantly, they reduce the amount of time that people spend driving (which reduces traffic and has a variety of positive environmental and economic effects that ).

Yet, our  than in any other developed nation in the world. We could quadruple our total gas tax (combined county, state, and federal) and we’d still be below average.

Despite that overwhelming evidence, our Kauai County Council (except for CM Yukimura, who has spent years arguing for adequate funding from gas tax) repeatedly has voted against significant increases to both the gas tax and the vehicle weight tax—including an increase proposed by Carvalho’s administration in 2013. When you kick the can down the road, someone eventually has to pay the bill.

Our gas taxes are lower than in any other developed nation in the world. We could quadruple our total gas tax and still be below average.

Which is why Carvalho’s administration is now turning to the GET as the funding solution to our decaying infrastructure.

Yet the excise tax is  (it impacts poor families more than rich families) and has nothing to do with driving.

In a market that has large social costs (i.e. traffic and carbon emissions from driving), the government must take corrective action. In this case, that means passing on the true cost of driving to the users in the form of an increased gas tax—which would ensure that we can adequately fund public transportation and improve our existing roads. The more you drive, the more you should pay for transportation. And increasing the cost of driving is likely the only way to impact our traffic problems.

While driving a single-occupancy vehicle comes with a high cost, public transportation has a . It helps low income families, it spurs compact development, it increases agricultural land and habitat preservation (by reducing the need for new roads), and it reduces carbon emissions.

Yet our once-per-hour bus system on Kauai is woefully inadequate for our needs and makes us entirely dependent on our cars.

I hope that the county gets serious in expanding public transportation and using road money for maintenance rather than new construction. But, funding must come first from an increase in the gas tax—not from an excise tax.

The Kauai County Council will be receiving public testimony on the surcharge Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. at the Historic County Building.