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When I first moved to Hawaii in 2003, my average commute time from Waipahu to Downtown Honolulu during rush hour was manageably under 30 minutes under even in the worst of circumstances. Two decades later, I find myself spending an average of 80 minutes or more just to travel 23 miles.

I can only imagine how much more aggravating the driving experience must be for people who live in Ewa Beach, Waianae or the more remote portions of the island. As I have said before, whether one drives a car, carpools or rides a bus, we are all equally stuck in traffic together.

And for me, the ultimate insult of Honolulu planning is to be stuck in traffic while an empty, unused, incomplete Honolulu rail car passes by overhead as part of a test run for the long-delayed system.

Last weekend, some out-of-town friends came to visit me for a social visit and brief a couple of representatives at the Hawaii State Capitol about the latest technologies in water generation. When they were done with the official part of their visit, they asked me if I could drive them from the Moana Surfrider hotel in Waikiki to the Dole Plantation in Wahiawa. I agreed, but told them we needed to leave early in order to have time to do all the other things they wanted to do.

“But it’s only about 26 minutes from here, right?” one of them asked me, drawing an instant smirk on my face.

“26 San Antonio minutes, 45 Hawaii minutes,” I corrected them. (They were incorrectly assuming, as one often does on the mainland, that one can average one mile of car travel per minute.)

But as all Oahu residents know, though traffic can pile up on even on weekends, the advantage is that when driving on H-1, we can use all lanes of traffic, including the . This means that traffic can flow, somewhat quickly, because we aren’t artificially bottlenecking the freeway. And as many Oahu residents continue to suffer unbearable commutes during work days, perhaps there is a lesson to learn and an opportunity to be seized here.

Open The HOV Lanes To Everyone Until We Fix Traffic

Until we can find ways to get more cars off the road or stagger commutes so that everyone is not jumping on H-1 at the same time in the mornings and evenings, we should just get rid of the HOV lanes and allow anyone, at any time, to use all lanes of H-1. This means that you don’t have to spend 20 minutes driving from Waipahu to the airport, only to spend another hour waiting in the middle lane of H-1 to get to downtown.

Yeah, yeah, I can already hear the virtue signalers coming out of the woodwork in response to this idea. Person 1, from the academia: “The HOV lanes exist to encourage people to stop driving alone and carpool, .” Well guess what? That ain’t working, because not all of us go to the same worksite, and the time it takes to drop off your buddy will make you late for work if you try it.

Person 2, from the Establishment: “We actually want traffic and streets in general to be inconvenient for those who use cars, because cars cause structural inequality, and we want to by eliminating the convenience of an automobile.” Oh really? Do you want to , round trip, every day, to work in dress clothes and tropical weather? Or is that just for everyone except you?

And Gov. David Ige, with his useless “I recommend you consider telework” platitudes – when he himself has the power to implement for his government a mandatory telework policy to reduce traffic – is also not helping the Oahu nightmare commute or the environment as a whole. “I recommend you consider” was the same defeatist tagline they gave us during the part of Covid where we all decided to quit trying.

So let’s dispense with utopian visions of Oahu and get right to business. Open up the HOV lanes until our government sees fit to correctly restructure the infrastructure of Oahu so that convenient and quick transportation alternatives – not gimmicks meant to funnel money to contractors and consultants on a project that will never be complete – are available.

Some may say that to get rid of the HOV lanes, we would need to amend the Hawaii Revised Statutes. So amend them then – next session. In the meantime, get off your butts in the Executive Branch and use the constitutional, broad-reaching power of a department’s right to make rules and enforce rules (or not enforce rules) to allow everyone to use the HOV lanes to speed up traffic on H-1.

The fact that all lanes of traffic can be opened up to commuters during a “crisis” such as a major accident or state emergency tells me that the authority exists to let people use the HOV lanes. Well, we are in a crisis of traffic, and we might as well reclaim those extra lanes during work days since we don’t have any other options.

Combine this with changes to the University of Hawaii’s classes to include virtual options and remote testing, a robust telework policy for state and county government and more convenient public transit, and maybe we’ll get out from under this traffic problem.

Let me say it again. We can fix Oahu. We just need the right mindset.