Drivers are going solo in zipper lane

Why have a zipper lane if the Honolulu Police Department won't enforce the rules? For example, Wednesday morning at 5:25 a.m., I followed a BMW that I could clearly see only contained the driver. And there I was following the rules carrying three passengers!

This BMW took up space of those who correctly use the zipper lane, and in fact the driver drove below the speed limit! And coming up behind me was a truck with just the driver only!

Come out here, HPD, there are tickets to be issued, not to mention money to be made!

Free bus passes would boost ridership

No one really wants to ride public transportation. TheBus is inconvenient, uncomfortable and slow. So in order to get people out of their cars, we have to be creative. Taxpayers subsidize TheBus with millions of tax dollars every year. So why doesn't the city give free bus passes to all its employees as a part of their benefits? Some would ride TheBus and reduce traffic for everyone.

Neither Mayor Harris nor the candidates for mayor have proposed this inexpensive solution. Rail transit does not mean more people will ride it than already ride TheBus.

Furthermore, the state, private businesses and hotels could buy monthly passes in bulk and give monthly passes to all their employees, too.

Finally, the University of Hawaii-Manoa and all the community colleges could give monthly passes to all their students as a benefit for registering. Students on tight budgets would appreciate and use it.

But if you make workers or students pay for bus passes, they will continue to drive their cars. A free bus pass to use at any time would be an attractive benefit and a creative way of reducing traffic congestion.

Let's rethink ways to honor WWI dead

Our city fathers never would have intentionally built a saltwater pool on the beach, had they known it would be impossible to maintain. A saltwater pool was the only technology available at time. We now have beautiful freshwater pools in Manoa, Makiki and Kailua, just to name a few. If we must have a swimming pool to remember the sacrifices of our World War I dead, why not make it a new, state-of-the-art freshwater pool?

If we want to reclaim the beach, maybe a new pool could be built in an area other than Waikiki. Waianae, Kapolei? Or let's use the millions of dollars that might be misspent restoring the Natatorium, to upgrade and maintain the pools we have. Above all, let's do something sensible. I think that's what the veterans would have wanted.

Racism played role in statehood story

There is a lot more to the story of Hawaii's statehood than described in the Aug. 3 letter by Bernardo P. Benigno. If, as he says, military troop contributions to World War II and the Korean War were decisive in granting statehood, Hawaii would have been the 49th, not the 50th, state of the union.

If he pursued answers to the question as to why Alaska preceded Hawaii to statehood, he would undoubtedly find the dominant reasons for the delay for Hawaii at the time had to do with congressional and Washington concerns about the predominantly non-white pop- ulation of Hawaii.

Billboard ban makes Hawaii more beautiful

I just returned from 10 days on Oahu, my first trip to Hawaii. In terms of natural beauty and friendly people, it is everything the P.R. people say it is. I saw more rainbows in 10 days than I've seen in the last 30 years.

I live in Austin, Texas, and natural beauty and friendly people are in large supply here, too. But Hawaii has learned something that Texas hasn't learned, and that is what billboards do to gorgeous scenery. The complete absence of billboards contributed to the beauty as much as all the stunningly beautiful trees, flowers, birds, beaches, mountains, water and sky. Somehow the economy survives and Hawaii residents find what they need to buy without this source of advertising. If you folks can make it work, maybe there's hope for us in Austin.

Have prisons become our insane asylums?

The atrocities common in the treatment of the mentally ill housed in state asylums of the early 1900s were still present in the modern mental-health facilities much later in the century. In order to eliminate this embarrassment, most states cut back on residential mental-health services. The intention was that the private sector, along with medical insurance providers, would pick up the slack. But that did not happen.

Many with moderate to severe mental illness were left untreated and were soon living on the streets. Their bizarre behaviors and a tough-on-crime stance soon attracted police.

Mandatory sentencing, mandatory minimum sentences and repeat offender statutes tied the hands of the judiciary and prisons began to fill with manic depressives, schizo-phrenics and dual-diagnosed substance abusers.

We need to go back to square one and remove the mentally ill from our state's enhanced sentencing statutes, untie the hands of the judiciary, expand our state's mental-health hospital and encourage substance abuse treatment.