Lawmakers leave
drivers all jammed up

Here's my bet: There is not a single licensed, sober driver in Honolulu who cannot tell you at least one traffic horror story within three minutes.

Most are not just able to tell it to you, they want you to really know how difficult it was to get to work, how impossible it is to pick up kids at school and how blindingly absurd it is for the H-1 freeway to be stopped dead at 11 a.m. on a Saturday.

With such a wellspring of public anger just waiting to be tapped by the clever politician, why is it that we are so lacking any leadership on the issue?

Supporters say that mass transit or rapid transit, while not a total solution, will be an important new part of managing traffic congestion in Honolulu. Support for transit has been just a blip above a dim spot on the Legislature's 2005 radar screen.

If you think there's a stall in the Middle Street intersection, wait and see what happens when you propose raising taxes.

Despite a new round of polls that show the public in favor of a tax increase dedicated to transit, the Senate had a chance to raise the excise tax 25 percent and it blinked.

"There are certain people who just don't want to deal with the tax issue. What it boiled down to was a consensus that they didn't want to go with it," Sen. Brian Taniguchi, Ways and Means chairman, said to explain why his transit tax increase bill had to be recommitted last week.

Taniguchi's plan raised the excise tax, gave the money to the counties and added some for education, and used tax credits for food and drugs to attack the regressive tax increase. The plan was both rational and complex; it was not said which adjective doomed it at the Legislature.

Across the country, the cities of Atlanta, St. Louis, Houston, San Jose, Cleveland, Dallas and Denver have all voted to add between one-half and one cent of each dollar spent as a transit sales tax.

But the difference in almost all of those cities is that there is an organized, funded transit coalition pushing for the plan and the money. Last week in Minneapolis, for instance, a coalition of health, faith, environmental and labor groups called for a tax increase to fund a rail plan.

Hawaii had an organized transit effort in 1992, featuring a planned route and models of the trains to lure supporters. But the tax failed by one vote in the City Council.

Today, transit backers have adopted the benign neglect strategy, hoping that if a plan staggers out of the Legislature, the counties would take up the challenge and approve a tax.

Hawaii's top two local leaders, Gov. Linda Lingle and Mayor Mufi Hannemann, have essentially left the transit question up to others to work out.

The end result could be that going nowhere is all we get.