By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Transportation Writer

Six billion dollars.

It seems a little ludicrous to try to put a price tag on Hawai'i roads, but that's what happens every year. This year the figure was $6 billion.

Or $5,969,533,006 to be precise, as the accountants of Deloitte & Touche were when they completed their annual audit of the state Highways Division last year.

That's the figure they came up with on June 30, 2002, for total assets of the division, which is responsible for all the highways owned and maintained by the state. That includes everything from H-1, H-2 and H-3 freeways to the Belt Highway on the Big Island.

By far, the biggest portion of that nearly $6 billion figure comes from the Highways Division's capital assets, including the land under the highways, road improvements, buildings and vehicles. A few hundred million or so comes from other sources, such as cash on hand from the state gasoline tax or government bonds sold to raise more money to build even more highways.

In a certain sense, of course, the roads are priceless. After all, we doubt anybody is going to buy H-1 Freeway, or even Kamehameha Highway, anytime soon, no matter how hard up the state seems for cash. As the auditors noted, in their usually dry way: "The Highways Division uses these capital assets to provide services to citizens; therefore these assets are not available for future spending."

On the other hand, we hear Gov. Linda Lingle is still considering a plan to build a new, possibly private, toll road from Kapolei to Honolulu, so maybe it's worth wondering just what $6 billion can get you these days:

• Six billion dollars is the amount of money that the Xerox Corp. overstated its financial accounts to regulators between 1997 and 2002.
• It's the same amount President Bush asked Congress to provide this year to develop and store new vaccines and treatments for smallpox, anthrax, botulism toxin, ebola and plague.
• Sun Microsystems donated $6.2 billion in software to schools worldwide last year and AT&T Wireless plans to offer $6 billion in new stock to investors this year.

So maybe it's not so ludicrous, after all, to make sure we keep putting those price tags on our highways. Who knows? If Bill Gates ever gets tired of riding the information highway, we've got one or two of the real things here we might be willing to part with at discount prices.

Mike Leidemann's Drive Time column runs Tuesdays. Reach him at 525-5460 or mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.