"You learn to live with it, but I just wish it could be improved a little," said Lau, an engineer with a private downtown Honolulu firm.

That's just what state officials hope to do when they launch a trial program tomorrow to close the freeway on-ramp at Lunalilo Street during morning rush hours.

Traffic engineers have long suspected that the commingling of traffic from the Lunalilo on-ramp and the Vineyard Boulevard west-bound off-ramp just before downtown Honolulu causes one of H-1's worst snarls.

Now, they're trying to do something about it. The plan calls for access to the freeway at Lunalilo Street to be closed from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on weekdays.

That may cause problems for Makiki and Ala Moana area residents trying to get on the freeway, but engineers are convinced it will speed up freeway traffic.

"We know it will help the drivers on H-1," said Transportation Department spokesman Scott Ishikawa. "What we want to find out is how it affects traffic on the local streets."

The state tried a similar experiment in 1998 and saw immediate improvement on the freeway. However, the trial ended after only two weeks, not enough time to let neighborhood drivers adjust or to evaluate how traffic patterns changed on local streets.

This time, the state plans to let the experiment run for 90 days and do detailed analysis of traffic changes throughout the surrounding area.

Most neighborhood residents are taking a wait-and-see attitude, said John Steelquist, a member of the Makiki-Lower Punchbowl-Tantalus Neighborhood Board.

"The first trial wasn't done very well and there are a lot of residual hard feelings," Steelquist said. "Now, DOT is doing a better job of responding to community concerns and taking a regional approach to the whole project. People are still skeptical but more open to the idea."

Although the freeway is designed to smoothly handle about 8,500 vehicles per hour, the count sometimes drops below 6,000 per hour during the rush hour because of all the cars using either the Lunalilo on-ramp or the Vineyard Street off-ramp, according to a study done by University of Hawai'i professor Panos Prevedouros.

"So basically, we are losing 1,000 to 3,000 vehicles per hour in throughput," Prevedouros said. That causes traffic to slow and, in turn, creates traffic jams that sometimes extend all the way back to Kahala Mall.

The 1998 experiment shaved an average of 8 minutes off the travel time of an East Honolulu commuter, Ishikawa said. However, it also generated complaints from Makiki drivers who had to find alternative ways to get on the freeway.

"Basically, the trial didn't last long enough to allow people to adjust to it," Ishikawa said. With a longer trial period, drivers may have time to find alternatives that don't cause delays, he said.

Another problem with the 1998 trial was the use of plastic cones that allowed some drivers to cross over into the freeway. This time, DOT plans to use sturdier metal traffic delineators to keep lanes of traffic separate; the delineators are sturdy enough that drivers won't want to collide with them, but flexible enough to allow emergency vehicles to pass if necessary, Ishikawa said.

Drivers will be allowed to enter the Lunalilo Street ramp but instead of merging left onto the freeway, they will be steered onto Vineyard Boulevard and allowed to enter the freeway just past Punchbowl Street less than a mile down the road.

Since the new entry point is just past the downtown bottleneck, access to the freeway may be as quick as the old route, engineers suggest.

"That's the idea, but there are still serious and firm questions to be asked before, during and after the trial," Steelquist said. "I think people will adjust but we want to see the hard data."

DOT has promised to conduct detailed traffic counts on neighborhood roads likely to be affected, including Prospect, Wilder and Punahou streets. It also plans to pass out written surveys to Makiki and East

Honolulu drivers to help evaluate the changes, Ishikawa said.

"You can look at it both ways," said Lau, the Kalama Valley resident. "I feel compassion for those in the neighborhood who are going to be inconvenienced, but then again you have to look at the greater good it could do for the thousands of people on the freeway."

David Livingston, a Hawai'i Kai resident, wonders though if anything can help the East Honolulu drivers as more and more homes are built in the area.

"Nobody is even talking about alternatives like light rail," he said. "People have been pulling their hats down over their eyes for 20 years and not worried about the coming gridlock. In 20 years it's going to be easier to walk to Honolulu from Hawai'i Kai than drive."