EDITORIAL
Flood of new cars focuses transit talk

As an Island state, Hawai'i will sooner or later have to come to grips with the fact that it has a limited carrying capacity for everything from buildings to cars and people.

"Sustainability" is the latest buzzword in this conversation and it focuses on a growth pattern that can be carried on without overwhelming our resources and physical capacity.

The state flirted with applying restrictions on new residents during the 1970s. Those ideas, although politically popular, ran firmly aground on a variety of constitutional, legal and social objections.

And before that, former state Sen. Nadao Yoshinaga proposed legislation that would have limited the number of cars and other vehicles in the state.

Limiting human in-migration may never get past what is recognized as a strong constitutional right to freedom of travel.

But the idea of limiting or controlling the number of cars may regain currency.

This thought is prompted by a story on Sunday by transportation writer Mike Leidemann, who reports that as many as 120,000 new cars and trucks could be brought into the state this year.

The flood is driven by a surge in tourism. More than three-quarters of American tourists who come here rent a car.

It's true that a substantial number of cars are scrapped each year, so the 120,000 does not represent a net gain. But even after scrapping, the estimate is that somewhere between 24,000 and 36,000 new cars and trucks will be registered and put on the road.

The question is: Put where on the road? The opening of the H-3 freeway plus miles of new subdivision and feeder roads in West O'ahu has kept the ratio of cars-to-mile-of-roadway relatively stable.

But that cannot last forever. The time for policy-makers to begin thinking of more serious controls on the number of vehicles on our highways and roads is now, not when the situation becomes untenable.

There is a strong ethic in Hawai'i, as almost everywhere in the United States, that the right to ownership and use of a private automobile is almost inviolate.

That does not have to translate into an automatic right to use one's car for every trip, every time.

Other jurisdictions have taken strong, even draconian measures to control the number of vehicles. Singapore is often cited as an example, where one cannot buy a new car without presenting an older one for scrapping or shipping out of country.

Hawai'i may not be ready for strong medicine such as this right now. But as state Transportation Director Rod Haraga noted in Leidemann's article, if planning does not begin immediately on sensible alternatives, ranging from increased public transportation to car pooling, the day of tough, unpopular Singapore-style solutions will surely arrive.