"They didn't have radios in the cars," said City Council Budget Committee Chairwoman Ann Kobayashi. "They couldn't contact the drivers."

When the gear was installed in 2002, former city Managing Director Ben Lee said it would improve efficiency by making it easy to send maintenance crews who were closest to the jobs at any given time.

It was never used.

Lee could not be reached for comment on Friday.

Former Mayor Jeremy Harris had pointed to the system as an accomplishment in his 2004 State of the City address, saying the city "employed state-of-the-art GPS satellite technology to better manage and track our fleet."

The Automatic Vehicle Locator system is among several Harris projects — including trees along Kuhio Avenue, construction improvements and even a Chinatown water fountain — that Mayor Mufi Hannemann is canceling, reviewing or delaying.

Monitoring stations and software also were part of the system. It was to operate by receiving signals from satellites and beaming them to monitoring stations, where personnel would track the precise location of vehicles.

Kobayashi said the project was a waste of taxpayers' money and that she never could determine who pushed for the purchase.

"It would be cheaper to give everyone a cell phone than to use the GPS," she said.

The project seemed troubled from the start.

Harris' former parks director, Bill Balfour, had said he had no use for the tracking equipment when it was first installed, Kobayashi said.

"The parks director never asked for it and didn't want it," she said.

Parks managers said they had no desire to track employees, which would have required putting a parks worker at the monitoring station rather than working in the parks, according to city Information Technology Director Gordon Bruce.

"There was no desire on the part of management to deploy, so the system was not fixed or deployed," said Bruce, who is now tasked with finding alternate uses for the equipment.

City officials said similar tracking equipment that was installed on city ambulances and fire trucks is being used because those vehicles have radios.

The city paid more than $828,000 to install that system on 26 ambulances and another $550,000 to put it on 42 fire trucks.

Derrick Young, of the city's Emergency Medical Services Department, said the equipment is used daily by the ambulance dispatch.

"It lets you know where the closest ambulance is," Young said. "And in emergencies, we like to send the closest ambulance."

Kobayashi said she was pleased to hear that at least some of the equipment has been used. "That's good; at least it's not a total loss," she said.

Honolulu Fire Capt. Kenison Tejada said the department found a way to make use of the GPS technology as part of the department's new onboard computer system.