That adds up to extra costs of about $129 million a year, or $342 for each traveler who has to drive during rush hour, according to the annual Urban Mobility Report released yesterday.

On the other hand, you could be living in Atlanta; Los Angeles; Nashville, Tenn.; Tucson, Ariz.; or more than 50 other metropolitan areas that have worse congestion than Honolulu.

"The problem can be stated simply: Urban areas are not adding enough capacity, improving operations or managing demand well enough to keep congestion from growing larger," said the report by the Texas Transportation Institute, considered the nation's leading center for traffic studies.

Honolulu drivers, who seem to be complaining louder than ever about the growing congestion on island roads, yesterday reacted to the study with a ho-hum, so-what-else-is-new attitude.

"It's not as bad here as Los Angeles, but little by little it's getting there," said Chenor Hosseini, a Hawai'i Pacific University student who uses a car to commute to her downtown classes from a home in the Ala Moana area. "I don't know what the figures show, but it's definitely getting busier than it was two or three years ago."

The report suggests that Honolulu's time lost to traffic congestion peaked in the early '90s at 30 hours and dropped over the next 10 years in part because a long recession had taken many workers off the road and forced many working residents to move to the Mainland.

Now, with the economy growing again, the cars and delays seem to be returning.

"I think it's worse here than in Chicago or Los Angeles because people don't know how to drive," said Brenna Joyce, who spends up to two hours a day commuting by bus from her home in Pearl City to her job in Waimanalo. "It's definitely gotten worse in the last couple of years."

City and state officials said they believe a number of projects, large and small, contributed to the relatively slow growth in congestion here during the first years of the decade. Among them are highway and freeway widenings, better traffic signal synchronization and other roadway improvements.

The biggest timesaver, though, could be the city's bus system, the report's authors said. Without it and the thousands of cars it keeps off the road, the average Honolulu driver would lose another 14 hours of time to gridlock each year, according to the report.

"You can see how bad it is just by looking across the street," said retired downtown Honolulu resident Suzanne VanSchoor, sipping an afternoon Starbucks coffee on Bishop Street.

"Look at how frustrated and angry they are. Everybody is in a hurry to get nowhere. They're rushing, rushing, rushing and they won't even give you a chance to cross the road. You wonder why more people don't ride the bus. It's clean, cool and gets you everywhere you want to go."

While the nation's largest metro areas still have the worst traffic, the report suggests that medium-sized cities suffered the fastest growth in congestion during the past decade, with the average delays in such cities, including Honolulu, growing from 15 to 25 hours between 1993 and 2003.

Los Angeles is still the king of delays, with motorists spending an average of 93 hours a year stuck in traffic. San Francisco was next with 72 hours, followed by Washington, D.C. (69), Atlanta (67) and Houston (63).

The study recommends that cities make several changes to fight the increasing gridlock, including building more roads and widening those with the worst bottlenecks, managing traffic better by coordinating signals and providing roving highway patrols, and providing up-to-date traffic information on the Internet and by phone.

City and state officials say they already are planning to implement such suggestions as:

• A new freeway patrol service, which will quickly remove stalled vehicles from Honolulu freeways, is scheduled to begin later this year.

• State Transportation Director Rod Haraga said the state is working with the city to increase the number of synchronized traffic signals on O'ahu.

• Ramp metering, which will ease merging delays on freeway on-ramps.

• A new city-state traffic management center with coordinated response to accidents and other problems is being discussed.