Mahalo to the more than 500 Honolulu citizens who attended last month's scoping meetings on mass transit solutions for O'ahu.

The meetings in Honolulu and Kapolei are an important initial step in a process whose goal is the creation of a transit system for our island. We received more than 400 comments from people telling us how they feel about the proposed transit alternatives and what kinds of additional information they want in order to make an informed choice about transit solutions.

There are some who mistakenly believe that these meetings were a time for making decisions. Not so. Honolulu's traffic problems have been building for decades and finding workable, viable solutions that fit our city and our people will take time and effort. The scoping meetings were intended to both share and gather information, and from our perspective, they were a huge success.

The City and County of Honolulu is looking for an integrated solution to our traffic problems, and we need the people of Honolulu to help design that solution.

At this early point in the process, we are trying to define what alternatives we should be looking at. For example, is it more important to serve workers near the airport, or people who live in Salt Lake, or is there a way to do both?

We are also trying to make sure that we study the right things. We know that we need to evaluate how much each alternative will cost to build and operate, and how many people are expected to use it, but we also need to make sure we identify historic buildings and environmentally sensitive areas that could be affected by each alternative, groups of people who most need to be served by transit, and those who would be affected by a transit system.

In the year leading up to the City Council's selection of a locally preferred transit alternative for Honolulu, we will be asking a lot of questions.

As we find answers to those questions, we will share that information with the public so everyone has an opportunity to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative.

Before the end of 2006, the city will issue an alternatives analysis that presents all of the data on each alternative. At that point, the people of Honolulu will have an opportunity to make informed comments on the alternatives directly to the City Council, which will review the data and the people's comments and then select a locally preferred alternative that best serves the citizens of Honolulu.

Over the next year, we encourage people to keep up with the project through the media, visit the transit Web site at www.honolulutransit.org and attend the many community meetings that will be held on this issue. The more involved Honolulu's citizens are, the better our transit solution will be.

The city is poised to embark on the largest public works project in our history that will enhance our quality of life. We need public involvement to ensure success.

Lawrence Spurgeon is the environmental planning lead for Parsons Brinckerhoff on the Honolulu High-Capacity Transit Corridor Project.