State transportation officials have opened a 2-mile stretch of the H-1 freeway’s eastbound shoulder lane in West Oahu to weekday morning commuters — the latest step in their strategy to employ simpler traffic fixes while deferring costlier large-scale highway projects.

For the first time on Monday, drivers heading east on the H-1 from 5 to 9 a.m. could travel in the shoulder lane from the Kualakai Parkway onramp to the Kunia/Waipahu/Ewa offramp.

The move aims to help drivers exit the freeway more easily at the Kunia offramp and improve traffic, state Department of Transportation spokesman Tim Sakahara explained.

“It’ll be a daily thing from here on out,” excluding holidays, he said Monday.

It follows similar, recent changes as thousands of students head back to school this month. H-1 Zipper Lane users now have two lanes to get into town instead of one during the weekday commute, and the state DOT last week implemented a long-awaited Nanakuli afternoon contra-flow lane on Farrington Highway to mixed results.

The agency continues to adjust the Farrington contra-flow to ease eastbound traffic, which loses a lane to the contra-flow, and its crews are also monitoring how well the shoulder lane works when used for travel, Sakahara said.

Changes to allow for morning travel in the new Kunia shoulder lane, including new striping and signage, cost some $460,000, according to Sakahara. If there’s an accident or breakdown in that 2-mile stretch, drivers should move their vehicles to that makai lane as they normally would, and the lane would temporarily convert to a shoulder again, he added.

The move follows Gov. David Ige’s decision to defer indefinitely almost all major new projects to increase highway capacity and reduce traffic congestion on state roadways.

“The reality is, we only have so much dollars, and we’re trying to manage that as best as we can,” Ige told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in July.

One such deferred project is a planned H-1 eastbound widening from Waiawa to Halawa, which is similar to a years-long project finished last fall to widen the H-1 westbound.

The eastbound widening could take about seven years to design and build — plus about $120 million that “we just don’t have,” DOT Highways Division Deputy Director Ed Sniffen said earlier this summer.

Honolulu routinely ranks among the U.S. cities with the worst traffic, and public opinion polls regularly show traffic at or near the top of the list of Hawaii voters’ concerns.

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Star-Advertiser reporter Kevin Dayton contributed to this report.