The Honolulu City Council faced full-scale community rancor over the proposed Ho‘opili development in Ewa, for which it is poised to approve rezoning in a few weeks. Much of the testimony at hearings railed about the loss of agricultural land, but another common theme was the crushing traffic jams West Oahu commuters endure.

One missive came in writing from Tami Sego, an Ewa resident who makes that commute often and observed that it has gotten worse since she moved there in 2009.

"Developers insist that the Ho‘opili community will be a ‘live, work, play’ community," she wrote. "Seriously? How many people do you know that buy their home and then get a job after?"

Setting aside the rail project, which is at least four years away, there are strategies for making traffic less of a trial for Oahu residents. One of them is, as noted, making the "second city" more of a self-contained employment center where people also live. But when Kapolei will reach that critical mass is not within the control of those now commuting into town.

Traffic mitigation is forefront among concerns for everyone, from the developers who want to build new communities to the officials deciding whether to give them the green light. It’s also an academic interest for Peter Flachsbart, associate professor at the University of Hawaii Department of Urban and Regional Planning.

He pointed to one of his published articles on the subject that put various approaches on a grid.

"There’s no shortage of strategies," he said. "But what I pointed out in the article is a lot of them fail for some reason."

Flachsbart described the three segments of the commuting public: "transit captives," those who can’t afford automobile travel; "auto captives," those who feel tied to their cars; and "transit choice," those who are persuadable if the car disincentives and transit incentives are right.

"I tend to favor combining strategies, combining incentives with disincentives, but the options have to be there to make it work," he added. "That’s it, in a nutshell."

Here’s an illustration from recent history: The rezoning for the Koa Ridge development in Central Oahu was controversial because it’s going to add cars to the congested H-2/H-1 interchange and it’s off the rail alignment.

What the City Council did, said Councilman Ron Menor, was add a condition to require the developers to subsidize bus passes for families for the first five years of occupancy.

Menor, who represents parts of the region most affected by the west-side traffic jams, added that he’s considering a similar requirement for the Ho‘opili project.

"It’s going to take a multifaceted approach," he said. "The city has a responsibility to continue to improve bus service and encourage residents to use the bus system."

The impulse locally among the primary players dealing with traffic concerns, in both the private and public sectors, is to try whatever solutions seem within easy reach.

One option that appears in the academic texts is, in theory, quite effective: "congestion pricing," a term for any program that adds cost to highway travel. In many cities, these include toll roads of one form or another, but in most places a workable alternative that’s free is required.

That could mean a fee for the Zipper and HOV lanes on Oahu, but Menor said this seems highly unlikely politically, even given the free option of the adjoining lanes of traffic.

"I think it would be a tough sell, with respect to residents who regularly travel on these roads," he said

In the supply-and-demand equations of transportation planning, most of the relief that’s been implemented has comprised supply-side solutions. Rail, van pools, buses, and the morning Zipper Lane all aim to increase the capacity to move people back and forth.

The state Department of Transportation recently contemplated expanding the Zipper Lane to afternoon traffic. But, said DOT spokesman Tim Sakahara, officials opted instead to add an extra lane on the H-1 on the Pearl City viaduct, as well as improve the Waimalu offramp to Waikele.

"These approaches will provide additional capacity without the cost of running an afternoon Zipper Lane operation, which was estimated at about $2 million," Sakahara said in an email response. "It also does not take away two lanes of traffic in the eastbound direction," which the Zipper Lane does.

Making concessions to traffic considerations has been a big part of the pitch for approval of Ho‘opili. Bob Bruhl and Cameron Nekota — the head of Hawaii operations and vice president at D.R. Horton-Schuler, respectively — said they hadn’t heard about Menor’s idea of having the developer subsidize transit passes for homeowners.

But their clear preference is for the current plan: to encourage use of the rail through the project design. Residences are clustered near the two rail stops and streets will accommodate the network of feeder buses the city will use to shuttle riders to the stations, Nekota said, and efforts are made to enhance the community’s bike- and pedestrian-friendliness.

In addition, Bruhl said, developers, landowners and home builders in the Ewa district share the costs of traffic impact fees that are assessed to help finance highway improvements.

However, there are demand-side programs that attempt to keep more of the traffic within the circle of Kapolei, and the developers insist that there’s progress. Nekota cited the Oahu Regional Transportation Plan’s projection of 70,000 new jobs in Ewa by 2035 and pointed to pending retail complexes and existing employment centers as signs of movement in the right direction.

"You’re starting to see job creation happen now, and it’s taken time, the whole evolution of a city," he added.

They’re trying to seed some of this by planning mixed-use dwellings enabling people to live in homes with their own public-facing offices attached — some of these are already established in the company’s smaller Mehana development.

And on Tuesday, a job fair sponsored by the Kapolei Chamber of Commerce aims to capitalize on Leeward residents’ longing to avoid the long commute, linking them with employment close to home (see story, page E5).

Closer to town, some employers are starting to embrace work flexibility programs, aimed particularly at giving staff a better work-life balance but also more tolerable commuting times.

"We have employees, they’re in the traffic for two hours," said Emily Santiago, vice president and human resources chief at UHA Health Insurance. Santiago’s company was among those honored last September with the When Work Works Award, conferred by the Society for Human Resource Management Hawaii chapter.

Santiago said the company’s program include shifting start and finish times, when that’s possible without curbing customer-service hours, as well as telecommuting options.

It’s not practical for every position, Santiago added, acknowledging that parents who shuttle children into town for school find their commuting constrained to those hours.

Demand-side changes tend to be complicated. And as all-around sensible as telecommuting can seem — Santiago underscored that it also can allow companies to save lease costs by occupying smaller offices — academics such as Anthony Downs put it in the "low effectiveness" category. Flachsbart pointed to Downs’ 2004 book "Still Stuck in Traffic" as a fairly definitive work on the issue.

And even in an ideal world, Flachsbart said, traffic congestion can be all-but-incurable. When various strategies succeed at easing traffic loads, the "latent demand" — people who have been postponing their commute — tends to fill up the roads again. And there’s so much latent demand in Honolulu.

A favorite quote he pointed to concludes the book with the advice to just get used to traffic:

"Get a comfortable, air-conditioned car with a stereo radio, a tape player, a CD player, a hands-free telephone, perhaps a fax machine and a microwave oven, and commute with someone you really like," Downs wrote. "Then regard the moments spent stuck in traffic simply as an addition to your leisure time."

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