All the extra hours stuck in Honolulu traffic cost each traveler an average of $434 in 2005 — nearly $50 more from the year before, according to a new traffic study.

Drivers spent an average of 24 additional hours crawling along during peak Honolulu traffic periods in 2005, up from 22 hours the year before, according to the Texas Transportation Institute's 2007 Urban Mobility Report released this week.

The cost of all those additional hours — at $14.60 per hour per driver — drained Honolulu's economy of $166 million, according to the study.

The study looked at the latest available data from 437 urban areas in America — and Honolulu drivers fared better than average.

Across the nation, drivers spent an extra 38 hours of travel time in 2005 at a cost of $710 per person.

Both on the Mainland and in Honolulu, some of the financial cost came in the form of extra fuel and higher gas prices. But most of it was measured in the cost of the time that drivers could have spent doing something more productive, said co-author David Schrank.

"Yes, the fuel cost is going up in Honolulu and across the country, and there are billions of dollars wasted," Schrank said. "But most of it isn't fuel costs or what you would earn at the office. It's the value of the time we could spend doing something else."

Schrank spoke by cell phone yesterday in Texas while watching his daughter's soccer game.

Overall, the 4.2 billion extra hours stuck in traffic cost the U.S. economy $78 billion and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel in 2005, according to the study.

Put another way, the amount of additional lost time and fuel equals 105 million weeks of vacation and 58 fully loaded supertankers.

'IN A UNIQUE POSITION'

It may be hard for daily commuters to believe, but the amount of extra time that the average driver in Honolulu spent in traffic actually decreased between 1995 and 2005, according to the study.

Honolulu drivers spent an average of 26 extra hours per person in peak traffic in 1995 — compared with only 24 hours in 2005.

But Schrank said the differences aren't statistically relevant, especially compared to other metropolitan areas that saw dramatic swings as the number of homes and jobs saw large changes that coincided with huge shifts in local economies.

"Honolulu is in a unique position," Schrank said. "The traffic you have there is basically relatively constant. For the most part, you're going to experience 20 to 25 wasted hours per year because there's enough of you guys living in paradise that you're going to bump into each other all of the time. You have your locals and you have some visitors, but you don't have extra traffic driving through the area."

PUSH FOR MORE OPTIONS

Parts of the West Coast and the Sun Belt, in the same decade, saw dramatic job growth and expansions of suburbs.

"Boom, all of a sudden these areas saw large growth that led to large fluctuations in traffic delays," Schrank said. "You guys don't have that overnight growth."

Melvin Kaku, director of the city's Department of Transportation Services, said his staff continues to analyze the report.

"But looking at it on the surface, we agree in principle that there's obviously no magic silver bullet and people are actually losing more productive time," Kaku said. "With an island so small, there are limited opportunities for more roads. We're obviously not going to build another H-1 or H-2."

That's why Mayor Mufi Hannemann continues to push for an overall transportation system that includes TheBus, TheBoat, a fixed guideway, rapid transit operation "and all the different options we have to look at," Kaku said.

Cliff Slater, chairman of www.honolulutraffic.com, which looks for cost-effective ways of reducing traffic congestion, said Honolulu's highways have not kept up with the commute patterns of people living farther away from town.

"Very simply, the big issue for Honolulu is that we haven't built any new lanes but we've built a lot of new homes," Slater said. "You cannot expect anything but greater increased traffic congestion if you make no attempt to expand our highway capacity. It's as simple as that."

Slater and his group want, among other things, elevated high-occupancy toll lanes — or HOT lanes — that would allow traffic to move at 60 mph and vary the toll with changing traffic patterns to keep the HOT lanes flowing.

"Two lanes of HOT lanes, which by definition are uncongested, can carry as much as four lanes of a regular freeway," Slater said. "HOT lanes moving traffic at 60 mph can convey twice as many vehicles moving at 20 mph, while reducing congestion with a subsequent decline in emission and energy use."

Scott Ishikawa, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, said several projects intended to ease congestion are under way or have been recently completed, including: