"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."

— Joni Mitchell, 1960s

"To alleviate the University of Hawai'i at Manoa's parking problem, plans were proposed to add a fourth phase to the quarry parking structure. Students still find parking to be a recurring problem both off and on campus."

— Ka Leo, Aug. 25

Parking problem?

There is no parking problem. There's a driver-disorder problem! And a deep-set cultural problem in Honolulu.

Somehow, Honolulu parents chose not to emulate responsible parents elsewhere who teach their children independence and good social skills by riding the bus. Is it because the Joneses might think they're cheap, or abusing their children by making them ride the bus with the lower classes?

They paved the whole front yard of St. Clement's church and school last week for parking, a large portion of Punahou School's front lawn last month, and UH-Manoa allowed a tailgate party of SUVs and pickups to occupy the Bachman Hall lawn.

What a great beginning to the school year, sending all the students the wrong message: Forget sustainable and green planning, support Detroit and the asphalt industry!

At the same time our beautiful lawns are being paved, columnists in this and other media are promoting more car lanes — wider highways, double-deck highways. Which means more people can bring more cars into town and to the schools.

And more pavement, which means less water seeping into the water table, and more heat reflected into our atmosphere.

Most distressing was that the big news on one local TV news broadcast was not the human toll of Hurricane Katrina. It was about the likely effect of Katrina on Hawai'i's gas prices!

Having experienced the annual impact of parents catering to their seemingly helpless children by flooding the roads with cars every late August for some 35 years, I can only hope for some leadership by the city and state administrations.

Promoting alternative means of getting to work and school is a good start, and kudos to the Mufi Hannemann administration for getting the funding and voter approval to start the requisite studies for a potential rail system.

Cities need multiple systems to function, as can be evidenced from most successful cities — Hong Kong, San Francisco, New York and even Los Angeles. The way they got that way is not always a model for planning.

The San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, found that just engineering a rail system in isolation from intensive land use planning and urban design around the future stations created destinations but not concentrated origin centers.

After some 40 years of operation, they are finally redeveloping their station areas to provide for higher-density housing adjacent to stations, thereby enlarging their ridership.

Hong Kong, since the beginning of its rail systems, has promoted high-density residential and commercial development over stations, which not only adds a rider base but provides revenue which covers most of the capital development costs.

Honolulu is a city and needs to start thinking the same way. The consultants about to start analysis of engineering options for a new component of the city's transportation system will, I hope, include a team of land-use planners and urban designers familiar with the benefits of designing for transit-oriented development, so that Honolulu's station areas will be sensibly planned from the beginning.

Seattle, like Honolulu, started planning for rail transit in the 1960s, and similarly has a 40- year history of aborted plans.

It does have a well-loved one-mile-long monorail system, a remnant of the 1962 World's Fair, which connects downtown with the Science Park and Recreation Park that has developed on the fair site.

Far-sighted engineers, including Honolulu's proposed new consultants, designed Seattle's admirable bus tunnel under downtown with rails in place to accommodate a future system.

In the 1990s, Sound Transit was formed, and continues to plan for a hoped-for extensive rail system. In addition a citizens' initiative is promoting one leg of a total system, with monorail in mind.

The strong feature of Sound Transit is that it's not merely an engineering endeavor but has a strong land-use planning and urban-design component. It has been working with neighborhoods and the region's cities, and with station-area advisory committees to prepare plans for areas within a certain distance of stations to take advantage of future stations.

The result, through zoning changes to allow increased density and apartments within the planning radius, is a benefit both to the neighborhood and for the Puget Sound region. The neighborhood has a higher quality of building design, a streetscape without telephone poles and wires, and with a street landscape which encourages walking and socializing.

Merchants have seen the value of increased patronage and have also spiffed up their establishments. Corners which formerly had people in vehicles patronizing convenience stores and drive-in banks now see umbrellas with people eating lunch and strollers with smiling children along with their parents.

One can feel the parents enjoying the fact that they are contributing to a more sustainable and healthy Seattle by leaving their vehicles to fend for themselves.

Intensifying urban areas around transit centers has the support of all the major cities, and especially the small outlying communities, in Seattle's Puget Sound region, because of the support such concentration gives to the halt of rural sprawl.

O'ahu sorely needs such land-use planning so that the green lands still surviving around Kapolei, Waialua and 'Ewa will feel some relief from developer pressures.

UH's Manoa campus would also benefit greatly from an intensified urban center with major transit access — young faculty and students who can't afford Manoa Valley or Mo'il'ili housing prices in today's constrained market may find a way to live close to campus.

If the new system or systems are designed for comfort and aesthetic enjoyment, perhaps UH won't need more parking in the quarry and Punahou can dig up the new asphalt.

Tailgate parking? Well, that takes more social change than planners may be prepared to think about.