Honolulu Drivers Suffer Through Worst Roads

Last year, TRIP, a national transportation watchdog group, rated Honolulu as having the second-worst urban roads in the nation. On top of all the potholes, Honolulu residents also pay the third highest cost for extra vehicle maintenance due to poor road conditions. The price tag is $770 a year in added costs.

A city official, Bill Brennan, claimed that the city is doing its best to improve road conditions. The city filled 80,000 potholes in 2007 and 7,000 more the following January.

Yet, does all this patchwork fix the underlying problem of why there are so many potholes in the first place and why the same ones seem to continue to reappear?

David Goldberg of Transportation for America, an organization that focuses on state transportation statistics, said of Hawaii´s government officials, “I think, frankly, it probably just has not been a high priority in their budgeting to keep the roads in good condition.”

With much of the city´s roads still in various stages of repair, this does not bode well for the construction of a $6 billion rail project which has yet to break ground.