Publishing article after article and letters to the editor repeatedly asserting that Oahu’s rail project ending at the Ala Moana Center will free up H-1 traffic jams is a disservice to our community.

There is a term for this type of activity: "brainwashing."

Some history: In articles published in this newspaper’s two ancestor newspapers, when the rail project was being studied, many professional traffic studies commissioned by the city showed that the only mass transit route that would reduce gridlock on the H-1 freeway was the rail route that went to Waikiki and up to the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

That’s why the Honolulu City Council approved the 30-mile "preferred guideway alignment," which included Waikiki and the UH in its routing.

The city-commissioned studies showed that mass transit routes that ended at the Ala Moana Center would not reduce H-1 gridlock. This is why so many Honolulu citizens are protesting the present rail routing. They rightly think that spending $5 billion-plus on a transit system that stops at Ala Moana Center and does not reduce H-1 gridlock is sheer lunacy.

So, I strongly disagree that a rail tunnel under Beretania Street isn’t worth the cost. Further, perhaps now the time is ripe for a serious consideration of the greatly advanced technology of transit tunneling and how it can solve the visual and noise problems facing neighborhoods all along the transit route.

How is it that New York City can afford boring two new transit tunnels under Manhattan through some of the hardest granite stone on Earth? The answer is that present tunneling is not like the tunneling of old. Cutting a rail tunnel under urban Honolulu through sand, coral and lava would seem to be like cutting through jello compared to New York City’s cutting a tunnel through granite. The project would take substantially less time and Honolulu’s tunnel boring costs would be substantially lessened. To date, no independent cost analysis of such a project has been undertaken by a reputable tunneling engineering company.

It is a very attractive proposal to consider: the routing of a transit tunnel through Honolulu’s dense neighborhood areas under Beretania Street, curving over to Ala Moana Center, then the Hawai‘i Convention Center, continuing on under the Ala Wai Canal to mid-Waikiki and then up to UH-Manoa, all without the daily incessant visual impacts and noise radiating from the above-ground heavy rail line in the sky.

To pay for the additional expense of building the entire "preferred guideway alignment" now and solve the state transportation headache of daily H-1 traffic jams, the City Council should immediately ask the state Legislature to extend the 0.5 percent Oahu general excise tax surcharge for two or three years, and also ask that the transit project be given the 10 percent the state is raking off the top of these mass-transit dedicated funds — some $350 million to $500 million — supposedly to pay for the state’s collection costs, which have proven to be nil.

Oahu needs a mass transit system that is worth the cost. Routing a technologically advanced transit tunnel under Beretania Street, curving over to Ala Moana Center, to the convention center and Waikiki, then up to UH-Manoa, just might be the win-win system we’ve all been looking for to really solve a major part of Oahu’s existing and future traffic mess.