Managing the parking shortage for a city that's moving toward new modes of transportation is a delicate business.

In this case, simply adding to the stock of public parking stalls, especially in the Downtown area, won't contribute to the success of the planned fixed-guideway system, in the long term. In cities with well-established mass-transit networks, the price of town parking is high, even if drivers can find a stall. Such disincentives to driving are essential elements of a mass-transit master plan.

Once the guideway reaches the urban core, Downtown needs a way to shuttle commuters to their final destination. A surplus of parking spaces won't do much to lure people into public transportation, leaving their cars in their garages and off our crowded highways.

And yet there is a pent-up need for parking now, with more than a decade to go before a reasonably convenient and much-needed mass-transit system is in place.

The revitalization of Chinatown — as welcome a development as that is— has surely added to the demand for space to accommodate residents and tourists who come to shop, dine and browse the new crop of art galleries and other cultural attractions.

So some kind of improvement is needed, sooner rather than later. One strategy would be for the city to add one or more routes of circulating shuttles in the core Downtown area that would link offices with parking facilities, which may be too distant for an easy walk.

It's certainly not an original scheme. Many cities are served by such networks. Honolulu itself already has a number of outlying circulating bus lines that essentially tie neighborhoods with a main bus-service trunk line.

More of these routes should be phased in to help support the mass-transit system and, more immediately, to provide links from parking structures to destinations where spaces are in short supply.

Advertiser writer Mary Vorsino cataloged some of the trouble spots in a story surveying the situation Downtown and in Kaimuki, Kaka'ako and Waikiki.

It's important that our city leaders discuss ways to provide some public parking, perhaps as requirements of redevelopment permits, and make such spaces useful through shuttle-bus services.

In combination with park-and-ride and carpooling programs, this enhancement can help ease Honolulu's transition from an auto-centered community to one with a variety of ways for people to get where they need to go.