Remember when it was a relaxing thing to go on a drive on the weekend? It's not "holo holo ka'a" out there anymore.

Kahala Mall parking is impenetrable on a Saturday morning. Kaimuki is an exercise in frustration. Pearlridge is bumper-to-bumper even before you get into the lot. There's no parking at beach parks. Driving anywhere near Ala Moana requires nerves of steel. Better to stay home and try to sneak in errands during the workweek.

If you can. Weekday traffic has its own constant dysfunction.

Some of the traffic problems are situational. When there's big surf on the North Shore, everybody has to drive slow and gawk. When there's a holiday sale at the malls, shoppers are like mosquitoes swarming an unprotected arm. An accident can choke up the freeways and surface roads for half a day, and nobody on O'ahu can drive in the rain.

Trouble is, these once-in-a-while events are just about every day.

Kalaniana'ole is every rush hour and every pau hana. H-1 by the Kaonohi overpass is all day. There's always digging or paving or repaving in Nanakuli and Wai'anae.

And it's not just O'ahu. On Kaua'i, the morning commute into Lihu'e has been a problem for more than a decade with lines of cars stretching for miles. Alternative routes have been opened, but extra roads haven't kept up with extra cars.

On Maui, multilevel parking structures are sprouting up in places where not long ago folks used to just park in the dirt. Even "remote" places like Kahakuloa have traffic jams every day.

On Hawai'i Island, the problems aren't quite the same. The Big Island has big stretches of roadway, but it also has big vehicles, big weather and big accidents. It doesn't suffer the urban plight of too many cars on too few roads; it is the rural dilemma of lots of room to get into trouble.

This session, quite a few bills have been introduced at the Legislature to address gridlock — things like a Lunalilo Street fly-over ramp, contraflow lanes for Kahekili and Farrington highways through Ma'ili and Nanakuli and "traffic capacity studies" for places where capacity is maxed out.

But none of those things are the cure. It's like putting Band-Aids on the boo-boos of a lung cancer patient who is still puffing a pack a day. Try as they might, lawmakers can't legislate us out of traffic woes.

Barring a reversal of habit, what is required is more land for parking and driving. Until someone figures out how to grow an island, we'll just be sitting in traffic, one person per maxi-van.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.