Bus service is one of those things, like beaches and mountain rain, that Honolulu residents take for granted. That’s not a bad thing: The longstanding expectation of reliable and affordable bus service is one reason Oahu has a high rate of public transportation use.
But TheBus, like every other municipal service, operates within the reality of rising fuel and labor costs. Keeping operations sustainable for the long term means that city officials need to make sure they’re as efficient as possible. So a first phase of changes to 13 routes and to bus frequency during off-peak hours was made June 3, with a second round due to be implemented starting on Sunday.
The public outcry has been deafening. The administration of Mayor Peter Carlisle initially did not do an adequate job of alerting bus riders to the first phase or in consulting with them on solutions where service clearly fell short of the need, especially in certain rural and suburban routes. Some of that is being corrected, and the door needs to remain wide open to the community in the weeks ahead.
However, the budgetary problems are likely to persist or worsen, with fuel costs on the rise again, which means that the City Council’s action this week was essentially to kick the can down the road. On Wednesday, Council members passed legislation that does nothing to solve the real fiscal problem. It was aimed more at assuaging the anger of those understandably upset by the changes and in averting a populist uproar in the midst of a political season.
In its first resolution, the Council urged the mayor to "find funding to immediately restore service cuts" to the services under the greatest strain, including routes 52, 55 and 65 and the "Country Express" routes C and E. The Council suggests only an examination of lapsed funds from previous budget years as a potential source, but Department of Transportation Services Director Wayne Yoshioka said these funds are always rolled into the next year’s budget and are already spoken for. So no help there.
The second resolution, to suspend a city policy limiting how much taxpayers can subsidize the operation, seeks to allow the city to avoid fare increases. Instead, the Council should be part of a larger discussion on how to rebalance revenues that are needed to support a reliable bus service.
Some of the changes implemented and proposed (detailed maps are viewable online at www1.honolulu.gov/dts) make sense, breaking off lesser-used routes into circulator services, realigning others to respond to a greater demand. The move to add more articulated buses to right-size some routes curtailed during the middays should be fully adopted.
Critics are right to point out that excessive cuts create a false savings. If service becomes so poor or inconvenient to be impractical, then many people will abandon TheBus, defeating the whole purpose of public transportation. But the city needs to re-evaluate its revenue sources, including senior passes, monthly passes and the individual fares on TheBus, in addition to its HandiVan charges.
It’s an unpopular step to take during an election year, no doubt. But if city officials are serious about reinforcing the bus service to make it both truly useful and sustainable, simply reinstating an unaffordable operation and pricing scheme is not the answer.
