Hilo, Hawaii, Dec. 13 >> One fading segment of free enterprise on the Big Island is watching with some anxiety moves to extend free school bus transportation.
It is the sampan bus industry, the drivers of which count transportation of school children as their bread and butter.
If … free transportation is provided for pupils living as close as 1-1/2 or 2 miles from school and extended to kindergarten and high school grades, it could further decimate the ranks of the sampan drivers or even take them off the streets of Hilo, according to Tsuneo Takemoto, County bus control director.
For the number of drivers has dwindled from 76 to 19 in the 14 years since the Country Bus Control Committee brought some order into the strictly free enterprising sampan bus operation.
And while the sampans have survived tidal waves and even the State’s new Motor Carrier Act, any substantial reduction in the school business would inflict grievous injury on the remaining drivers.
Takemoto estimates pupil transportation accounts for as much as
70 per cent of the sampans’ business now.
Like their brothers in Honolulu, Los Angeles and nearly all major cities — the municipal bus systems — the sampans started to come on hard times with the mushrooming of private cars and better highways after World War II. They have in common, too, the problem of rising costs and, to a lesser extent, competition in U-drives.
While hotel and Hawaii Visitors Bureau literature still features text and pictures of the sampan bus fleet, the drivers get very little tourist business any more. … Most of their regulars, besides the school children, are the older folk who never owned a car. …
The original sampans plied between the old Hilo wharf and the downtown area. Nobody recalls how they happened to be named sampans, or where the design originated, but Takemoto said one oldtimer once told him he got the idea from a magazine illustration of a Mexican jitney bus. …
The fleet picks up a little charter business, although this is curtailed by P.U.C. regulations limiting sampans to a 20-mile radius of Hilo.
