It would cost $2.5 million to return TheBus service to what it was before the city began imposing cuts earlier this year, but routes could not be restored until March 2013 even if money were available, according to Wayne Yoshioka, director of the city Department of Transportation Services.

Yoshioka told the City Council Budget Committee Wednesday that the city doesn’t have the money to restore service, and predicted months of delays even if there was money because Oahu Transit Services has been reducing the number of drivers on its payroll.

OTS, which contracts with the city to operate TheBus, has not been replacing drivers who retire or leave for other reasons, and no longer has a full complement of drivers to staff all of the original routes and bus runs, Yoshioka said.

Yoshioka told the Council the unpopular bus cuts and route changes imposed on June 3 and Aug. 18 were designed to save the city $6 million to $7 million.

Councilman Romy Cachola said the Council has been "battered" by complaints from the public about TheBus cuts, but said Mayor Peter Carlisle’s administration seems closed to the idea of restoring service.

"If the residents and the bus riders are really crying and chewing us out, and we are the representatives of the people in this district, and we’re getting an earful, we need to find ways to resolve it, but we cannot resolve it by ourselves unless the administration is willing to meet us halfway," Cachola said.

"Don’t be hard-nosed about the whole thing," Cachola told Yoshioka.

Budget Chairwoman Ann Kobayashi said she will be "busy" looking for other places in the budget to make cuts so that service can be restored.

Council Chairman Ernie Martin said the amount of money that the Carlisle administration needs to restore bus service is "not insurmountable."

Martin said the city may be able to delay hiring some workers in other departments until the last few months of this fiscal year to save on salaries, and told Kobayashi she can find money for TheBus by using her "sharp knife" on other parts of the budget

"Frankly I would have been shocked here today if the administration had come forward and said, ‘Of course we can find the $6 million to $7 million,’" Martin said. "Then, of course, they would look ridiculous to the general public for imposing these cuts to begin with."

Some of the bus changes affect how often buses travel along their routes, while others shifted routes to different streets, or ended routes at different locations.

Yoshioka stressed that the route and schedule changes had little impact on bus service during peak travel times, but has acknowledged that the changes reduced the number of seats available to riders, and led to buses being more crowded.

The city has made adjustments in response to feedback from transit riders, but some still complain that drivers have left them standing at stops when buses are too full to accept any more passengers. The bus changes have prompted hundreds of complaints to the city this summer.

Kapahulu resident Rose Pou said the bus changes have been especially hard on elderly passengers "because there’s no seats, there’s too many elderly on one bus. They’ve got to get the buses back to normal where the elderly can have seats."

Pou said she has been telling disabled seniors to abandon TheBus and request the more expensive door-to-door city service from TheHandi-Van. But that could present new problems for the city because demand for Handi-Van rides has been growing, and the vans cost more to operate per passenger than TheBus.

"They don’t want to, but they’re going to have to, Pou said of the shift to Handi-Vans. "They’re going to have to go down to get their Handi-Van passes just because the bus has changed, and there’s not enough Handi-Vans as it is."

Yoshioka told reporters after the meeting that it might be possible to restore the bus routes as early as December, but that would require that the Council boost the budget for TheBus by $6 million to $7 million.

"We’re dealing with the budget that we’ve been assigned to do," he said. "If this is the budget we have to operate under, we’ll make it work, and we’ll try our best to accommodate our riders."

He said he is a bus rider himself and understands some riders’ unhappiness with crowding or less frequent service. "That’s a frustration to a bus rider, I understand that, I experience that myself, but I think it’s something we have to do to live within our means if that’s what we’re given as our constraint on the budget."