Bus system overhaul has riders crying ‘rail’

Two weeks into the city’s effort to adjust bus schedules and eliminate some routes to save millions of dollars in operating costs, some bus riders are fuming and suspicious.

In Waikiki, longtime bus rider Roger Van Cleve is threatening to go out and buy a car.

"If I don’t know what the bus schedules are, I can’t be out on a corner someplace waiting forever," said Van Cleve, 83. "This is all a setup to make us cry for rail."

In Palolo, 40-year-old artist Cory Kot said that today he can ride a single bus to get downtown, but bus changes scheduled to take effect in August will require him to transfer to make the same trip.

Kot questioned why TheBus management is suddenly so intent on imposing budget cuts that require Kot to wait longer at bus stops when the city is preparing to spend a whopping $5.27 billion on a new rail transit system.

"To me, it’s insane," Kot said. "It’s going to affect ridership, is what I predict."

City bus drivers say they are receiving dozens of complaints from riders, particularly from hotel employees who used bus Route B to get in and out of Waikiki for work. The city eliminated Route B, requiring riders to shift to often-crowded Route 2 buses.

Some drivers say it appears fewer elderly people are riding TheBus in the wake of the changes, but the city says it is too soon to tell if the changes are actually affecting ridership.

Underlying many bus rider complaints is a nagging suspicion the bus changes are somehow related to rail.

Wayne Yoshioka, director of the city Department of Transportation Services, said the bus changes have nothing to do with the 20-mile rail project now under construction in Kapolei. The city would have taken steps to control bus costs even without the rail project, he said.

However, the Federal Transit Administration did warn the city in December that Honolulu needs to show how it will contain the growing cost of TheBus and TheHandi-Van service before the FTA will commit to federal funding for the rail system.

The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation is now in the final stages of preparing an application for a full funding grant agreement the city hopes will secure $1.55 billion in federal funds for the rail project.

The cost of the TheBus and TheHandi-Van systems has been scrutinized by the FTA because city taxpayers will have to subsidize both the bus and rail systems once rail begins operations in 2015.

Earlier this year, an FTA consultant estimated that adding the rail system will require a 54 percent increase in the annual subsidy Honolulu taxpayers provide for the overall transit system. The federal government wants to be sure the city can afford the extra cost of rail subsidies.

It is politically risky to change or reduce bus or any other basic city service in an election year, but Yoshioka said the city had to make the potentially unpopular adjustments in TheBus service now to control the growth in transit costs.

City officials feared an outcry in the wake of the changes, and so far the Department of Transportation Services has recorded 340 comments or complaints about the bus changes. Most comments focused on changes to:

» Route 55, which now ends at Wahiawa Transit Center,

» Route 65, which serves Ahuimanu via Kahekili Highway with Heeia service discontinued, and

» Route E, which now ends downtown instead of in Waikiki.

"We have put a high priority on fine-tuning these routes," Yoshioka said.

The first batch of changes was made June 3, with the next round scheduled for August. Some changes affect how often buses travel along their routes, while others involve adjustments of routes that operate on different streets or end at different locations.

The idea was to reconfigure bus routes to make the system more efficient, which meant that some areas will receive less service and some more, Yoshioka said.

"If we were running a bus that was less than full, we were trying to (reorganize) the system so that we don’t do that," he said. "Of course, what that means is the buses are going to be running fuller than they have in the past. Some people don’t like that."

The changes are expected to save $6 million to $7 million a year by adjusting 21 bus routes. Even with those savings, the city expects that fuel costs for bus service will increase by about $3 million in the year ahead.

City policy requires that fares paid by riders cover between 27 percent and 33 percent of the cost of operating TheBus, with city taxpayers subsidizing the system by paying most of the rest of the cost. That taxpayer subsidy for TheBus operations will be about $135 million in fiscal year 2013.

Recent increases in labor and fuel costs are making it more expensive to operate the bus, Yoshioka said, while city records show fare collections are projected to drop by $1.4 million in the year ahead.

The increasing bus costs and declining fare collections mean fares will cover less than 27 percent of TheBus operations next year unless something is done, Yoshioka said.

The department was unwilling to increase the share of TheBus budget that is covered by taxpayer subsidies, Yoshioka said. Increasing bus fares was another possibility, but a fare increase is not a popular option, he said.

"If we are going to hold the line on bus fares as people have been asking us to do, the only other option to us is to try to manage our projected increase in expenses," Yoshioka said.

The recent changes should not affect the bus system capacity during peak hours, when buses were generally already full, he said.

However, the bus system changes imposed on June 3 reduced the overall number of available bus seats on weekdays by about 3,400, with about half of that amount caused by the elimination of Route 231 in Hawaii Kai. Very few riders used that route, Yoshioka said.

The impact on weekends was greater, with the overall number of available bus seats reduced by about 10,700 seats on Saturdays and about 9,500 on Sundays, according to city statistics.

Yoshioka said the recent changes caused some routes to become much more crowded than the city had intended, and transit officials are re-evaluating the system to determine what further adjustments might be needed.

While the city says the recent bus service changes are not related to rail, bus planning and future operations of the bus and rail systems are intertwined.

For example, the consolidation of Route B and Route 2 is one of an array of bus revisions planned years ago to complement rail. The consolidation June 3 was described in the 2010 rail environmental impact statement.

The bus system changes were also developed in part from recommendations in the city’s Short Range Transit Plan. One of the goals of that plan is to begin making early adjustments to Oahu’s transit system so it will mesh with the rail line.

The new rail line will require a complete overhaul of the bus system, with the city eliminating 19 existing bus routes that will be replaced by rail, according to the rail EIS.

At the same time, the city intends to establish many more new bus routes to better serve rural areas such as Windward Oahu, the North Shore and Waianae that have been asking for better service for years, Yoshioka said.

That overhaul of bus service to complement rail will happen before the new 20-mile rail line is completed and open in 2019, but the city recognizes the transition won’t be easy.

NelsonNygaard Consulting Associates, which helped the city develop the Short Range Transit Plan, warned in a 2010 report that the bus service adjustments needed to provide transportation links to rail "will change the daily habits of thousands of people."

"Many trips that are served by one-seat rides today will, in the future, require one or two transfers to reach the final destination," the consultants warned in a 2010 transit report.

Actual travel times may be reduced even with the extra transfers, but "the perception that the system provides a lower level of service will be commonplace," the report said. "This change has been experienced in many high-capacity network introductions throughout the US. It is not new or unique to Honolulu."

In the meantime, the current round of bus changes has angered bus users such as Gene Spurgeon, 52, who commutes to his job as night manager of a Waikiki coffee shop.

Spurgeon said his 55-minute bus commute from Ewa Beach has become an ordeal of 21⁄2 hours each way, which includes time spent at bus stops waiting for two or three transfers.

Faced with the prospect of a five-hour round-trip bus commute each day, Spurgeon said he went out and bought a car.

"Now I spend $450 a month on gas, which is a shame because the whole object of the bus is to keep people off the road and keep traffic off the freeway, right?" he asked. "It was too much frustration. It’s horrible. If I ride the bus for five hours, I don’t have that much time to sleep."

Employees at the coffee shop are suddenly coming in late because they can’t get a bus when they need one, and Spurgeon blames Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle.

"I don’t know why the mayor would let this go on when he’s supposed to be the one who’s protecting us," Spurgeon said. "He’s not doing a very good job."

A spokesman for Carlisle did not respond for a request for comment, but Yoshioka said he does not know of any route that would see such a dramatic increase in travel time because of the recent bus changes. He offered to work with Spurgeon to see if a more efficient route could be identified.

"My sense is that most bus riders, while preferring no changes in service, understand the situation and are generally supportive," Yoshioka said.