The City Council unanimously approved two resolutions Wednesday designed to encourage Mayor Peter Carlisle’s administration to reverse unpopular cuts of city bus service.

Another round of service changes and reductions are scheduled to take effect Sunday, but transit riders told the Council there are already too many people packed into too few buses.

Ewa Beach resident Geri Padilla, a desk clerk in a Waikiki hotel, presented the Council with a petition with 639 signatures urging the city to restore service on Route E Country Express and add bus capacity during peak hours.

"The buses are filled to capacity and people are packed like sardines," Padilla said during the meeting. "After a hard day’s work, it’s very hard for us, especially for people like me who work in the hotel industry."

Padilla and other bus riders have also complained that routes changed earlier this year make their commutes longer, and often require additional transfers.

"It takes five hours a day, two hours to go to work, and going back home is three hours," she said. "It’s no fun."

Kakaako resident Lois Bunin, 87, rides a scooter because she is disabled, but said she tries to ride TheBus instead of TheHandi-Van because she knows the city wants to reserve Handi-Van service for disabled people who have no other options.

But Bunin said bus service has become awfully uncomfortable since the city trimmed service on June 3.

"I see people every time I take a bus, fighting, trying to get on, buses are crowded, crammed, and people are cranky, and I don’t blame them," Bunin said.

Some of the June 3 bus changes affect how often buses travel along their routes, while others have routes on different streets or ending at different locations.

A spokeswoman for the Carlisle administration said the city is considering complaints from riders and adjusting routes to try to answer the riders’ concerns, and in July made fixes to a number of routes where service was reduced or changed in June.

City Managing Director Douglas Chin told the Council the Department of Transportation Services is seriously considering making additional changes, and that the city is looking for available money within the DTS budget and in other departments that could be used to restore service.

However, Chin told the Council the cost of fuel is increasing, and that it is too early in the new fiscal year to commit to a wholesale reversal of the cost-cutting revisions the city has been making in bus service.

One Council resolution approved Wednesday urges the Carlisle administration to restore TheBus service to what it was before the cuts took effect June 3.

A second resolution would allow the city to increase the taxpayer subsidy of the bus system to cover the budget shortfall that prompted the cuts.