Rural commuters in Windward Oahu who rely on TheBus are getting some relief after enduring several years of scaled-back service, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll keep those gains in the long term.
Last week the city reduced the average weekday wait time for Route 55 — TheBus’ only line to run the length of the Windward side — to 35 minutes from 42, according to Oahu Transit Services President and General Manager Roger Morton.
That’s a big improvement from 2012, when Route 55 wait times spiked to an hour due to islandwide bus cuts — but it’s still not as convenient as the 32-minute wait time that passengers saw in 2011.
“It’s a start. We’re happy with a start. I’d love to see it every half-hour,” said Hauula resident KC Connors, a longtime advocate for better bus service on the Windward coast, as she waited for the bus Thursday in Kaneohe.
“We’d love to get the traffic down. We’d like to make the bus convenient and something that’s an option,” Connors said.
Earlier this year leaders in the communities farther up Kamehameha Highway told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that residents there reported losing jobs, missing college classes and facing other hardships because that isolated stretch of the island was underserved by TheBus.
“We went through a period there where it was traumatic for our students living out in that direction because it was cut back so dramatically,” Windward Community College Chancellor Doug Dykstra said Friday of the previous bus service levels.
When the city scaled back Route 55 service, the students coming from the North Shore and rural Windward areas started taking fewer credits, Dykstra said.
About 60 percent of the WCC student body attends classes part time, often because they also have to work, Dykstra added.
“For anyone living out that way, of course, it’s very important,” Dykstra said of TheBus. “If you’re on a 40- to 60-minute frequency out there, it’s forever.”
The city’s Department of Transportation Services said it was able to restore Route 55 wait times closer to their 2011 frequencies thanks to added budget dollars from the City Council for more service there. No other lines lost service so that Route 55 could be improved, according to acting DTS Director Mark Garrity.
Part of the challenge, according to Garrity’s predecessor, former DTS Director Michael Formby, is that reducing wait times for Route 55 is costlier than it would be for most other routes on the island. The approximately 60-mile route runs from Ala Moana Center to Haleiwa.
“We will continue to monitor the ridership demand on this route and make adjustments to the schedule as budgets allow,” Garrity said in an emailed statement Friday.
The Route 55 improvements are part of broader service and route changes across TheBus, according to Morton. They include Route 416, a new “circulator” route through Kapolei; and Route 99, a new peak-hour express route from Wahiawa to Kapolei.
Dykstra said he’s hopeful that Route 55 will see more riders with the new shorter waits — and that the city won’t scale back the service again. WCC is about to start Christmas break, so the ridership numbers should “tick up again” in January when school resumes, he said.
To review more recent changes to TheBus, visit thebus.org/updates/RouteChangeDecember2016.asp.
