As a frequent bus rider, I was glad to see the city roll out a very reasonably-priced day pass good for unlimited travel on Honolulu buses.
That sounds like a pretty good deal.
As Hawaii News Now reported:
Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell signed a bill into law Friday that allows riders to buy a one-day pass, eliminating the need for passengers to get paper transfers from bus drivers.
“We have one of the most heavily used bus systems. We want to make it as easy and convenient for riders,” Caldwell said.
City officials hope to have the one-day pass available for purchase by October. They say it will make things a lot easier for both passengers and bus drivers, while addressing the fraud that currently happens with paper transfers.
City officials, including Mayor Caldwell, are pretty proud of it.
However, there are a few caveats.
Did you catch the October timeframe? Apparently it’s going to take eight months to get this puppy up and running.
And then, if I understand it correctly, it’s a day pass. Not to be confused with a 24-hour pass.
If you’re a visitor and happen to buy your pass in mid-afternoon to do a little sightseeing and later travel to a restaurant for dinner, your $5 would only get you 12-hours or so.
That’s because the passes will be good from midnight of the day of purchase through 3 a.m. of the following day.
Still a good deal, but…
My wife and I have been in Las Vegas the past few days. She’s attending the annual conference of the Western Society of Criminology, and I’m along for the ride. Yesterday I rode the bus from the Las Vegas Strip to downtown in order to find the Writer’s Block Bookstore.
The Las Vegas buses are operated by the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada. The RTC website says the buses carry about 64 million passengers each year. That’s just about the same ridership as Honolulu, which claims 68 million annual rides.
My 24-hour bus pass here in Las Vegas cost $8, so I paid a premium over what the day-pass in Honolulu is going to cost.
But my pass is actually good for 24 hours. I bought it just after 10 a.m. yesterday, and I can use it up to 10 a.m. today.
How do they do that? By using smart passes rather than the technologically-challenged dumb passes Honolulu will rely on. Paper passes for Las Vegas buses have a magnetic strip containing the data showing when it was purchased and when it will expire. When you get on a bus, you just swipe your pass through a reader on the fare box. It allows them to sell tickets of different durations using the same paper tickets. Most useful for visitors are the 2-hour, 24-hour, and three-day passes.
I bought my pass using the rideRTC smartphone app. The app can be downloaded for free, and provides route maps and schedules, fare information, and allows you to quickly buy one or more passes using a credit card. No fumbling for cash at the bus stop. And no getting shortchanged by a day-pass that might only be good for a few hours.
According to RTC:
rideRTC Features
• Buy and use your transit pass – Purchase an RTC transit pass from the convenience of your phone anywhere, anytime, and use it on board any route.
• Plan your trip – Plan your next trip using transit with detailed step-by-step information.
• Find your bus – Get arrival information about routes and bus stops near you and where you want to go.
• Customer assistance – Call RTC customer service directly from the app.
And signage at bus stops and on the buses warns riders they must purchase their tickets before getting on the bus, eliminating most of the delays in boarding.
Oh, one more thing. The Ambassadors.
At the stop when I first boarded the bus outside Meda’s conference hotel, there was a man in a blue shirt identifying him as an RTC Ambassador, as in this photo (the picture was actually taken on my return from downtown). He walked among passengers waiting at the bus stop offering information, bus riding tips, schedules, and more. Extremely helpful for visitors, and most riders in this area were visitors. And after I visited the bookstore, returning with my bag of books, there was another ambassador making sure that visitors got launched properly back to the Strip.
That’s service.
And a final observation. When I visited the Regional Transit Commission’s website, I couldn’t help noticing that it provided quick and easy access to a schedule of meetings and agendas, not only for the commission but for its various committees.
“Meetings are open to the public and community participation is encouraged,” the website advises.
Committees include things like the Bus Shelter and Bench Advisory Committee, Arts in Transit Advisory Council, Specifications Subcommittee, Finance Committee, Evaluation Committee, and more.
That’s a different level of transparency and participation than we enjoy back home, isn’t it?
Bottom line. Yes, Honolulu’s new $5 day pass is a welcome move. But TheBus still has a long way to go.
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Yes, The Bus has a long way to go. So does Honolulu. Having been here for 53 years, it still feels like a backwater town when it come to so many issues from housing to municipal services and transparency in public affairs. But we do have world class weather ……..
“True” 24 hour passes. The “convenience” of purchasing online. The service of “paid” ambassadors working at bus stops. Those are all “nice” things to have…. mainly for the convenience of tourists. For the vast, VAST majority of bus riders who are local commuters, they don’t “need” any of that. Particularly if it means having to pay Las Vegas bus fares. $5 vs $8 for a daily pass. $60 vs $65 for a monthly. The price difference may seem trivial to you. But I’m pretty confident that if you took a poll of people waiting at bus stops, the majority will opt for having lower fares without all of the fancy schamnzy doo-dads.
The new $5 daily pass offers a simplification over the current paper transfers. That’s great. No need to overhaul and fix a whole bunch of other stuff that ain’t broken.
The downside to the new pass is that one-way riders just had their fares doubled.
Correction — I see that single rides will still be available for $2.50.
We moved to Hawaii from Japan. The bus system in Honolulu appeared so backward even in 1989 compared to what we found when we first arrived in Tokyo in 1972.
The buses near our home made change automatically. Drop the money in the top, scoop your change out of a pocket at the side. Honolulu buses still don’t make change.
There were buzzers everywhere, within easy reach of standees as well as those in seats. The buses were lower, so they even had push buttons in the ceilings of some buses. In Honolulu, it is hard for many people in aisle seats to reach the cords, and push buttons in some places are only beginning to appear.
No bus in Tokyo or elsewhere that I recall had a staircase inside the bus, but many Honolulu buses do. And before the stairs are very few seats so that older persons are forced to navigate stairs while the bus is moving. Bad!
Also, our signage at the bus stops, even when present, is insufficient. New York, Tokyo, Portland, other non-rural areas may even have bus maps, but for sure they indicate which buses stop there and the destinations. While more stops in Honolulu have bus numbers on them, it is comparatively recent and the information is incomplete. The signage is more like that found on country or rural routes on the Mainland. More than once tourists have asked me if a bus from a stop goes to Waikiki and I’ve had to tell them to go across the street, it’s the other direction.
And the air conditioning! It’s often freezing cold.
Finally for this rant, the poor suspensions of many buses that are allowed to remain in service. The rock-hard suspensions combined with Honolulu’s potholes provide a horrible ride.
There, I’ve dumped years of frustration into a single comment.
Tell me how you found the bus service in Vegas in comparison.
Oh… and the TheBus API for its GPS trackers fails so often that no app on a phone can be accurate. When they work, they’re a great help, and when they don’t, they can cost you a long, long wait since your bus was early and you didn’t know it.
Ok, now I’m done.
Good post, Larry. Thank you.
it would probably help Honolulu’s bus system if the anti-billboard, anti-outdoor ad zealots would ease up on their crusade when it comes to letting city buses and bus stops to be adorned with advertising. LV buses has ads on their buses/stops. So does Tokyo’s. Just an idea to help that would actually generate revenue that could help fund improvements. Beats just complaining about problems and expecting city leaders to produce something out of nothing.
Ian … The new one-day Honolulu pass will be good for 27 hours to accommodate workers with crazy hours.
On the flip side, I was bothered that this new policy eliminates all transfer slips, which affects one-way riders who need to transfer to get to their destination. They’ll now need to pay $5 for the one-day pass rather than $2.50 if they’re going one way and need to transfer.
City officials insist this is only a very small segment of their ridership. They also argue that eliminating transfers reduces the work of bus operators and eliminates abuse by folks who cheated by using transfers beyond a single destination. We’ll see what happens.
I agree with Gordon about the one-way riders who need to tranfer.
Another detail I haven’t seen mentioned yet is how and where to buy the one-day passes. It that’s not convenient, then the new system will really suck for one-way riders needing to make transfers who don’t have access to the locations to purchase the passes, especially if they need to take more than 2 buses to reach their destinations.
You still need the transfer if going one way. You’re forced to pay twice as much if you’re going from point a to point b and need 2 or 3 different buses to get there.