[ OUR OPINION ]
Bus strike
presents challenge,
opportunity for citySOON after 1,400 Teamsters Union members began Honolulu's first bus strike in more than 30 years yesterday, Oahu Transit Services posted on its TheBus Web site the following notice: "For information, please consult the news media." The advice was sound, because information on the bus company's site and on city government sites was woefully inadequate in helping regular bus riders find other ways to get to school or work.
THE ISSUE
City officials and Honolulu commuters alike tried to deal with the first day of a bus strike.City officials performed admirably in surveying city employees in the days and weeks prior to the strike to find out who would need rides and encouraging companies to do the same. The result was an extensive use of carpooling on the first day of the strike. "People are getting in to work and school and there's no sense of the system breaking down," Cheryl Soon, director of the city Department of Transportation Services, reported at mid-morning yesterday.
Soon's department also provided a great deal of useful information for regular bus riders to the Star-Bulletin and other media, and we were pleased to provide it on our pages and over the Internet. Much of that information, including details about jitney service planned by taxi cabs along eight bus routes, was not made available on the city's Internet pages.
The department's Web site purportedly devoted to strike-related information cites three meeting points for bikers. It also has links to the Leeward Oahu Transportation Management Association, the state's Rideshare program and Vanpool Hawaii, all of which contain no information about strike contingencies, and to the Hawaii Chamber of Commerce, where members were invited to join a pre-strike survey on whether their companies would be greatly affected, somewhat affected or not affected at all by a strike.
TheBus's Web site provides large amounts of information about its negotiating position in contract talks with the union. The site refers viewers to the city's Department of Customer Services as "the official focal point for the dissemination of information to the public concerning information about a bus strike." Wrong. That department's site contains no information related to the strike.
The city has earned much praise for its Web site since its refurbishment three years ago enabling residents to make various transactions for city services over the Internet. It was expanded last year to include maps of available commercial and industrial real estate properties to attract more businesses to open offices in Honolulu.
Those efforts have shown that the city can provide citizens with extensive information on the Internet in text and map form along with interactive capabilities that could be used for carpooling arrangements. City officials are making information about dealing with the strike available to the media, but they are missing an opportunity to put the city's Web site to the test.
