Bus attracts
15% fewer riders
from a year agoThe city reports the post-strike
numbers are slowly growing
Four weeks after a crippling bus strike, bus ridership is still down from last year, but the number of people getting back on board is slowly creeping up, a city official said.
"It's going in the right direction," City Transportation Services Director Cheryl Soon said. "It's a steady clip in the right direction."
Buses began to roll again on Sept. 29 after a month-long strike by Oahu Transit Services Inc. employees represented by Teamsters and Allied Workers Local 996.
In the first post-strike week of service, the city offered free bus rides to lure riders back before new higher bus fares kicked in. Soon said ridership was down the first week about 21 percent from levels last year. Four weeks after the strike's end, ridership was down 15 percent.
"I think riders are coming back," Soon said. "That's very good."
Soon said preliminary numbers on Monday and Tuesday have the ridership loss this week at just under 14 percent.
Soon said it is hard to tell whether the ridership loss is the result of the strike or higher bus fares.
"I don't have any theories on it. It tracks what's happened in other cities when we've asked them what happened," Soon said.
Soon said that at some point in other cities that have had bus strikes, the ridership numbers began to flatten out, but that has not happened here yet.
Her department has gathered data that they will analyze to determine which segments of the riding public have not returned.
The city plans to start a campaign to get riders back riding the bus during the holiday season, encouraging them to use the bus to go Christmas shopping, Soon said.
