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Gathering Place
‘Ilima Smallwood |
Maui’s working class
needs good bus serviceAs a member of the Maui community I find it both appalling and humiliating that we do not have a public transportation system. Hawaii has more vehicles per capita than any other state. With our world leaders fighting over oil and hundreds upon hundreds of world citizens dying over it, don't you think we have a responsibility to act a little more accountably for our use and waste of this precious material?
As a society we don't have more cars than the rest of our country because we're natural grease monkeys; we have them because we need them, because we cannot participate in this community any other way. This is not a cheap place to live; it costs me more to live here than it did to live in Manhattan three years ago, not to mention the fact that wages are less competitive and jobs scarcer. Add to that the expense of owning a car and the highest gas prices in the country and it's a miracle anyone in the working class makes it here at all.
Maui's bus service isn't failing because it's not needed; it's failing because it's not adequately serving the people who need it -- the working class. Assuming I have to travel from Kihei to Kahului for work Monday through Friday, let's look at my choices.
>> By bus: It costs $10/day to get to work and back, and takes about 45 minutes to an hour to get there and the same to get home. That's $200/month and 32-40 hours commuting time.
>> By car: It takes about 40 minutes roundtrip. Assuming you make payments, your car will probably cost you between $150-200/month, insurance will be at least $70/month and gas about $20-$30/week. That's about 14 hours a month commuting time at about $340.
For this extra $35/week in expenses I have just gotten an extra full day's time for my own leisure, the freedom of coming and going on my own schedule (no waiting for buses), the ability to go anywhere and the ability to travel outside my commute and get around on the weekends without added expense, except a little gas. What choice would you make if you had to choose?
The bus service that has been in place the last couple of years has not served the working class, it has served the tourism industry. For a transportation system to work it must get people where they need to go efficiently and reliably. If it only gets you halfway there or takes three times longer to get you to your destination, it's useless. Right now the bus doesn't serve the north shore/upcountry communities at all, and there's no direct line from Kahului to Kihei, the two largest urban areas in central Maui and the ones most often travelled between by residents.
This problem needs to be studied and a workable resolution must be found. We need to sit down, look at a map alongside our community demographics and answer the question, where must this route go, what must the frequency of buses be and what cost is feasible to enable 25 percent (or more) of our working population to get rid of their cars? It's not really too difficult a question. It seems to me the problem is we just haven't been asking the right one. Our island economy relies on tourism; do you think people are going to be eager to come back when the first thing they do upon leaving the airport is sit in traffic for an hour?
I have been told by peers considering leaving the island that lack of transportation is one of the major motivating forces. We have a major brain drain on Maui, and if we don't take steps to curb it our community at large will suffer from the imbalance. Let's not wait until the problem is any more compounded. With an efficient bus system we could better the environment, relieve traffic congestion, lessen our dependence on oil (especially if the buses were bio-diesel), and open up both job and retail markets now isolated from one another.
Mayor Arakawa is right, throwing $500,000 into a system that clearly isn't working (as the county council has approved) would be a mistake, but abandoning the public transportation efforts would be an even bigger mistake. Maybe that money could be better spent doing a thorough community study and developing a transportation plan that would really work.
'Ilima Smallwood lives on Maui.