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Express bus was
fast and efficient
-- riders want it back

We are writing to correct a number of misstatements made by James Burke, acting director of the city's Public Transit Division, in the Star-Bulletin's Aug. 17 article on community efforts to reopen the E express bus route from Aala Park to Waikiki.

If you count waiting time as well as travel time, the E was faster, not slower, than the other Waikiki-to-downtown bus routes. The travel time of the B route may be shorter than the E route, but the B's wait times are much longer. The E's limited stops and frequent service made it the fastest of any bus running between downtown and Waikiki.

It is not true that the E service was duplicative of other routes. For instance, the E stopped at Aloha Tower Marketplace, right in front of the Hawaii Maritime Center -- but none of the other Waikiki buses stop there. And the E was the only bus to run through Kakaako makai of Ala Moana Boulevard (by Kakaako Waterfront Park, the Children's Discovery Center and the new medical school complex); the Route 65 bus has now been rerouted through that area, but it only runs once an hour (as opposed to the E's every 5-10 minutes), and it does not go to Waikiki.

The E also was the only bus from Waikiki to serve the Ward Entertainment Center and neighboring shops and restaurants. And there are many other points of difference between the E and the other Waikiki lines.

To say that the E added to congestion on other routes is absurd. More buses do not lead to more crowding: More buses equal less crowding. Overcrowded buses on Routes 8, 19 and 20 have been passing up waiting riders at bus stops in Waikiki for at least the last 15 years; the E alleviated that problem to some degree. But now that the E is no longer running, it's happening again.

Although the city's director of Transportation Services promised, in a Feb. 18 letter to the editor of your newspaper, that the city would "give the public an opportunity to comment" before the E route was discontinued, no such opportunity was offered. According to documents recently obtained from the city's Public Transit Division (through a government records request by the Save the E Bus Coalition), a 10-minute "public hearing" was held on March 28. But the only "public notice" of the hearing was a handful of letters sent to less than a dozen citizens who had written to the mayor regarding the E bus.

The records produced by the Public Transit Division reveal that this lack of public notice was in violation of the Department of Transportation Services' own policy, which calls for press releases, distribution of fliers on buses and at bus stops, direct mailings to area residents and purchased advertisements, as well as posted notices and community outreach.

Perhaps the city officials failed to provide the public with the opportunity to comment on the E's discontinuation because they were afraid of what they would hear. But who knows better than bus riders whether a bus route is successful? Do government officials with parking spaces in the municipal complex really think they know better than the people who actually use TheBus?

It's time for TheBus to start listening to its customers: We want the E express route back.

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