To the Maui County Council:

Re: Testimony Concerning the Maui County Budget, Especially in Matters Pertaining to Maui Bus.

I call on the Maui County Council to reject the proposed Maui Bus fare hikes, and, instead, to disseminate more information about the proposal via postings in Maui Bus vehicles; and also to hold open and well-publicized public hearings on fares and other Maui Bus issues once this information has had time to circulate throughout the community.

Many Maui Bus riders now believe that the Council, the Mayor, and the Maui County Department of Transportation (MDOT) have been sneakily conspiring to enact fare hikes of up to 400% behind our backs, trying to make them a done deal before we even find out higher fares are being considered.

Bus patrons first learned of the proposed fare increases, scheduled to take effect on July 1st, by reading about them in the newspaper ("Council Eyes New Bus Fares", Maui News, May 14, 2012).  No announcements of the fare restructuring proposal, or of the public's opportunity to give testimony at any phase of the budget process, were ever posted in any Maui Bus vehicle, despite repeated calls to MDOT requesting this be done.  To the best of my knowledge no notices of this sort whatsoever have ever been posted on Maui Bus buses, in any budget year since the inception of Maui Bus until well after final fare decisions had already been made.

The elimination of the $1 per boarding fare and the hike in the price of the day pass from $2 to $5 means a 400% increase in cost for the rider who only boards once in a day, and a 150% increase for day pass users.  While it is true that monthly passes for those 55 and over will decrease 17% from $30 to $25, student passes will be held at $30, and as Maui Bus remains one of the very few transit systems in the US that does not offer a fare discount to the disabled, those with disabilities will continue to pay general boarding rate of $45.

The magnitude of the proposed fare increases is huge: The cost to the rider who pays on a daily basis will more than double, at the very least. If increases this big are truly necessary, Maui's bus riders might have found them acceptable (although distasteful) had we first been engaged in a campaign inviting our participation by dispensing information and asking for our input.  But this furtive behavior - coming as it does within the context of recent revelations of the Council's squandering of taxpayers' money by handing out generous bonuses to staffers ("Councilors Continue to Dole Out Bonuses", Maui News, May 17, 2012)  during this time of unparalleled economic distress when so many of us have been forced to accept substantial pay cuts just to keep our jobs - leaves us skeptical.  And Maui Bus drivers also say they haven't had a raise since service began some five years ago.

Many of the riders who will be most affected are students and other people of very low income.  A County Council truly responsible to the needs of the people would first cancel these scandalous bonuses before asking our poorest citizens to dig deeper into their already threadbare pockets.

The proposed fare plan suffers from numerous shortcomings that are a “no-brainer” to anyone who actually uses the bus system. It is all too apparent from this proposal that the people deciding upon the future of the bus system never actually ride on Maui Bus.

For starters, the elimination of the $1 single boarding fare will greatly increase the number of people purchasing day pases, which each driver writes out by hand, adding to their workload, and necessitating schedule changes.  Perhaps the Council has forgotten the huge debacle caused by the poorly-thought-out introduction of the day passes two Januarys ago, but the riders still have not forgotten the complete disruptions of their lives brought on by this ill-considered decision by the Council and the Mayor, which was made without consulting the ridership: The extra time it took to write out passes could not be accommodated by already tight schedules, and buses ran as much as two hours behind schedule (“Tardiness Snarls Kihei Buses”, Maui News, January 28, 2011).  Riders could no longer rely upon the bus schedules to plan their trips; commuters missed their connections, consequently taking as long as two or three hours extra in each direction to get to and from work!  People's lives were completely disrupted for several weeks, and in the end the schedule changes that came about added a full 30 minutes to the commute between Wailuku and the southern half of Kihei (“County’s Busiest Bus Route Sees Some Changes to Lessen Delays”, Maui News, February 4, 2011).

Another absurd consequence of eliminating the $1 per boarding fare is that it removes the economic incentive for an individual to practice the healthy behavior of taking the bus in one direction and walking in the other. With Maui County's already astronomical rates of obesity, diabetes, and other serious and very costly health problems made worse by insufficient exercise, it makes no economic sense to remove such incentives, no matter how slight they may be.

These new changes will also mean that everyone who rides the bus will now be carrying a flimsy paper fare token of some kind, and, as presently designed these do not hold up well in the water, resulting in deterioration of the passes to the point where they become illegible or appear to have been altered, and are therefore rendered void.  So, every time I go to the beach I am faced with the choice of leaving my pass on the sand with the risk that it might get stolen or blow away, or bringing it into the water with the near certainty that it will be rejected - and, possibly, confiscated - by the next bus driver who looks at it.

Finally, to the continuing shame of the people of Maui County, and despite longstanding calls from disability advocates, the proposed fare restructuring still will not address or correct the scandalous fact that Maui Bus is one of the very few public transit systems in the entire country that does not give a disability discount.  

Maui County’s government, seemingly as a matter of policy, has continued to refuse to directly inform riders, via in bus postings, of proposed changes ahead of time ("County Needs to Post Bus Changes on Buses", Letter to the Editor, Maui News, July 17, 2009), and has consistently failed to consult the ridership beforehand about the potential effects of such changes ("VIEWPOINT: Riders Know Best About Problems Caused by Changes in Bus Procedures", Maui News, July 10, 2009), despite these and other clear calls for change and more openness going back to July, 2009 and even earlier.

And even though the Maui County Council scheduled a series of single-focus special public hearings on such budget matters as vehicle weight taxes and real property taxes ("Council to Hold Series of Public Hearings on Budget", Maui News, May 19, 2012), no widely-publicized budget process public hearings focusing specifically on Maui Bus matters have ever been held.

So great is the determination to suppress public conversation about these matters that persons distributing information about the fare restructuring proposal and these present hearings at the Maui Bus Transit Hub at Queen Ka'ahumanu Center on May 21, 2012, were immediately ordered by Queen Ka'ahumanu Center security, under threat of arrest, to stop handing out flyers on "private property", and to leave the premises immediately.  Those participating had previously asked MDOT to provide them with an area at the Transit Hub where they could perform these First Amendment activities - even stating the particulars of the information they wished to distribute and why they felt a responsibility to fellow bus riders to do so - but MDOT refused to cooperate, stating that the Transit Hub was on "private property".  My understanding is that one has a Constitutional right to perform such free speech activities at a public transit facility, even if it is on private property over which an easement has been granted, while it is being used for public transit purposes.  In the end, under threat of lawsuit, the leafleting continued and no arrests were made.

I urge the Maui County Council, in the very strongest terms, to:

1. Pass a law requiring open and well-publicized public hearings, held at times and places accessible by Maui Bus, on Saturdays, during the day, so ordinary working people can come and give testimony without having to take off from work, before transit fares and policies can be changed. Stipulate that you must provide background information and give it to us at least one month in advance so we can study and discuss it before we meet. Make sure citizens will have three months' notice of any fare changes so we can plan our own household budgets. Write reasonable caps on the maximum amount of future fare increases into this law.

2. Pass a budget with NO BUS FARE INCREASES at this time.

3. Retain the $1 single boarding fare.

4. Exercise the leadership and oversight apparently needed to guarantee the Constitutional right of citizens to conduct transit-related First Amendment activities at all public transit hubs and other transit facilities open to the general public, whether they be on county land, leased property, private property easements, or elsewhere.  Apart from the need to protect the fundamental rights of citizens, this lack of understanding is an area of potential legal liability for the County, and must be addressed.

5. Immediately distribute full background information, and hold well-publicized public hearings to address any budget shortfalls with smaller, graduated increases, perhaps happening twice a year.

6. End Maui Bus's shameful “less than” treatment of the disabled. Extend the exact same fare discounts to seniors, students, and the disabled, as is the practice of virtually every other public transit system in the US. Extend these discounts to pay-as-you-go riders, as is also customary elsewhere, and not just to monthly pass holder. Most people who receive disability benefits struggle harder than the rest of us to make ends meet. The argument sometimes put forth that “not all the disabled need or want a break” insults my intelligence and shows a severe disconnect with reality.

7. Use Maui Bus yourselves for your own transportation needs so you will know what it is like to have to rely on the bus, and also so you can get to understand bus riders and our needs a little bit better. Publicly commit to riding Maui Bus to and from work for the whole month of September. This may seem like an unreasonable request, but this is exactly what many of Maui's citizens must do to get to school, work, medical appointments, and run errands, and you cannot possibly understand our needs if you haven't been through this experience. If you happen to fly in from another island, take the bus to and from the airport so you know what that is like for us. And if you live in a part of Maui County that has no bus service, perhaps you should try getting by for just one week without using a car.

8. Come up with a credible plan to increase the frequency of service, extend hours of operation, add more frequent stops to present routes, introduce new routes, expand the areas served, modulate the system's capacity to handle the deluge on cruise ship days, and give priority boarding to kama'aina who need to get to work or appointments when cruise ship traffic overwhelms the system.

9. Redesign all classes of fare passes to make them waterproof.

10. Cancel all announced staff bonuses and place a moratorium on new ones.

The current fare proposal is simply unacceptable to the people of Maui County. If our elected officials cannot come up with a better transit plan, then the people of Maui County will have no choice but to come up with better elected officials come November.