This simple bar chart shows the amount of buses operating in Oahu over time. As we can see the number of buses serving Oahu has not changed much since bus service was first introduced. While this is not a comprehensive analysis it would appear that the level of service for TheBus has gone down or at least not increased over time since area that TheBus serves has only increased. It would be nice to do an analysis that would include historical coverage areas and bus routes.
One way to increase bus service quality without an increase in funding is by increasing frequency on core routes, hopefully getting some routes to every 10 minutes, then riders generally do not need to plan their trip around the bus schedule because missing a single bus is not a huge issue. Where if the bus only comes every 30 minutes (which is many routes on Oahu) then the rider may want to get to the bus stop up to 10 minutes ahead of time, in case the bus is early!
Data source, DBEDT Data Book:
- 1989-1992: http://files.hawaii.gov/dbedt/economic/databook/db2000/sec18.pdf
- 1993-2013: http://files.hawaii.gov/dbedt/economic/databook/2013-individual/18/182513.xls
Why the 2013 version doesn't retain the data from 1989-1992 is a mystery to me. Also some of the numbers that overlap (1993-1999) don't agree with each other. I've assumed that the 2013 version is more accurate.