The City and County of Honolulu has used $3 million of federal funding to sanitize TheBus during the pandemic.
Despite those efforts, more than seventy employees who worked with the bus system contracted COVID-19. Three employees died.
There are no reported cases of passengers contracting COVID-19 from using public transportation.
Roger Morton is the Director of the Department of Transportation Services at the City and County of Honolulu. He states, "As things continued into March, our ridership dropped from around 200,000 riders a day to about 50,000 riders a day in the course of two weeks."
"Responding to that, we realized we have tremendous importance to get our essential workers to work, and we continued operating every day since then," Morton says.
Currently, TheBus has been able to return to 55% of its pre-pandemic ridership.
