With thousands of students and faculty headed back to the classroom this fall, the City and County of Honolulu has launched a campaign to share how the rail system, known as Skyline, can cut down on commute times.
The Skyline turned three this summer, and it’s proven to be more popular than ever with its routes connecting TheBus to the airport. The city is also planning to add more Biki Bikes to help beat traffic.
To learn more about how Honolulu’s public transportation plans are progressing, HPR spoke with Department of Transportation Director of Transit Jon Nouchi.
Interview Highlights
On celebrating the Skyline’s services
JON NOUCHI: Skyline had another birthday, and we are celebrating that milestone by making sure that everybody knows our best and worst-kept secret is that Skyline's a great way to get around. We wanted to make sure that — through that advertising and marketing — that people know all of their options. Through the local media, we've advertised Skyline time on the ticker that compares the current average travel times to popular destinations and popular origins and compared that to what the Skyline travel time is. Just so people always have it in their head that Skyline is always the same travel time, because Skyline's always on time. …
And we also wanted to compare it to the cost of owning or leasing and maintaining and licensing and having insurance, all the related costs for a car. When you compare that to an annual bus pass, the costs are vastly greater for the cost of ownership of a car versus having a transit pass for one month.
On other public transit progress
NOUCHI: We're celebrating other gains in our system right now across our multimodal system, which includes Skyline, TheBus, TheHandi-Van and Biki. There are a lot of things to talk about on each one of those. We're really happy with the high level of performance that Skyline's been seeing. I know we've had a couple of service outages due to the weather and things like that, and those things do happen, and we do apologize when that happens, but we're still achieving better on-time performance and availability than most global partners in the transit sphere. So that's a check in the positive box for Skyline. But on our bus side, we're actually seeing some gains there too. We recently brought in the first five of 20 new electric buses into our fleet. I had the privilege of being able to drive one back from the dock, and it was a great experience. And those vehicles are just so peppy. I mean, they're just quiet. They just feel nice there on the road. And I think not only our drivers will like them, but our passengers would like them. But moving on, we've actually brought on 18 more new Handi-Vans into our fleet. And probably of note for a lot of other people is that we have executed contracts to bring on board 600 new Biki bikes into our fleet to stabilize the system and refresh our assets there and rebuild the system up to a higher level of quality.
On adjusting to Hurricane Lala and power outages
NOUCHI: The hardest decision I had to make was choosing to cease transit service at 8:30 on Saturday. And what I am really proud of, though, is our partners, our operating partners at Oʻahu Transit Services, they did a lot of due diligence in sending our supervisory staff out, and if there was anybody waiting at bus stops, they either assisted them where they could or they notified them that the transit service was not going to operate until the next day. And I'm sure our services, people were disappointed, and you know, we missed an opportunity to provide dependable service for our riders in that sense. But we ceased for safety — for the safety of not only them, but for our system and for our bus operators. And we extend just a very sincere apology to those that were affected by that cessation of service. It's been a matter of weeks now and I still think about it and wonder how we would come to that decision in a more, in a less impactful way for our community.
On the need for a larger workforce
NOUCHI: Here’s the thing: our transit system in Honolulu … It's a place where you can not only have a job, but you can have a career. And we're trying to reach out to a lot of younger people, and just our population in general, to tell them about that. Like we keep giving out 50-year pins for 50 years of service to Oʻahu Transit Services. And that says something. That means it's a good place to work, and that you really can build a career. And I think we need to tell that story a little bit better and attract more people into a really fulfilling career of service.
This story aired on The Conversation on Sept. 1, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
