Blog du Wren

Maui Transit Review

Never does everything go right on a trip. Every traveler knows that. But with some preparation, the number of hiccups tends to go down. This recent trip to Hawaii seemed to have more than its fair share of hiccups, at least from the get go, starting with a 6 hour plan delay that put us into Maui in the middle of the night, long after our hotel's shuttle stopped working forcing up to sleep in a homeless camp on the beach. But those things happen.

The big hiccup that altered our trip severly was one I never saw coming. We were quite rudely refused service on Maui Public Transit due to the size of our luggage(which I would have been happy to carry on my lap). So all the planning of figuring out the schedules/routes to get us to the frisbee tourney, to campsites, and back out to the airport was lost. I was stunned at the this rule and the rudeness with which it was enforced.

An inquiry to the transit agency after our trip was rather unhelpful as to ascertaining the reasoning behind such a limiting regulation. "The rules regarding luggage size are from City and County of Honolulu." I, personally, suspect that there is a more underhanded motivation behind the rule, to discourage tourists from using the service, instead pushing them to car rental to help boost the island's economy. Call me a cynic, I guess.

So where did that leave us, all transportation plans shot? At the whim of strangers, that's where. But luckily, we found quite a few friendly ones, specifically ones associated with the Maui Hat Draw frisbee tourney* who toted us out to tournament site and helped us find a nice campsite afterward. It also pushed us to the time-honored tradition of , something neither of us has done much but took too rather easily.

While in the end the trip turned out awesome despite the epic fail of the local transit agency, I can't help but have my faith in public transportation slightly shaken by the experience. If I can't believe in the bus, what can I believe in? Am I going to have to become a car-renting, gasoline-burning tourist like the rest of them? We'll see, I guess, as I've got another adventure just around the corner.

Thursday March 7 2013

File under: hawaii, transportation

Toggle Comments (2)

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on Mon 11th Mar, 2013 10:13 am CDT Horge said:
Interesting about the refusal. 2 weeks ago I was in Budapest and happened to notice a sticker there, handily written in English since Hungarian is a spaceman language*, saying you are limited to 2 or 3 bags a person. I can't remember if this was for the metro, bus or trolley, but it was the frst time I'd seen public transport trying to do that - not that I'd expect it to really be enforced in a place like Budapest. But then again, I wouldn't expect Hawaiians to be uptight about such a thing either...
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on Mon 11th Mar, 2013 10:14 am CDT Horge said:
*It literally is. I learned this trip that in "Blade Runner", the cyborgs' weird language is actually Hungarian, and that Yoda's speaking style apparently arose from having sentences translated into grammatical Hungarian, then translated literally back into English.
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