Hele-On Bus is the public transport bus service provided by the County of Hawaiʻi on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, within the state of Hawaiʻi, United States. It serves a limited number of routes on limited frequency.
History
Prior to 1976, public transport in the Hilo area was provided by "sampan" buses converted locally from conventional passenger automobiles and operated as taxi or jitney services. The first "sampan" was credited to Hilo taxi driver Fukumatsu Kusumoto, who converted a Ford in 1922 by expanding the passenger compartment and installing wooden benches. Most sampans retained the passenger compartment from the back of the driver's seat forward; the remainder of the body was cut away and replaced with a homebuilt open-sided bed with a canvas roof, accommodating approximately twelve passengers on longitudinal benches. In Hawaiian, sampan buses are called kaa huli aku huli mai, the 'face one another' bus, after the bench seating arrangements. A 1971 article promoting tourism to the island called them "as anachronistic and beloved as San Francisco's cable cars."
In the late 1930s, sampan bus fares dropped from 15 cents to 5 cents as competition increased. The Board of Supervisors of the County of Hawaii created the Bus Control Committee in 1948 to regulate the sampan bus industry, and required all licensed operators to use the terminal in Mooheau Park starting in 1949. A law was passed in 1962 to exempt sampan buses from the vehicle safety laws introduced by the 1961 Motor Carriers Act; the sampan bus exemption remained until 2014, limited to a radius of centered on Hilo, when it was removed via HB2351/SB2901. At one point, there were more than 80 sampan buses in Hilo, but only 9 were left by 1972. The Lyman House Memorial Museum offered tours of Hilo starting in 1988, aboard a restored vintage 1948 Plymouth 13-passenger sampan bus, but it was sold to Hamakua Springs Country Farms proprietor Richard Ha in the early 2000s.
Origins
In 1968, the County Economic Development Department began considering whether to subsidize or assume control of the aging sampan fleet, concluding it would cost an estimated $95–100,000/year to operate five routes. At that point, the average sampan bus was 20 years old, operated by drivers averaging 58 years old earning a net income of only $1 to $1.25 per hour after expenses. Hawaii County Councilman James Souza sponsored a bill to create a County transportation agency in 1971, and the County was awarded a $31,616 federal grant that June to begin studying the area's transportation needs. The Hawaii County Transit System report was published in May 1972 and submitted to the County Council in September of that year.
The county transportation system was officially launched on November 29, 1973 with a bus that ran from Waiohinu to Hilo, after being championed by Hawaii County Councilman (and eventual County Mayor) Dante Carpenter. The new service was named "Hele On" after a Pidgin Hawaiian phrase meaning "to get out of here" or "to move along". Olan Carpenter, wife of Dante, came up with the name. The service's first logo was a blue circle with a tire track in the center and two bare, yellow feet on either side of the track, devised by Colleen Shimazu. In 1975, the Mass Transit Agency (MTA) bought out and shut down the sampan system, then began providing public transportation services for the County of Hawaii as the Hele-On Bus system. The County Council decided to solicit bids to operate the service as a performance-based contract, provided as a cost per bus-hour, in September 1975. The operation contract was initially awarded to Laupahoehoe Transportation Company.