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Check Your Pits Before Riding The Bus in Honolulu

Written By Allen - September 5th, 2009
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If you are planning to ride the bus in Honolulu, you better make sure you put on another coat of deodorant. And forget about getting some stinky food in a to-go carton. Gordon Pang of the Honolulu Advertiser is reporting that:

The City Council is considering a bill that will make it illegal to “bring onto transit property odors that unreasonably disturb others or interfere with their use of the transit system, whether such odors arise from one’s person, clothes, articles, accompanying animal or any other source.”

Councilman Rod Tam, a co-sponsor of the bill, explained why it is needed:

“As we become more inundated with people from all over the world, their way of taking care of their health is different. Some people, quite frankly, do not take a bath every day and therefore they may be offensive in terms of their odor.”

I like that part – “some people do not take a bath everyday” – maybe Mr. Tam should come to NYC or San Francisco or any city on the mainland. Tam took the language for his bill from the Seattle transportation system.

Over 400 people have left comments on the post on the Honolulu Advertiser and I’ve seen thousands of comments on other posts about this proposed idea.

Under the bill, a person found in violation may be ordered to leave transit property and issued a summons or citation by a police officer. If convicted, a person could be fined up to $500, spend up to six months in jail, or be both fined and jailed. Could you imagine being jailed for smelling on the bus? What do you tell your celly?

The ACLU is now concerned with this smelly bill.

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  • Scoop
    So you think everyone should ride mass transit but you oppose laws that might actually boost ridership -- and provide much-needed help to seriously helpless individuals?

    Public transit, as the name implies, is public space, and people who use it must rightfully restrain themselves for the comfort of their fellow riders. Justice compels society to penalize littering, screaming, grifting and otherwise menacing people. Not only should such prohibitions exist, they should be far better enforced than they are now.

    Laws against smelling are different. Your post here portrays them as a snare for unsuspecting exercisers or manual laborers. But obviously they are no such thing. They are a tool for managing the homeless, who are the only folks who really, really stink.

    The fine, thus, is basically meaningless. The threat of jail is merely a tool designed to allow cities to force seriously sick people to accept some of the care they so desperately need.

    This is not a ploy to harass the homeless -- note that two of the nation's most liberal cities are the ones mentioned in this article -- it is a device to try to undo some of the tremendous harm we did to truly vulnerable people when we "deinstitutionalized" them back in the 1970s.

    If you seriously believe that normal people who happen to smell a bit will get fined under this law, you are insane.

    If you were joking about regular people but oppose this because the homeless are happy being "free" to pick food out of trashcans and talk to the voices in their heads, you are even more naive than many of your posts suggest.

    And if you think either that people have a God-given right to act as badly as they want on public transit -- or that better policing of behavior wouldn't seriously increase ridership -- then you are hurting the cause that you profess to support.
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