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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, March 3, 2003

Bus lost-and-found center overflows

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Transportation Writer

Every day, people leave things on the bus. Commonplace things like umbrellas and backpacks. Important things like passports, airline tickets and wallets. Unbelievable things like dentures and neon signs.

Leila Keawe-Aiko, a bus-pass sales representative who oversees the O'ahu Transit Services' lost-and-found center, shows off a drawer full of wallets that have been turned in by bus drivers. The center holds on to lost wallets for a month.

Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser

"Fortunately, we're really honest in Hawai'i. If you lose something, it probably will end up here," says Leila Keawe-Aiko, a sales representative who presides over a wonderland of things gone missing at O'ahu Transit Services' lost-and-found center on Middle Street.

All day, all night, lost objects show up on city buses, left behind by some of the 240,000 daily riders on 86 routes.

In Keawe-Aiko's office, there's a metal desk drawer full of wallets, from expensive leather billfolds to surfers' models that close with Velcro. There's a drawer-sized basket filled just with sunglasses, including expensive ones made by Oakley and Maui Jim. Another drawer overflows with electronic gear.

"You want to see cell phone heaven? Here it is," says Keawe-Aiko, pulling open a desk space stuffed with telephones, Walkmans, digital cameras, CD players and Gameboys.

And that's just the stuff from the past 30 days. OTS doesn't have room to hold lost-and-found items any longer than that.

Each item found on a city bus, either by a driver or an honest passenger, is carefully tagged with information about time, date, location and route number and sent to the office.

From there, Keawe-Aiko goes to work, trying to reunite the lost goods with their owners. Sometimes people call in a panic, recognizing their mistake in a matter of minutes. Most go unclaimed and end up being given away.

"With wallets we make every effort to get them back," Keawe-Aiko says. "We'll call if we can find a number in the phone book. We'll send them a letter if there's an address. If there's a driver's license, we'll send it back to the state. If there's a military ID, we send it to them."

Unclaimed goods

Often the calls go unanswered, the letters get returned. If the wallets go unclaimed after a month, the personal identification and credit cards are destroyed and the rest of the wallet, including cash, is given back to the bus driver who found them.

"It's a little reward because they were honest enough to turn it in," Keawe-Aiko says.

And it's not just little things that get lost. Keawe-Aiko shows a visitor around the office just about bursting with things you would think aren't so easy to overlook just because you're getting off a bus:

Winter jackets. Sweatshirts. Backpacks. Boom boxes. Hats. Skateboards. Bodyboards. Canes. Walkers. Umbrellas. Baby carriages and strollers. Rings and other jewelry. Shopping bags. Coffee cups. Tennis rackets. A neon "Gotcha" sign. Boxes and boxes of books, from best sellers to high-school biology textbooks.

"You wouldn't think somebody could lose their teeth, would you," Keawe-Aiko asks. "They did, though. Uppers and lowers."

Items that are often found on O'ahu buses include passports, wallets, jewelry, cell phones and Gameboys.

Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser

Sometimes, it can be a dirty — and dangerous — job. There's really no telling what she'll find inside a backpack when Keawe-Aiko dumps its contents out to discover some hint of its owner: switchblades, vodka bottles, forged checks, hypodermic needles, rotting fruit, even illegal drugs. In five years of overseeing the lost and found, though, she has never seen a lost gun.

"You can always tell when someone has something illegal they're trying to find," she says. The owner will call the office and inquire about their backpack in a sotto-voce whisper, as if they're afraid to hear the answer. Drugs are always turned over to police, who occasionally try to set up a small sting operation by luring an owner back to the lost-and-found office.

The most "popular" lost-and-found bus routes are the ones used by tourists: No. 20 to the airport, No. 22 to Hanauma Bay, and especially, the Nos. 52 and 55 circle-island lines.

"People go on vacation and so does their brain," Keawe-Aiko says. "They think they're on a tour bus."

She says circle-island travelers often will get off the bus when the driver takes a 5-minute break at the Turtle Bay Resort. "Then get distracted by the view, the beach or a turtle in the water and the next thing you know the bus is leaving with all their souvenirs," she says.

Occasionally, the lost items constitute a real emergency. In such cases, like missing medicine or same-day airline tickets, a driver will be called by radio dispatchers to search the bus. If the item is found, a supervisor can be sent to the bus for a special delivery.

Keawe-Aiko, who has worked for OTS for 10 years, tries to run a full-service operation. A former travel agent, she once saw a lost airline ticket and knew the passenger wouldn't be able to leave the Islands on time; she rebooked the flight for the next day before the tourist could get to the office.

Falling through the cracks

Although most items are found by the end of the day, occasionally things fall into the cracks, literally. Keawe-Aiko said the wallet of her cousin was once found in a bus that had been stuck in a maintenance yard for months; by the time the wallet came into her office, the cousin had died, she said.

New things keep showing up in the lost-and-found office. Since officials started putting bicycle racks on the front of buses several years ago, there's been a sharp increase in the number of bikes left behind — an average of six to 10 per month, including ones that retail for $300, $400 and even $500.

Because most are unlicensed and go unclaimed, they are presumed stolen, Keawe-Aiko said. They are stored in a locked bike-rack area on the Middle Street grounds, and like the wallets, turned over to the driver who found them after 30 days.

None of Keawe-Aiko's stories tops the one from a few years back when a 3-year-old girl was turned in to her lost-and-found office.

The girl, wearing pink slippers and a striped playsuit, wandered away from her aunt's house in Kalihi, somehow boarded a No. 2 School Street bus, got a transfer, and rode to the end of the line, which just happened to be at the Middle Street offices.

While Keawe-Aiko, the police and a "posse" of radio station listeners frantically tracked down the girl's mother, the little girl played happily in the lost-and-found offices, where she helped hand out bus passes and used the typewriter.

"Her guardian angel was with her that day," Keawe-Aiko said. "If she caught the bus in the other direction, she would have gone to Waikiki. Instead, she ended up here."