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On the last regular commuting day of TheBus Route 18, multiple riders showered driver Kathy Paiva with gifts of food.

They fist-bumped her when they got on and hugged her when they got off. They soaked in views of the ocean, trees and even Diamond Head that had become familiar to them over countless rides.

One regular commuter, Brendan Mar, didn’t have work that day. He got on anyway. 

Mar brought Paiva a treat from McDonald’s after getting off the bus at Kahala Mall and boarding again when it looped back around.

Route 18, which snaked around Ala Moana, through Makiki, up to the University of Hawaii Manoa and down to Market City, is a casualty of the latest round of route changes by TheBus.

It was no longer needed as other routes were shifted to the same area, said Jon Nouchi, deputy director of the city’s Department of Transportation Services. “Over time, there is not one segment of the Route 18 that is unique, that another bus doesn’t run on with it,” he said.

So Route 18’s de facto community of riders disintegrated, going their separate ways on different routes with unfamiliar drivers.

Bus routes change frequently. Drivers are reassigned and passengers find new ways to get to their destinations. But since Route 18 came only about once per hour, it meant that riders tended to see the same people every day while commuting, including a contingent of UH-affiliated people who might never have noticed each other if not for their shared rides.

They expressed different levels of sentimentality and some frustration at having to find new bus schedules. But most of all, many passengers said, they would miss Paiva.

Paiva is talkative and laughs a lot. She chats with passengers and greets them with a big smile below her sunglasses. During her mandatory break in East Honolulu, she liked to get out to feed the birds.

“I’m not going to see these birds much longer, so I got to give them something,” she said on Aug. 15, her last day on Route 18.

Cathy Chow, who works in student housing at UH Manoa, said she would lose a direct ride to school. She will switch to Route 4 and have to transfer to either Route 13 or Route 8. UH graduate student Reed Mershon said he would start taking the bus on Route 6. 

Standing at his usual stop at the corner of Pensacola Street and Hoolai Street around 8 a.m., Mershon, who made sure to wear his thrifted TheBus aloha shirt that day, said that he hoped his fellow riders like Chow and Mar would be on the bus.

“Since tomorrow is a holiday, the schedules are a bit off … it’s functionally like the last day is today,” he said.

Mershon sat with UH associate professor Aaron Pietruszka, his faculty adviser, as they chatted with Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory project engineer Yosef Ben Gershom. 

“It’s like a social thing for us, because we don’t see each other during the workday,” Ben Gershom said. Despite working one floor away from each other on campus, they only met on the bus, he added. 

Natasha Richardson, who commuted to her job at Blood Bank of Hawaii and often chatted with Mar, who had been her middle school classmate, said the social element doesn’t concern her much. But she would miss Paiva.

“The bus driver is very good,” she said. 

Paiva said the feeling is mutual. And despite only driving Route 18 for the past six months, she said that it holds additional sentimental value to her since it includes a portion of one of the first routes she drove when she started in 1996.

“This is one of the first routes that I had a part of,” she said.

Even quieter riders who keep to themselves said they appreciate Paiva’s lust for life.

“She always greets me every morning,” office worker Angel Uyeshiro said. Uyeshiro, who sat in the back half of the bus wearing headphones, only became a regular after moving back to Oahu a few weeks beforehand. 

She rode from her place in Makiki to the bottom of Kaimuki, where she works, enjoying the view of Diamond Head as the bus drove that direction through the UH campus. 

“Something that’s hard about living here is there’s very little changes in terms of the scenery,” said Mershon, who moved here from seasonal Chicago. “But being on this route at the same time every morning, you do notice small things in the trees and the way the sun’s hitting things,” he said.

He’ll miss those oddly specific views he grew accustomed to seeing. More than that, he’ll miss Paiva and the small community she helped facilitate in her role as the bus driver with the big smile. 

But the end of Route 18 doesn’t mean the end of Paiva and her smiles. It just means that now, she’ll be delivering those smiles to riders on Route 1L instead.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by , Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and .