HONOLULU, Hawaii — Back on the mainland, if you climb onto a public bus in a big city, you might call it something fancy like “the Metro.” But on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, home to over two-thirds of the state’s population, it’s just TheBus.

The line was renamed in 1971 after the Honolulu city government acquired three labor strike-prone private bus lines, backed by a good deal of money from the federal government, and consolidated them into one agency.