John, I commend you for taking the bus from Ewa to Downtown. That is laudable. The sad reality, is that our bus system has been at-capacity since the early 1980's.  It seems intuitive that since a single bus can fit 50-80 people, then if the City wants to decrease traffic congestion and improve mobility, why don't they simply add more buses?  The problem is that Honolulu's geography (narrow linear development between the ocean and mountains) squeezes Honolulu's traffic into a very limited number of major east-west thoroughfares.  This forces many bus routes to share the same roadways and results in a phenomenon called "bus bunching". 
Buses get caught up in clusters that crawl along at a snails pace, often with very crowded buses near the front and emptier buses in the rear.  For riders waiting at bus stops, instead of buses coming every 5-10 as scheduled, they get several buses all at once, and then long periods with no buses at all. I will explain more below.