The Madison Peak Oil Group and Madison Area Bus Advocates, two local organizations that frequently work together on transportation issues, have advocated at numerous meetings in recent weeks for a transit center downtown. Madison Peak Oil Group member David Knuti said city officials have shown interest in their argument, but little desire for action.

"Obviously nobody's making it a priority," Knuti said. "The long-term bus thing is really going to be a mess when the station gets shut down."

According to John Meier of Badger Bus, the company has discussed redeveloping the depot site for several years. Badger Bus regularly runs between Madison and Milwaukee, stopping at Johnson Creek along the way, and provides charter and tour bus services, as well. The bus, which costs $35 round-trip from Madison to Milwaukee, is popular among University of Wisconsin-Madison students, who comprise 80 percent of Badger Bus' current customer base.

Only 10 percent of passengers currently depart from the depot, however, which is located at the corner of Bedford Street and West Washington Avenue. The vast majority of riders prefer the bus stop at the Memorial Union, Meier said, making the depot an underutilized piece of downtown property.

"The bus industry has changed significantly," he said. "The years of bus depots and waiting and transferring have really changed."

Those who do use the depot, Meier said, generally do so to quickly board, preferring to buy their tickets online or at the Memorial Union. Moreover, new competing bus companies like Megabus and Bolt, which have carried more than 2 million passengers in just a few years of operation, have managed to cut costs by eliminating depots, selling tickets almost exclusively online and making stops only at street corners or in park-and-ride lots.

Currently, these services operate most regularly on the East Coast, but they are expanding to the Midwest, with Megabus making a few stops at the Dutch Mill Park and Ride lot near the Beltline-Stoughton Road interchange on its Minneapolis-Milwaukee-Chicago route.

Meier, whose family has owned Badger Bus since 1920, said unlike those services his company's buses make more stops and serve more commuters. But he acknowledged Badger Bus will have to adapt to the competition by relying more on its on-demand stops, such as three on East Washington Avenue, and less on depots.

Without a depot, "as your market changes, you have the ability to change with them easily," he said. "We're all about convenience -- we have to be convenient, or it's not going to work."

The Meiers' redevelopment project has so far been well-received at the city's Urban Design Commission as well as in the Bassett district of Capitol Neighborhoods. Meier said they will likely submit official plans to the city in mid-April, and the project could be approved as soon as July.

Meanwhile, despite heightened talk about high-speed and/or commuter rail, local and state officials have had relatively few concrete discussions about if and how those modes of transportation should converge downtown. Knuti and others from the Madison Peak Oil Group and Madison Area Bus Advocates have urged city officials to take over the Badger Bus Depot through eminent domain, or at the very least slow down the Meier project so that an alternative site can be found, but city officials have expressed little interest in that option.

"The point is you look around, and where is that station going to be?" Knuti said. "I think Madison will look silly if it ends up with a transit system based on street corners."

Knuti added that Badger Bus has operated profitably by relying on the city and state infrastructure, such as its pickup site at Memorial Union on Langdon Street, saying that "they owe something to the bus-riding public to make a stab at keeping a station." In particular, the move to depot-less bus transit will hurt elderly and disabled riders for whom waiting outside at street corners is a less-than-desirable, if not impossible option, he said.

Ald. Robbie Webber, who serves on the city's Long Range Transportation Planning Committee, said there are a lot of practical concerns about losing the depot, including the effect on the elderly and disabled. Another issue is whether the city should allow private bus companies to make regular stops on public streets. Current city laws allow cars to pause in "no parking" zones to drop off and pick up people, but Webber said allowing buses to do the same on a regular basis can cause street maintenance issues.

"Can buses, which are much larger and obviously take up much more space in three directions, can they just stop anywhere along the street where it says 'no parking' and pick up and drop off customers?" she asked. "Should the city have rules about that?"

Ald. Mike Verveer, who represents the area in which the Badger Bus depot is located, said he is "very concerned" about the future of intercity buses, particularly Greyhound Lines. Greyhound currently operates out of the Badger Bus depot, but has not said where it might pick up or drop off passengers if the depot closes. Verveer added, however, that the city cannot force the Meiers to keep the Badger Bus depot open.

In terms of bringing high-speed or commuter rail downtown, the bus depot may not be the best site, Verveer said, since it is about a block away from the rail line.

"I believe there are better locations much closer to the actual rail lines that are much more appropriate," he said, such as a parking lot near the Kohl Center.

David Trowbridge, manager for the city's Transport 2020 project, said the current plan includes several potential downtown stops for a commuter rail line, but no concrete location for a transit hub. Madison is in an unusual situation in terms of finding a downtown transit center, he said, unlike cities that have transformed old rail stations into multimodal centers serving intercity and city buses as well as high-speed and commuter rail. Since Madison has not had passenger rail in nearly 40 years, most of the former downtown rail stations have found other uses, like Madison Gas & Electric's downtown plant or Williamson Bikes across West Washington Avenue from the Badger Bus depot.

Whether high-speed rail even goes into downtown Madison may be another factor in where a major transit hub is located. Currently, the state Department of Transportation has expressed "a strong preference" for putting a high-speed rail stop between Minneapolis and Milwaukee at the Dane County Regional Airport, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said, and there may be an advantage to putting a hub at the airport if that's the only rail stop in Madison.

"Ideally, you would like a hub to be in your downtown, but there are advantages to putting it at the airport," he said. "Our airport has the advantage of being very close, a 10-minute ride to downtown. … I think in our case, having it at the airport might work."

Ultimately, despite being an "exciting time" for transit, Cieslewicz and other officials agree that it is likely that Madison will operate for at least part of 2009 or 2010 without a downtown bus depot.

"It is fair to say that the proposed Badger Bus station (redevelopment) absolutely has brought to the forefront the implications of the fact that we don't really have a clear plan for an expanded public transportation system downtown," Verveer said.

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