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March 12, 2008 The backbone of Madison's bus system is broken, Metro Transit's planning and scheduling manager Sharon Persich said Tuesday. "We can't have a route with buses that just aren't on time," she said. But that is exactly what is happening with Route 6, the longest route in the system and one of the ones with the highest ridership, according to Persich. Route 6 goes from the West Transfer Point at Whitney Way and Tokay Boulevard east. It goes up Speedway, down Regent to Park Street, up to Johnson and University to the Square, then out along East Washington all the way to East Towne Mall. On the way to East Towne, it also serves MATC's Truax campus and the Portage-Hayes neighborhood. "It is sort of the backbone of the system," Persich said. And it is one of the main things that the service changes presented by Metro to the city's Transit and Parking Committee Tuesday are designed to fix. However, the service changes, which would go into effect in September, amount to a comprehensive reworking of the entire system, transit service manager Ann Gullickson said. Metro Transit director Chuck Kamp has been talking with the mayor about this comprehensive revision of service for six months, according to Gullickson. "The mayor's office will look at what staff is proposing and then see what might be feasible in the context of what is going to be a tight budget this year and next year," Mayor Dave Cieslewicz's spokesman George Twigg said. The public will get a chance to say what it thinks about the plan at a public hearing at the 5 p.m., Tuesday, April 15, Transit and Parking Committee meeting. Metro's full plan will be available to the public in about a week online at mymetrobus.com, according to Persich. All she could say Tuesday about the cost was that implementing the plan would cost "hundreds of thousands of dollars a year." Gullickson told the Transit and Parking Committee that money to implement the plan this year was not in the budget. THE PLAN All the changes Metro proposed Tuesday, taken together, would add 33 hours of service to the system each day, from 1,151 hours of service each day to about 1,184 hours. In addition to changing Route 6, the plan proposes bringing back the popular Route 10/11 that traveled Johnson and Gorham to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus but bypassed the Square, increasing service to the airport during the week and adding weekend connections to the airport. However, the plan also calls for eliminating some service areas, such as Route 13 south of Olin Avenue. This section of this route serves Badger Road, the Department of Revenue and the Huber Correctional Center, all of which have been providing lots of riders to the system, but are within the town of Madison not the city of Madison. The town has told Metro that it can't afford its transit budget this year, according to Gullickson. Other service reductions, such as the elimination of Route 38 on Monona Drive between Cottage Grove Road and Walter Street, and the total elimination of Route 24 on the north side, are within the city. THE NEED Both the increases and reductions in service in the city are needed because "for at least two budget cycles we have reduced service and eliminated routes. When we eliminated routes, we tried to restructure others to try to minimize adverse impacts. In the process, we tried to get too much out of schedules that are now too tight," Persich said. Sharon Williams, the regular driver on Route 73, which goes from the West Transfer Point to the Middleton Transfer Point, agrees. "What we used to do in 30 minutes takes 35 minutes now. Schedules need to reflect the growth of the city and allow drivers to get out of their seats to stretch, to go to the bathroom and to eat," she said Tuesday at the West Transfer Point. Persich agrees that "schedules are just too tight, especially on Route 6. It is too tight because we made a change out in the East Towne area to save money and it has turned around to bite us." "The other issue we have is a lot of buses carrying too many people; we are having overloads," Persich said. Cathy Casper, a seven-day-a-week bus rider who spoke before the Transit and Parking Committee Tuesday, addressed both issues, saying, "The system is in crisis. The whole system needs to be looked at." "I got left after the mayor's roundtable on Mineral Point Road by the Route 67 bus to West Towne. She was full up at the West Transfer Point and couldn't pick anyone else up. That is a very serious problem and needs to be looked at," Casper said. mrathbun@madison.com |