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Until last fall, Alta Jewel often made the bus trip to University Hospital, where she served several times a week as a volunteer chaplain. It was an easy bus ride, a straight 15-minute shot from her west side home. But then, Madison Metro axed her route, and the 68-year-old retiree, hobbled by recent back surgeries, suddenly found the trip more than she could handle - a 45-minute journey during which she has to switch buses. And that's if she's able to transfer without too much of a wait, which can be more than an hour. She still makes her medical appointments at the hospital, but she's cut out her volunteer work. "The financial burden of taking a taxi to do volunteer work becomes sufficient enough to dip into income," she says. "It really precludes a lot of the things I feel I can still contribute." Route 8, a circulator route on the west side, was Metro's 13th most productive in terms of riders per hour when it became a weekend-only service in August 2006. At the same time, Metro officials also reduced service on routes on the south and north sides of the city. Two years earlier, Metro eliminated Routes 11 and 10 on the east side - its second and fourth most productive routes, respectively. Both lines operated nine months a year, getting students and university employees from the isthmus to the University of Wisconsin campus via Johnson Street quickly, bypassing the Capitol Square, where riders now have to wait for several minutes before continuing their route. In a city that has one of the highest rates of bus ridership in the country, the cuts created a storm of controversy that continues to dog top Madison officials. The changes affected many of the very neighborhoods that Metro's own planning documents pegged as high-density areas that warrant the "highest level of services." "I could get across town during peak hours within 16 to 20 minutes using this bus system, which is about what you could do if you drive it, which was pretty spectacular," says Pam Barrett, who used to take the Route 10 from her home in the Schenk-Atwood neighborhood to her job at the VA Hospital on the west end of the UW campus. Now, she says, "the commute home is about 45 minutes, and the commute in is about 40 minutes." Laurie Wermter saw her commute time from her east side home to her job at Memorial Library more than double when the city cut the off-peak-hour frequency of Route 4. "I have to allow 45 minutes to get to work," she says. "Before it was about 10 minutes, 15 minutes at the most." And it's not just her commuter route. She said she used to be able to schedule a medical appointment at the Dean Clinic on High Point Road on the west side and get back to Memorial Library to work the afternoon. Not anymore. She used the Route 8 for that. "Those cuts greatly harmed people who live in the city, the more inner parts of the city, who are trying to get around without a car either because of environmental reasons or because they just don't have the money to afford a car," says Wermter. LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS Mayor Dave Cieslewicz acknowledges that "we got a lot of heat" for the route cuts. But he says high fuel costs created budget pressures that made them necessary. He also made some changes in the way Metro was run, choosing not to renew the contract for the architect of the cuts, former Metro general manager Catherine Debo, and bringing in Chuck Kamp, who spent 15 years heading the Appleton bus system. Cieslewicz says for now, no further route cuts or fare increases are in the works. And early this year he appointed a special committee to look for options to ensure Metro's long-term health as expenses mount. "I wanted to find a way to get out of what I call the iron triangle," he says. "And the iron triangle was three bad choices: In the face of these rising costs you can cut services, you can increase fares or you can dramatically increase the support from city property taxpayers. And none of those are very attractive choices." The committee, a collection of city officials, City Council members and bus riders, will be grappling with how to help Metro evolve from a local to a regional service. Committee Chairman Mark Opitz says the panel will likely issue its recommendations in March. Also on the committee is Susan De Vos, director of Madison Area Bus Advocates, which formed in response to the last round of service cuts. The group wants the committee to address ride times that can take well over an hour get across town. It advocates more direct lines and the development of a rapid bus transit system, which would involve setting up several new bus stations for speedy and frequent crosstown routes. "Hopefully, that is something the ad hoc committee is addressing and may actually get someplace with," she says. Kamp agrees. "We're at kind of a key point where the community has gotten large enough that some kinds of express and more efficient services need to be considered rather than most of our routes being local routes that have bus stops every couple of blocks or are required to go through neighborhoods in some roundabout way," he says, adding that possible plans include construction of express bus lanes with separate signalization to allow buses to cover more distance in a shorter time. GROWING OUT In recent years Metro has fanned out to reach growing parts of the metropolitan area, forging agreements to provide service to Middleton, Fitchburg, Verona, the town of Madison and paratransit service to Shorewood Hills. It's also had discussions with Oregon, McFarland, Sun Prairie and Cross Plains, but with no agreements yet. "You have that competition with serving the periphery, but you don't have a lot of additional resources," says Kamp. "If you're basically taking the same amount of resources and trying to spread it out, it means that you're reallocating resources to try to get the most bang for the buck." Opitz says he can't provide many details about what the planning committee will recommend for Metro's future. But he's sure of one thing: The committee will advise pushing hard for a regional transit authority, which would have the ability to set up a transportation sales tax that could help fund Metro's growth. The initial push for the taxing authority came earlier this year from city and county officials who want to build a commuter rail line between Middleton and Sun Prairie. But the formation of an RTA is by no means in the bag. The move would require an enabling law by the Legislature, which has yet to put a proposal on the table. It would also need voter approval through a referendum, and four Dane County communities - Waunakee, Sun Prairie, Cross Plains and Stoughton - have voted to oppose the taxing district. MONEY PIT Metro's budget, currently $48 million, is under pressure from skyrocketing fuel costs, and funding sources are not keeping up. State funding has dropped from 42 percent in the late 1990s to 38 percent last year. Meanwhile, the city's share of funding has ballooned by nearly 30 percent over the past five years, a larger increase than any other city department. Rising fuel costs make for an annual budget crisis. Last year's shortfall amounted to $878,000, and Metro's contingency fund - $2.5 million in 2003 - stood at $130,000 this year. Since 2000, the maximum fare on a Metro bus has been $1.50, while the cost per passenger is $2.89. But as far transit services go, Metro's cost is far less than most of its peers nationwide, according to a state Department of Transportation report presented to the Legislature in October. That same report rated Metro tops in ridership per capita compared to many comparable cities nationwide. Kamp says a lot of that ridership has to do with awareness of environmental concerns and fuel costs. But it's also due in large part to arrangements with businesses and other entities with large pools of employees. Metro already has agreements to provide free rides for employees of the city of Madison and St. Mary's Hospital, as well as for students at Madison Area Technical College and students and staff at UW-Madison and Edgewood College. Those businesses and colleges offer unlimited rides and pay Metro 88 cents per ride, which next year will increase to 95.2 cents. Kamp says Metro makes up the cost of the reduced fares through increased ridership. "There's no doubt that unlimited ride passes have contributed to our ridership increase," he says. And that helps put Metro on solid ground, he adds. Kamp points out that ridership is seeing a 16-year trend of increased ridership to nearly 12.5 million rides this year, within hailing distance of its historic high of more than 13 million in 1982. The service has enjoyed a string of favorable reports comparing it to like-sized operations - most recently the DOT report. The challenge, Kamp says, is to keep up with the times. "It's more of a challenging time for any transit system compared to 20, or let's go back 50 years, when all American cities were compact, densely populated, urban-centered areas," he says. "America has spread out, and that's harder for transit to provide services." But he acknowledges that Metro riders who have lost service have a legitimate gripe. "If it was my route and that happened to me, I'd be very upset," he says. STILL MAD Madison Area Bus Advocates members continue to voice their hard feelings over the route cuts. Michael Barrett, Pat Barrett's husband and a self-described "transportation geek" who sits on the group's board, says the cuts were a slap in the face to east siders on the isthmus. "It was this mayor's very first act on the bus system," he says, "which I found so ironic because it was this neighborhood that put him in office." MABA has held two meetings with Cieslewicz, but members say they have never gotten a good answer for why the routes were cut. "This is an enormously complicated issue," Cieslewicz says, "but my understanding was Metro felt they could get more efficiency out of those routes and save a little money." He adds, "If you look at what was done to soften the blow, I think it was the right thing to do, given we had some budget pressures. But sure, it was obviously a controversial decision." While sympathetic to the group's complaints, Kamp has not considered reinstating the routes, and he says that before making any other changes he's letting the mayor's planning committee do its job. And at any rate, since the cuts were made, Metro has seen an increase in its isthmus ridership, as well as an overall increase of 6 percent for the first nine months of this year, he says. "The majority of those impacted made the adjustments and continued to be riders," he says, "although some did not." But bus service makes for a thorny political issue, given that Madisonians ride buses at numbers far above the national average, not only for economic reasons but because many feel that in light of environmental concerns, it's the right thing to do. Cieslewicz would not detail why he sent former manager Debo packing, but it's clear her political skills were a factor. "One of the things I saw in Chuck that I really like is his ability to really reach out and work with groups like MABA," he says. "They're very well-informed, they'll question every decision because they've got a great deal of background and understanding of the system, so they'll question every decision. And they're effective, but from a management standpoint sometimes challenging to work with." Riders contacted for this story were not sorry to see Debo go. But the jury's still out on Kamp, who came on board just in time to deal with the fallout from the route cuts. "Mr. Kamp has been very sympathetic," says Wermter. "But so far we haven't had any of these things change."
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