New Metro vision eyes Web access, coffee on buses

Park your car in a structure at the transfer point. Grab a cup of coffee from the shop in the complex. Jump on the bus and check your e-mail on your laptop as you make the commute to work, maybe even getting paid a portion of your hourly rate for the ride because you are working.

It sure isn't Madison today. Parking is scarce as hen's teeth around most Madison Metro transfer points. Coffee isn't even allowed on the buses, and wi-fi access certainly does not surround bus routes in all parts of the city.

But it was one of several pictures of what future transit service in Madison could look like that emerged in the city's new Long Range Metro Transit Planning Ad Hoc Committee brainstorming session Monday night.

Although the word "trolley" was never uttered in the meeting (committee members slyly referred to "the T word" with grins), this new image of bus travel is aimed at the same white-collar workers that Mayor Dave Cieslewicz says would be the most likely users of a downtown trolley system and who tend to avoid buses now.

A different kind of surfing on buses could be in the offing in Madison.

A different kind of surfing on buses could be in the offing in Madison. The mayor's trolley idea has come under heavy fire in recent weeks, both for its price tag and for its potential harm to bus ridership, but Cieslewicz spokesman George Twigg said the ideas being put forward by this committee are not an attempt to create an opening for the mayor to back away from the trolleys.

"Efforts to improve and expand the Metro system will continue regardless of what happens to any other transit ideas," Twigg said today, but he added that visions of coffee-sipping, e-mail-reading bus riders are just the kinds of ideas Cieslewicz hoped would come out the committee's work.

The group began meeting this month and intends to deliver a report to the mayor by the end of the year. Their next meeting is scheduled for 5 p.m. on Monday, Feb, 26, in room 120 of the Madison Municipal Building.

At Monday's meeting, the underlying principle that the transit system should be for everyone, not just the people who need it, was underscored by member Carl Durocher. Edward Clarke, a business community representative on the committee, pushed the group to spell out the assumptions it was working from: whether they were trying to define options for a business that should support itself or a service like the public schools or public libraries.

Durocher responded by saying that Metro should be "a community service not just for transit dependent riders, available to everyone and accessible to all parts of town and everyone in the city." And, he added, it should be "committed to partnerships that allow it to go beyond the city limits." Durocher said the committee had to accept that the system won't be self-supporting.

While seeming to agree, Clarke insisted that the committee define what a sustainable financial condition would be. He and Durocher agreed that Metro should remain a cost-effective system.

Committee Vice Chairman Mark Opitz, who is also a Dane County Board member and Middleton resident, urged limiting Durocher's vision in another way. Opitz did not support taking transit to all parts of the city and region. Instead, he argued it should be limited to places with a dense enough population.

Opitz said he did not envision providing bus service to one-acre lot subdivisions in the town of Middleton, for example. Rather, he championed both transit-oriented land use and long-range planning that takes into account expected land use patterns.

Amanda White, a committee member and the executive director of Community Cars, was also a vocal advocate of looking at the structure of the system. She specifically called for an evaluation of the efficiency for riders of the transfer point system, which uses four hubs for bus routes in different parts of the city.

-----------------------------------

on the web at http://www.madison.com/tct/news/stories/index.php?ntid=115967