16 Bus Routes Could Be Cut By 2025

Essential trips only on MCTS buses. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) officials have identified the routes facing cuts if a looming fiscal cliff is not avoided.

The fiscal cliff is the result of a long-term funding imbalance that has been offset since 2020 by federal pandemic stimulus funds. The transit system essentially faces a financial time bomb that will explode in 2025 when the stimulus funding runs out and it’s left with a likely budget deficit of approximately $25.1 million or more, according to the latest forecast by the Office of the Milwaukee County Comptroller.

Officials from MCTS and the Milwaukee County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) went before the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors‘ Committee on Transportation and Transit Tuesday reporting that the transit system would likely need to cut 16 of the existing 36 routes if the fiscal cliff is not avoided. These routes represent approximately 45% of all routes and 20% of all county bus service. Another four routes would be downsized, with large segments of bus service removed.

“That’s what this has come to,” said MCDOT director Donna Brown-Martin. “There is nowhere else to cut.”

The routes identified for cuts represent the lower frequency, lower ridership routes in the system. But while they are not the ridership draw that higher-frequency routes are, they are still used every day by county residents. Transit officials created a series of maps showing supervisors the bus routes that would disappear from their districts.

Speaking directly to the chair of the transit committee, Brown-Martin said, “Chairwoman [Priscilla] Coggs-Jones imagine being a rider of Route 22 on Center Street, and then in 2025 your closest east-west route will be on North Avenue a half mile away.”

The effect of such a cut would be wide-ranging. MCTS reported that 2,300 businesses would lose their nearest bus route, 70,000 jobs would no longer be easily accessed by bus and 125,000 people would no longer live near a bus route. “It will touch everybody in some way, shape or form,” Tom Winter, MCTS director of schedule and planning, told supervisors.

“The state of our local economy and community hinges on a robust transit system,” Brown-Martin said. “Milwaukee County residents’ mobility will be severely handicapped if these eliminations come to pass; jobs and educational opportunities will be more arduous, time-consuming and costly to access; senior citizens will become more isolated.”

Such cuts would also “derail a lot of the efforts” put toward redesigning the transit system so that it is balanced towards a system with a greater number of faster, higher frequency bus routes, Winter said.

The transit system has already been eliminating low-ridership routes and non-fixed services — freeway flyers, festival bus service — and the potential cuts outlined would further diminish the reach and breadth of public transit, cutting off citizens that rely on public transit from some areas of the county.

“MCTS has shrunken its facilities footprint, its staff, its service area, and reduced the frequency on various bus routes, all while eliminating freeway flyer routes and service to summer festivals, State Fair, Brewers games and most schools and job shuttles as well,” said Brown-Martin.

She added that the transit system is faced with a future of withering away until it becomes a system with routes serviced by one bus every 30 to 60 minutes. “That inferior level of service has proven to be unproductive, inefficient and frankly puts more people in their cars and on our roads,” she said.

If the transit system shrinks considerably, so too will its workforce. “There’s a stark reality here,” Brown-Martin said. “Without a significant increase in funding, without us working together — MCTS, MCDOT and the county board — MCTS will need far fewer bus operators and mechanics in 2025.”

Donnell Shorter, president of the transit workers union, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 998, said, “I think transit has done their job cutting the fat, but there’s no more fat to cut.”

Brown-Martin implored the supervisors to join the union and the transit system in advocating for more funding. “I cannot encourage enough for the county board to explore solutions that appropriately align the county’s limited resources to address the immediate fiscal challenges of MCTS.”

MCTS has launched a public awareness campaign called #SaveTheBus. Managing Director Denise Wandke told supervisors that transit officials recently went to Madison with the Wisconsin Public Transit Association (WIPTA) to meet with state-level officials. Shorter said he will be in Washington D.C. next week, and that he will share information with the Wisconsin representatives he meets about the crisis transit faces: “My message will be ‘We need transit’.”

Routes identified for elimination

• Route 11 – Hampton Avenue
• Route 20 – S. 20th Street
• Route 22 – Center Street
• Route 28 – 108th Street
• Route 31 – State – Highland
• Route 33 – Vliet Street
• Route 34 – Hopkins – Congress
• Route 52 – Clement – Pennsylvania
• Route 53 – Lincoln Avenue
• Route 54 – Mitchell – Burnham
• Route 55 – Layton Avenue
• Route 56 – Greenfield – S. 43rd Street
• Route 58 – Villard Avenue
• Route 68 – Port Washington Road
• Route 88 – Brown Deer Road
• Route 92 – 92nd Street

Routes identified for downsizing

• Route 19 – King Drive – S. 13th – Service on S. 13th between College Avenue and Puetz
Avenue
• Route 60 – 60th Street – Service on 60th between Greenfield Avenue and Layton Avenue
• Route 76 – 76th Street – Service on 76th south of Edgerton Avenue, on Grange Avenue
and on Southway
• PurpleLine – 27th Street – Service on 27th and Drexel Avenue between Franklin Walmart
and IKEA