Bus Fare Evasion Declining

MCTS Connect 1 at Wisconsin Avenue Stop. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

The Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) doesn’t want its drivers to be fare enforcers, but it does want them to be “fare informers.”

In 2025, after a midyear $10.9 million budget deficit rattled MCTS, county government transit officials released for the first time internal estimates of the cost of fare evasion. The numbers were shocking.

MCTS was estimating that as many as one in three bus riders were not paying a fare, costing the system an estimated $4 million in fare revenue annually. The system has since started a public information campaign aimed at encouraging fare payment and new targeted enforcement by the system’s unarmed transit security along routes with high rates of fare evasion.

Beginning in February, the system also repealed a 2022 policy that told bus operators not to ask for fares. The goal was to reduce conflict and assaults on drivers. Fare disputes are the primary cause of operator assaults, according to MCTS and national-level data.

New MCTS President and CEO Steve Fuentes said previous transit system leaders “leaned on the side of taking away the engagement piece from bus operators regarding fares.” Operators were told not to say anything to riders who boarded buses and didn’t pay, he said.

“Well, that caught on and kind of caught fire and led to a very dramatic escalation in fare evasion,” Fuentes told Milwaukee County supervisors on the Committee on Finance Thursday.

The new policy tells bus operators to inform riders what the fare is when they board the bus. “Do it in a professional manner, one-time only… and then after that just continue to go down the street,” Fuentes said. 

Fuentes called it a “common sense” policy. Along with drivers destination signs on buses are also programmed to remind drivers to pay fares. “We don’t ask them to enforce any fare payment, we don’t ask them to put people off the bus, we want them to be very professional,” Fuentes said.

The information campaign, which preceded targeted enforcement and the new operator policy, appears to have already had an impact, Fuentes said. Between August and December 2025, fare evasion estimates dropped from 33% in August to 23% in December. The overall fare evasion estimate for all of 2025 was about 30%, he said.

MCTS fare evasion attracted federal attention last year. U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil sent a letter to federal transportation officials asking for greater oversight. In December, FTA Administrator Marcus Molinaro sent a letter to MCTS demanding a report on the system’s plan to address fare evasion. He also sent a letter to the City of Milwaukee asking for a plan for evasion on The Hop, which was a puzzling message for city officials because The Hop does not collect fares.

Fare revenue makes up only about 15% of the system’s annual revenue, said Joe Lamers, director of the Milwaukee County Department of Transportation. The main source of revenue is state mass transit aid, which has not kept pace with inflation for the past two decades, driving the system’s fiscal crisis.

MCTS will soon begin working with a consultant to redesign the bus network to provide the “best service possible” under existing financial conditions. Consultants were instructed to “live in reality,” Fuentes told supervisors, and “design a system based on what we can expect to receive. It’s not going to be a wishlist.”

Bidding on the project recently closed and Fuentes said MCTS will soon be able to announce an award.