The incredible... shrinking... Milwaukee County Transit System bus routes, and the door-to-door paratransit system, for Milwaukee County residents with disabilities, have something in common: terrible route planning.
It would be hard to devise a bus system that has worse transfer connections than MCTS. Take the 23 northbound, and transfer to any of the east-west routes it crosses: the 21 on North Avenue, the 22 on Center Street, the 60 on Burleigh, the 62 on Capitol... sometime in the next twenty minutes, your bus will come, maybe. Chances are good that you will see the bus you need pulling away, just as the bus you are on pulls up at the corner, across the street. But maybe it already left two minutes before.
The same could be said about any other connection: getting on or off any line on Wisconsin Avenue, to or from the 18, the 19, the 20, the 23, the 27, the 35, the 67, the 76... You may be lucky. The system is not planned to make things hard for us. But it is not planned to make things flow smoothly and conveniently either. North-south routes are not timed to get to transfer points for east-west routes at anything like convenient times. Nothing is synchronized. Then there is the occasional 19 bus that ends its route at National and 2nd Street, when it is the end of the driver's shift, and off to the yard on South Kinnikinnic the bus goes. Would it be too much to end the route at Wisconsin and Plankinton, where everyone could at least transfer?
Some cities solve this problem by having all bus routes start from a central downtown location. Akron, Ohio calls this “the round-up.” All routes end at one public square at about the same time, wait five or ten minutes for transfers, then go back out again. That probably wouldn't work for a city as spread out as Milwaukee. Nobody wants to take a bus from Glendale to downtown on their way to the Northwest side of town. But it might work for some routes, while others went across town.
Paratransit has a different, but equally aggravating problem. Paratransit has no fixed routes. It is door to door service, from the passenger's home, to their destination, and a trip back later. Route planners have a difficult job. They have to string together twenty or thirty individual rides, into a route that is efficient, sensible, and convenient for all. It is rare that any driver or passenger sees such a result. It is more common that an elderly lady in a wheelchair will be picked up from a doctor's office on Port Washington Road, near Hampton, and go home to 7th and Cherry (Hillside) by way of 76th and Brown Deer Road, then over to 91st and Florist, then back to 76th and Good Hope Road, then a few more stops along the way to 7th Street.
Every paratransit driver and passenger could tell a dozen similar horror stories. To be fair to all the people who work on scheduling these routes, they work with an antiquated computer system which practically guarantees gross inconvenience. The computer program was selected by the MCTS office in charge of Transit Plus – many years ago. It defies common sense, proving that old saying, garbage in, garbage out. Bad programming will give you a bad result, no matter what the data or the intentions of the operator.
The computer program has no sense of direction. Literally. It combines rides which end near each other. How far apart the pick-up points are, whether the passengers are even going in the same direction, does not compute. Pick up a passenger on one side of Cudahy, going home to the other side of Cudahy, the computer will route the bus by way of Froedtert Hospital. (Someone coming home from Froedtert is getting off near someone else who is going home to Cudahy. See? Two passengers both going to Cudahy!) Or the route might not be so ridiculous, but that is luck of the draw. Most paratransit drivers have the good sense to take the passenger home by the most direct route, but some are afraid they will be warned, suspended, or fired for doing such a sensible thing.
Why doesn't the Transit Plus office replace this junk program with something that works better? Well, one must be fair to the Transit Plus administrators too. If they present a budget to Scott Walker, that includes the cost of a new computer system, he will take it out. If the county board passes it anyway, he will veto it. He will say, “I don't believe in public transit. My solution is for every person with disabilities to have their own car with hand controls. Oh, some are not only paraplegic but quadraplegic? How about a computerized drive system that responds to direct mind control? No, not at public expense, but they should all get good jobs so they can afford it themselves. And those with cognitive disabilities should get high-paying cognitive disability jobs, so they can afford to hire a personal chauffer.”
Likewise, there is no priority at MCTS for making the bus routes convenient to passengers. Walker's actions give the impression he would like to shut the system down entirely if he could. It is not clear what Governor Jim Doyle's commitment to transit really is either. MCTS is just a holding action – keep some buses running because the board insists on keeping some buses running. Fast, efficient, convenient service that people would actually choose to rely on? There is not much evidence anyone is thinking about that. Here is a way to begin, if anyone at MCTS is listening:
First schedule the 10 and 30 on Wisconsin Avenue. Space them out so they don't arrive on each other's tails. Then, schedule each north-south route that crosses Wisconsin Avenue, starting with times that are convenient for transfer to and from the 10 and 30. Then, schedule the other E-W routes, so that there are at least some convenient times for transfer to and from the N-S routes. It won't be perfect. What is convenient for a N-S to eastbound transfer may not be convenient for a N-S transfer to westbound. But it could be a lot better, if convenience were a priority.
What the computer program for paratransit scheduling needs is a simple mathematical formula. It is taught in geometry class around 10th grade or so. It is the equation for the slope of a line. Y equals MX plus B, or M equals Y2 minus Y1 over X2 minus X1. Put that into the computer program, and the routes would combine passengers going in the same direction, instead of passengers coming from wherever who will end up in the same area. Southwest to northeast will have one slope. East to northwest will have another slope. Froedtert is not on the way from the east side of Cudahy to the west side of Cudahy. Simple.
All that is needed is a commitment to quality as well as quantity, and recognition that public transit is a sound investment that will pay off once our elected and unelected officials commit to it.
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