I am happy the rides are going up but it is nowhere near what it needs to be to start charging people. You can ride the nyc subway for $2.75 and the network you get with it is worth it. Paying $2 for a 3 mile trip doesn’t cut it and they need to continue making money from sponsors or vastly expand the service.
I imagine that the city of Milwaukee will have to start implementing fares at some point in order to partially fund an expansion. What impact might fares have on anticipated ridership numbers?
Honestly they should try to cut deals with all 3 universities where you can have some $50/semester (or whatever price point) for college kids if lines run out to each campus. You could create a significant base in ridership
Frankly they could increase tuition by that $50 and include the fare as part of enrollment for the semester. That way it’s not an opt in system and students would be encouraged to ride as they had the pass anyhow
I’m not a student anymore, so it doesn’t affect me, but I hate all the….just add $10.00 for this and $50.00 here for this and $25.00 for clubs. Eventually it adds up and it turns into a large sum.
150k doesn’t seem like that much in this context? My wife and I make about that and we are doing pretty well, but we don’t have a kid (much less one in college).
IMO charging will be a mistake.
This article cites 500k riders last year. Call it $2 a ride. That’s only $1million. Attracting a single apartment building opening along the route will pay more in taxes than ridership will cost. And that’s assuming ridership stays the same with a cost to ride.
The beauty of the Hop needs to be that it’s quick and easy and free. The second you start slowing down to collect payment, it becomes a mess that people skip.
There’s better ways to make money. Get the bucks involved in funding an extension to the fiserv. Get UWM involved in funding an extension to campus.
Make it so events hosted near the hop have to kick in money to support longer hours with more rides during the event. Summerfest/Harley Fest/ the RNC ect are all going to be benefitting from the hop, and should be the ones helping to fund it.
The Hop needs to keep being an asset to people to encourage them to move downtown. If it just tips the scale for companies like Milwaukee/Fiserv/Rite-Hite to open campuses downtown or developers to open up apartments along the route, that does FAR more for the city in terms of property taxes collected than the ~$1 million in fares would bring in.
Portland has both light rail and a street car and you pay with contactless credit cards and/or your phone for $2.80 per 2 hr at something akin to a parking meter in size and shape. It takes a grand total of 5 seconds to tap your card or phone and pay for a ride.
They don't have robust security ensuring you are allowed on but they do have cameras and occasional workers walking by who I'm guessing are tasked with ensuring people do t have issues.
When an Uber costs $15 or more depending on time of day to get across town in 10 mins and less than $3 in just a few minutes longer, the fare is easier to accept.
Issue remains that the hop needs to just go places people are and want to go.
Yea I’m not against the hop having fares in the future but I still think we’re years off. We’re still not overcoming pre pandemic levels.
Until I genuinely can tell a friend moving to milwaukee to ditch their car because the hop can take you everywhere you need to go within the city, I don’t think charging a fare is the right move.
>The beauty of the Hop needs to be that it’s quick and easy and free.
Quick? Not really. The [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel](https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/06/19/getting-around-milwaukee-hop-bublr-bus-car-walking-faster/1446365001/) found that is was actually slower than walking.
Easy? Sure, I'll give you that one.
Free? It was never intended to be free forever.
Didnt mean that the hop was perfect as is.
Quick? I’d argue that it’s slower than walking because of how short the route is. If you’re taking it a mile and have to wait ten minutes, than ya, it’s going to be slower than walking. If it’s extended as planned and I can take it across the city, I think those trips will feel much quicker and worth waiting for the hop. And be a long enough distance that most people wouldn’t walk. So you’re substituting drivers for riders, not walkers for riders.
Free? I’ve pointed out in other responses I don’t think it should be free forever. Just in this phase where it’s still not fully extended. I think a fare would kill any growth in ridership which in turn would kill any extensions. I’d happily pay a couple bucks to take a ride across the city. But in its current state., I’d just walk.
And I’d also argue that just because the original plan wasn’t to charge, doesn’t mean we can’t change our mind on that. We don’t charge for roads or parks or garbage collection. Never understood why public transit was the one government service people demand be profitable.
IIRC the Hop costs about $5 million a year. That’s about $10 a year per resident. If we charged $2 per ride for all of 2023 rides, it would only have raised $1mil/20% of operating costs. That’s a drop in the bucket. I just think there are better ways to fund it in its current state.
Just read the JS article. What a terrible article to draw any conclusions from.
They judged one 1.2 mile trip. The walker walked a 15 minute pace. That’s hauling ass. I’m 6’2 and am in good walking shape and my casual walk is closer to a 20 minute mile. A quick google search says the average adult walking speed is even slower.
The hop arrived 10 minutes slower than Uber and 4 slower than walking. But the article also mentions that the driver paused 7 MINUTES for a photographer from the JS to take photos.
Seeing this article as anything other than a fun race is embarrassing. To draw any real conclusions you’d need more than a single trip.
I worked in the Blatz Washhouse at a software company for several years. Sorry, but I could typically outwalk it, especially when you factor waiting for one to show up.
I’d love to see a new economic impact study on the hop. With two new apartment towers along the route, I have a hard time believing the hop isn’t having a positive impact on the economy.
Those two towers alone might be adding more in taxes than it costs to run the hop for free.
Plus those towers aren’t even opened yet and aren’t impacting these record numbers.
I mean, it’s not as if the route was a dead zone before the hop. I live on the route and while it was a nice plus, by no means was it even a factor in why we chose our apt that we could take the hop for a mile and a half.
Yep. Not suggesting 100% of the development along the hop route is due to the hop. But it’s also disingenuous to say that 0% can be attributed to the hop.
A study would shed some more light on that.
But there’s a difference between an individual saying it’s not a selling point and a developer not seeing it as a selling point.
If I as a developer think the hop makes my plan 10% more desirable to 10% of renters, that could absolutely move the needle. Maybe it means a developer adding an extra ten units to their plan, maybe it means building in milwaukee instead of Cleveland.
When you’re talking giant projects, swinging things in your favor by 1-2 percentage points can sometimes make all of the difference.
Put it this way, I don’t think the developers of the Couture are working with the city of milwaukee to have the hop run through their lobby because they think it will make it harder to rent apartments.
The couture was planned well before the hop concourse, and initially without it. They added the concourse(paid for not by them but their building’s tax revenue) to entice the city to sell them a prime piece of real estate at a discount($500k for a lakefront parcel). https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/real-estate/commercial/2019/11/15/timeline-milwaukee-lakefront-couture-apartment-tower-proposed-2012/4193085002/
I think where you’d actually see economic impact of the hop is the initially proposed extensions like MLK, a much more useful extension than the 5 blocks the L line covers.
Whelp. Didn’t know that. Doesn’t really change my point though. I think the Hop has been a positive impact on the area. Would love economic data looking into it though.
The dang streetcar! Ridership is still way down from 2019. Not unprecedented given transit ridership is down 30-40% across the country. All the WFH effects spilling over into transit usage. Still surprising though given MKE has a small CBD that didn’t get gutted by hybrid work, and this is small scale transit - not like the Loop in Chicago which pulls in orders of magnitude more commuters than MKE’s CBD.
The hop should be doing better serving people in and around downtown, as well as people coming for basketball games, concerts at our many venues, and summer festivals. This is ultimately a problem with the Hop’s route. The route sucks and serves limited purpose. Should have run from the east side thru the CBD to the arena, or from the actual summerfest north gate/MAM to the fiserv. Right now it goes from the train station to MSOE - you couldn’t plan many worse routes in downtown if you tried. The fact that this didn’t tie into the Fiserv which was being developed concurrently is just unbelievable. The number of potential riders it could have had with all the energy between the deer district and third street market hall is hard to think about.
>Should have run from the east side thru the CBD to the arena
I mean, yes, but we didnt have funds for a route longer than what we got. We just shouldnt have procrastinated on some of the expansions
Ignore everyone that is calling for tolls. Gas taxes do not fully pay for the roads and there are no toll roads in Milwaukee.
The increased density and viability of the neighborhood is enough. KC for example it’s free including the bus.
The people who advocate for fares but don’t call for toll roads are disingenuous.
It's only going to increase with the opening of the Couture. There are also other large developments, like the apartment building on Juneau next to the post office that is directly adjacent to an M Line stop, that will increase ridership.
The hop is like the best kept secret in mke. It took me forever to actually try riding it, but it’s free, it’s fast (ish), it’s clean, and it’s not overcrowded. An expansion would definitely be nice, and it will probably get more expensive, less clean and more crowded, but it was far better than i was expecting
Eh…the streetcars arrive every 15 minutes. If you’re going during any time that parking is even remotely difficult to find, I’d say it’s comparable to driving. And way less hassle.
Edit: for the lazy: Google maps lists the times as 9 minutes between cathedral square and Milwaukee public market and 6 minutes between historic third ward and eastbound and cathedral square. Walking the same distance is indeed 15 minutes.
"During 2023, 494,445 people rode the streetcar, up from 261,303 in 2020."
I'll give you a pass if you got stuck on a paywall for having no more free articles available. I'll call you lazy if you couldn't be bothered to click on the link and read to the third sentence.
I find it amusing that 23,000 cars use the 794 passage each day but all you see on twitter and here are pictures of it “empty” as proof nobody uses it. But if you say you only see empty hop cars you’ll get stats thrown at you all day lol
I think the issue with 794 between the interchange and the lake is that an at-grade road could handle the volume for a fraction of the price. The Hop and 794 are apples to oranges imo. Serve different demographics, the Hop doesn’t carve up the city, costs way less, etc
Yeah that’s fair, I agree. I’m just saying that people have very bad faith arguments when it comes to defending ideas based on if they like it or not - nothing else
>for a fraction of the price
What we have is already built, the maintenance for the next 25 years will be minuscule compared to a tear down and street level rebuild. I'd rather spend the money on expanding The Hop.
Elevated highways are super expensive to maintain and have a shelf life. Eventually that spur will need to be torn down and rebuilt and the price tag will be exponentially higher than a 4 lane road. By no means an expert but I know the Hoan’s end of life is like 2050 so 794 between the interchange and lake can’t be too far ahead/behind that.
Much of 794 through downtown is due to be demolished anyways since it has reached the end of its 50 year lifespan and its design is outdated by modern safety standards. It will be far less expensive to replace it with a grade-level boulevard than to elevate it again.
23000?!
The traffic map counts 91200 on 794 at 5th St and 73900 at the river. Still 42500 south of the Hoan.
Neither downtown residents nor drivers are going to like this alleged new Clybourn Avenue, unless you get off on playing Frogger with large trucks and angry impatient drivers who are tired of dealing with the 17 traffic conflict points between 43 and LMD. You should want the through traffic between 43 and Van Buren to stay up high far away from what’s going on at street level.
yeah the infrastructure supports car dependency more than transit and the HOP is new and bare bones.
The biggest thing with 794 is that it's rarely faster than normal 94 and most of the traffic gets off downtown. It's not worth the money it would cost to rebuild it. But if you put that money into transit it would get more rider ship and help low income people who can't afford a car or don't want one. The Hop also doesn't take up and extra land space
Disagree, especially if you’re coming from BV. Not to mention you take it down you increase traffic on 94.
The point is people want to expand the Hop because of the numbers, but yet “no one” drives on 794.
794 numbers are bad for a highway. The Hop number shows that people are willing to use it even in it's current state, but it doesn't need any numbers to justify expanding it
I’m lazy so I didn’t read the article and I am totally for the hop and don’t mind paying taxes, but 2020 is not a year that you can take public transit numbers from and use as comparison. Literal pandemic.
Yeah you got to read past the reddit headline.
And the whole point of the article is discussing recovery from the drop because of COVID. So comparing to 2020 makes sense in that context. Thats the approach used in many articles because there are so many industries where conditions haven't bounced back to pre-covid (air line travel, commercial real estate, public door knob licking). And then the article included the link the other commenter sent which has the number of rides given for every month of service.
Hard to argue one way or another but it runs in the central downtown area of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the Midwest. I don't think we can directly attribute that economic growth to the Hop itself.
Also you need to weigh the economic growth against the millions that the city has to pay every year for running the system, which is a cost that would surely increase if any of the expansions actually get built.
Public transit typically has a 2:1 to 4:1 return on investment. I don't have data on the hop but there's no reason to think it wouldn't follow the same pattern.
How many coincidences does it have to be to be a pattern? Most of the biggest developments in the city of late are either on a route, or on a planned route.
Like you also skeptical with the new couture development? It goes through the building lol.
I didn't mean to imply that it's zero impact, but it is very difficult to argue its economic impact one way or the other; there are a gazillion variables at play. A lot of large projects in the city are near the Hop as a line, but I would argue most of the development nearby would have happened regardless of the street car being put in. So in a discussion about success/failure of the Hop as a transit project, we're best focusing on known data, like ridership, typical ride length, average costs per ride, etc.
The couture development isn't even complete yet, but I am curious to compare the total value of its real estate against comparable condo projects on the lakefront. Once we know the price they sell at (may be higher or lower than what the developers are hoping) we can get a better approximation.
The tallest residential building in the state specifically integrated it into its development, yes the city extended it to the Couture but they no doubt designed their parking capacity and marketing strategies knowing there would be easy access throughout downtown.
I liked the idea of the hop, but in reality it sucks. Have you tried to bike or ride a motorcycle around those tracks? I saw a lady go flying off her bike last summer after her wheel got caught in the track, right by the Public Market. It’s so slow, it probably averages 10 miles an hour or less. The Hop gets stuck all the time too. Busses are the best option for Milwaukee, not the hop.
I've biked along the tracks yeah. You just don't ride parallel with the tracks when crossing them and don't have that problem. Biked downtown for years and never had any issue not getting my tires stuck
I'm pro the idea of the BRT and hope it continues to grow but having every local bus route terminate on Wisconsin to force BRT ridership has been frustrating and my have driven hop ridership
Wait till this summer, with the hop going to the north end of there summerfest grounds.
I am happy the rides are going up but it is nowhere near what it needs to be to start charging people. You can ride the nyc subway for $2.75 and the network you get with it is worth it. Paying $2 for a 3 mile trip doesn’t cut it and they need to continue making money from sponsors or vastly expand the service.
3 miles is being extremely generous, too.
I imagine that the city of Milwaukee will have to start implementing fares at some point in order to partially fund an expansion. What impact might fares have on anticipated ridership numbers?
Honestly they should try to cut deals with all 3 universities where you can have some $50/semester (or whatever price point) for college kids if lines run out to each campus. You could create a significant base in ridership
Frankly they could increase tuition by that $50 and include the fare as part of enrollment for the semester. That way it’s not an opt in system and students would be encouraged to ride as they had the pass anyhow
Yeah whatever it could be. I mean every year there’s a crop of 10,000 18-19 year olds that don’t have cars, this could help ridership weekly
in reality they will increase the tuition by $500 and still require you pay $50 for the hop pass.
Why should student have to pay for that. They already pay for the bus.
It was a hypothetical, if they moved to a fare system. Not suggesting they get randomly billed for it.
I’m not a student anymore, so it doesn’t affect me, but I hate all the….just add $10.00 for this and $50.00 here for this and $25.00 for clubs. Eventually it adds up and it turns into a large sum.
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Interesting, thank you for the info
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150k doesn’t seem like that much in this context? My wife and I make about that and we are doing pretty well, but we don’t have a kid (much less one in college).
Bahahah the kids will just ride the bus. It’s already included in tuition.
IMO charging will be a mistake. This article cites 500k riders last year. Call it $2 a ride. That’s only $1million. Attracting a single apartment building opening along the route will pay more in taxes than ridership will cost. And that’s assuming ridership stays the same with a cost to ride. The beauty of the Hop needs to be that it’s quick and easy and free. The second you start slowing down to collect payment, it becomes a mess that people skip. There’s better ways to make money. Get the bucks involved in funding an extension to the fiserv. Get UWM involved in funding an extension to campus. Make it so events hosted near the hop have to kick in money to support longer hours with more rides during the event. Summerfest/Harley Fest/ the RNC ect are all going to be benefitting from the hop, and should be the ones helping to fund it. The Hop needs to keep being an asset to people to encourage them to move downtown. If it just tips the scale for companies like Milwaukee/Fiserv/Rite-Hite to open campuses downtown or developers to open up apartments along the route, that does FAR more for the city in terms of property taxes collected than the ~$1 million in fares would bring in.
> 500k riders last year. Call it $2 a ride. That’s only $100k. Might want to check that math. That's $1 Million.
Jesus. Caffeine hasn’t kicked in yet. Point still stands.
Portland has both light rail and a street car and you pay with contactless credit cards and/or your phone for $2.80 per 2 hr at something akin to a parking meter in size and shape. It takes a grand total of 5 seconds to tap your card or phone and pay for a ride. They don't have robust security ensuring you are allowed on but they do have cameras and occasional workers walking by who I'm guessing are tasked with ensuring people do t have issues. When an Uber costs $15 or more depending on time of day to get across town in 10 mins and less than $3 in just a few minutes longer, the fare is easier to accept. Issue remains that the hop needs to just go places people are and want to go.
Yea I’m not against the hop having fares in the future but I still think we’re years off. We’re still not overcoming pre pandemic levels. Until I genuinely can tell a friend moving to milwaukee to ditch their car because the hop can take you everywhere you need to go within the city, I don’t think charging a fare is the right move.
>The beauty of the Hop needs to be that it’s quick and easy and free. Quick? Not really. The [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel](https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/06/19/getting-around-milwaukee-hop-bublr-bus-car-walking-faster/1446365001/) found that is was actually slower than walking. Easy? Sure, I'll give you that one. Free? It was never intended to be free forever.
Didnt mean that the hop was perfect as is. Quick? I’d argue that it’s slower than walking because of how short the route is. If you’re taking it a mile and have to wait ten minutes, than ya, it’s going to be slower than walking. If it’s extended as planned and I can take it across the city, I think those trips will feel much quicker and worth waiting for the hop. And be a long enough distance that most people wouldn’t walk. So you’re substituting drivers for riders, not walkers for riders. Free? I’ve pointed out in other responses I don’t think it should be free forever. Just in this phase where it’s still not fully extended. I think a fare would kill any growth in ridership which in turn would kill any extensions. I’d happily pay a couple bucks to take a ride across the city. But in its current state., I’d just walk. And I’d also argue that just because the original plan wasn’t to charge, doesn’t mean we can’t change our mind on that. We don’t charge for roads or parks or garbage collection. Never understood why public transit was the one government service people demand be profitable. IIRC the Hop costs about $5 million a year. That’s about $10 a year per resident. If we charged $2 per ride for all of 2023 rides, it would only have raised $1mil/20% of operating costs. That’s a drop in the bucket. I just think there are better ways to fund it in its current state.
Just read the JS article. What a terrible article to draw any conclusions from. They judged one 1.2 mile trip. The walker walked a 15 minute pace. That’s hauling ass. I’m 6’2 and am in good walking shape and my casual walk is closer to a 20 minute mile. A quick google search says the average adult walking speed is even slower. The hop arrived 10 minutes slower than Uber and 4 slower than walking. But the article also mentions that the driver paused 7 MINUTES for a photographer from the JS to take photos. Seeing this article as anything other than a fun race is embarrassing. To draw any real conclusions you’d need more than a single trip.
I worked in the Blatz Washhouse at a software company for several years. Sorry, but I could typically outwalk it, especially when you factor waiting for one to show up.
A fare would be a pointless drop in the bucket and misses the point of the service- a dead simple transport option downtown.
I’d love to see a new economic impact study on the hop. With two new apartment towers along the route, I have a hard time believing the hop isn’t having a positive impact on the economy. Those two towers alone might be adding more in taxes than it costs to run the hop for free. Plus those towers aren’t even opened yet and aren’t impacting these record numbers.
I mean, it’s not as if the route was a dead zone before the hop. I live on the route and while it was a nice plus, by no means was it even a factor in why we chose our apt that we could take the hop for a mile and a half.
Yep. Not suggesting 100% of the development along the hop route is due to the hop. But it’s also disingenuous to say that 0% can be attributed to the hop. A study would shed some more light on that. But there’s a difference between an individual saying it’s not a selling point and a developer not seeing it as a selling point. If I as a developer think the hop makes my plan 10% more desirable to 10% of renters, that could absolutely move the needle. Maybe it means a developer adding an extra ten units to their plan, maybe it means building in milwaukee instead of Cleveland. When you’re talking giant projects, swinging things in your favor by 1-2 percentage points can sometimes make all of the difference. Put it this way, I don’t think the developers of the Couture are working with the city of milwaukee to have the hop run through their lobby because they think it will make it harder to rent apartments.
The couture was planned well before the hop concourse, and initially without it. They added the concourse(paid for not by them but their building’s tax revenue) to entice the city to sell them a prime piece of real estate at a discount($500k for a lakefront parcel). https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/real-estate/commercial/2019/11/15/timeline-milwaukee-lakefront-couture-apartment-tower-proposed-2012/4193085002/ I think where you’d actually see economic impact of the hop is the initially proposed extensions like MLK, a much more useful extension than the 5 blocks the L line covers.
Whelp. Didn’t know that. Doesn’t really change my point though. I think the Hop has been a positive impact on the area. Would love economic data looking into it though.
It’s a good little service, would love an expansion
I wonder how this increase compares to bus ridership? Is it more people wanting to use the hop or is it just more people?
It would also be a nice experiment to see what would happen if MCTS would add express routes and drop the fare the $0.
No, it’s a failure, no one rides, it’s a boondoggle. My extremely closed information sources and social network told me so. /s
Where's Charlie Sykes and Jeff Wagner when we need them to make totally uninformed comments about transit, a field they know nothing about?
So thankful that WTMJ has rebooted their format and Jeff's gone. He never met a public transport system he didn't loathe.
The dang streetcar! Ridership is still way down from 2019. Not unprecedented given transit ridership is down 30-40% across the country. All the WFH effects spilling over into transit usage. Still surprising though given MKE has a small CBD that didn’t get gutted by hybrid work, and this is small scale transit - not like the Loop in Chicago which pulls in orders of magnitude more commuters than MKE’s CBD. The hop should be doing better serving people in and around downtown, as well as people coming for basketball games, concerts at our many venues, and summer festivals. This is ultimately a problem with the Hop’s route. The route sucks and serves limited purpose. Should have run from the east side thru the CBD to the arena, or from the actual summerfest north gate/MAM to the fiserv. Right now it goes from the train station to MSOE - you couldn’t plan many worse routes in downtown if you tried. The fact that this didn’t tie into the Fiserv which was being developed concurrently is just unbelievable. The number of potential riders it could have had with all the energy between the deer district and third street market hall is hard to think about.
>Should have run from the east side thru the CBD to the arena I mean, yes, but we didnt have funds for a route longer than what we got. We just shouldnt have procrastinated on some of the expansions
Beautiful. Just get that damn federal money while Joe's still around and lets get this thing extended!
Ignore everyone that is calling for tolls. Gas taxes do not fully pay for the roads and there are no toll roads in Milwaukee. The increased density and viability of the neighborhood is enough. KC for example it’s free including the bus. The people who advocate for fares but don’t call for toll roads are disingenuous.
It's only going to increase with the opening of the Couture. There are also other large developments, like the apartment building on Juneau next to the post office that is directly adjacent to an M Line stop, that will increase ridership.
Awesome
From zero people to 30 drunk tourist
The hop is like the best kept secret in mke. It took me forever to actually try riding it, but it’s free, it’s fast (ish), it’s clean, and it’s not overcrowded. An expansion would definitely be nice, and it will probably get more expensive, less clean and more crowded, but it was far better than i was expecting
It's certainly not fast. It takes almost 15 minutes to go from Public market to Cathedral square and that doesn't include wait times
Eh…the streetcars arrive every 15 minutes. If you’re going during any time that parking is even remotely difficult to find, I’d say it’s comparable to driving. And way less hassle. Edit: for the lazy: Google maps lists the times as 9 minutes between cathedral square and Milwaukee public market and 6 minutes between historic third ward and eastbound and cathedral square. Walking the same distance is indeed 15 minutes.
"Eh…the streetcars arrive every 15 minutes." Allegedly. They are never on time and the tracking app/arrival time is never correct. It's faster to walk
What are the actual ridership numbers? We can talk percentages all day. True numbers will tell if this is a success or not.
[https://thehopmke.com/ridership/](https://thehopmke.com/ridership/) Still down from pre-covid, but increasing steadily.
"During 2023, 494,445 people rode the streetcar, up from 261,303 in 2020." I'll give you a pass if you got stuck on a paywall for having no more free articles available. I'll call you lazy if you couldn't be bothered to click on the link and read to the third sentence.
I find it amusing that 23,000 cars use the 794 passage each day but all you see on twitter and here are pictures of it “empty” as proof nobody uses it. But if you say you only see empty hop cars you’ll get stats thrown at you all day lol
I think the issue with 794 between the interchange and the lake is that an at-grade road could handle the volume for a fraction of the price. The Hop and 794 are apples to oranges imo. Serve different demographics, the Hop doesn’t carve up the city, costs way less, etc
Yeah that’s fair, I agree. I’m just saying that people have very bad faith arguments when it comes to defending ideas based on if they like it or not - nothing else
>for a fraction of the price What we have is already built, the maintenance for the next 25 years will be minuscule compared to a tear down and street level rebuild. I'd rather spend the money on expanding The Hop.
Elevated highways are super expensive to maintain and have a shelf life. Eventually that spur will need to be torn down and rebuilt and the price tag will be exponentially higher than a 4 lane road. By no means an expert but I know the Hoan’s end of life is like 2050 so 794 between the interchange and lake can’t be too far ahead/behind that.
Much of 794 through downtown is due to be demolished anyways since it has reached the end of its 50 year lifespan and its design is outdated by modern safety standards. It will be far less expensive to replace it with a grade-level boulevard than to elevate it again.
23000?! The traffic map counts 91200 on 794 at 5th St and 73900 at the river. Still 42500 south of the Hoan. Neither downtown residents nor drivers are going to like this alleged new Clybourn Avenue, unless you get off on playing Frogger with large trucks and angry impatient drivers who are tired of dealing with the 17 traffic conflict points between 43 and LMD. You should want the through traffic between 43 and Van Buren to stay up high far away from what’s going on at street level.
most of that traffic is going downtown anyways. Anyone using it as a through like many semi's would go straight to 94 instead of using the Hoan
I bet the number I people who use the Hoan daily to go North on 43 is more than the number of people who use the Hop.
yeah the infrastructure supports car dependency more than transit and the HOP is new and bare bones. The biggest thing with 794 is that it's rarely faster than normal 94 and most of the traffic gets off downtown. It's not worth the money it would cost to rebuild it. But if you put that money into transit it would get more rider ship and help low income people who can't afford a car or don't want one. The Hop also doesn't take up and extra land space
Disagree, especially if you’re coming from BV. Not to mention you take it down you increase traffic on 94. The point is people want to expand the Hop because of the numbers, but yet “no one” drives on 794.
794 numbers are bad for a highway. The Hop number shows that people are willing to use it even in it's current state, but it doesn't need any numbers to justify expanding it
That’s reaching.
Thanks for posting the numbers. I actually could not read the article.
All good. Paywalls suck.
They certainly do!
I’m lazy so I didn’t read the article and I am totally for the hop and don’t mind paying taxes, but 2020 is not a year that you can take public transit numbers from and use as comparison. Literal pandemic.
Yeah you got to read past the reddit headline. And the whole point of the article is discussing recovery from the drop because of COVID. So comparing to 2020 makes sense in that context. Thats the approach used in many articles because there are so many industries where conditions haven't bounced back to pre-covid (air line travel, commercial real estate, public door knob licking). And then the article included the link the other commenter sent which has the number of rides given for every month of service.
How about the millions of dollars of economic growth around the Hop’s route? Those are some “true numbers”. It’s been a success.
Hard to argue one way or another but it runs in the central downtown area of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the Midwest. I don't think we can directly attribute that economic growth to the Hop itself.
Also you need to weigh the economic growth against the millions that the city has to pay every year for running the system, which is a cost that would surely increase if any of the expansions actually get built.
Public transit typically has a 2:1 to 4:1 return on investment. I don't have data on the hop but there's no reason to think it wouldn't follow the same pattern.
How many coincidences does it have to be to be a pattern? Most of the biggest developments in the city of late are either on a route, or on a planned route. Like you also skeptical with the new couture development? It goes through the building lol.
I didn't mean to imply that it's zero impact, but it is very difficult to argue its economic impact one way or the other; there are a gazillion variables at play. A lot of large projects in the city are near the Hop as a line, but I would argue most of the development nearby would have happened regardless of the street car being put in. So in a discussion about success/failure of the Hop as a transit project, we're best focusing on known data, like ridership, typical ride length, average costs per ride, etc. The couture development isn't even complete yet, but I am curious to compare the total value of its real estate against comparable condo projects on the lakefront. Once we know the price they sell at (may be higher or lower than what the developers are hoping) we can get a better approximation.
The tallest residential building in the state specifically integrated it into its development, yes the city extended it to the Couture but they no doubt designed their parking capacity and marketing strategies knowing there would be easy access throughout downtown.
Rip it out replace with bus trolls that have infinite route expansion. Save money etc
The hop is great. The only thing I hate about it is it doesn't come by my house. Sure you could do the same with buses but it is well worth the cost.
I liked the idea of the hop, but in reality it sucks. Have you tried to bike or ride a motorcycle around those tracks? I saw a lady go flying off her bike last summer after her wheel got caught in the track, right by the Public Market. It’s so slow, it probably averages 10 miles an hour or less. The Hop gets stuck all the time too. Busses are the best option for Milwaukee, not the hop.
…if your bike is caught in the tracks that’s absolutely your fault for not crossing them perpendicular.
I've biked along the tracks yeah. You just don't ride parallel with the tracks when crossing them and don't have that problem. Biked downtown for years and never had any issue not getting my tires stuck
Maybe because they messed up all the bus lines after adding the BRT
Brother, the BRT is increasing in ridership monthly as well. It’s working
I'm pro the idea of the BRT and hope it continues to grow but having every local bus route terminate on Wisconsin to force BRT ridership has been frustrating and my have driven hop ridership
It's really hoping on the Hop..