A sneak peek at Metro Transit's first Bus Rapid Transit line (2024)

About 25 Madison city officials and journalists got a sneak peek at Madison’s first Bus Rapid Transit route Tuesday, traveling and making selected stops between the Near East and Far West sides.

The $194 million Route A, officially opening to the public on Sept. 22, will stretch 15 miles from Sun Prairie and Hanson Road on the east to Junction Road on the west. A second, north-south route is expected to be operational by 2028, and the entire system is expected to cost about $355 million to build, with federal dollars covering about 75% of that, city officials say.

The center-road bus stop on East Washington Avenue at Baldwin Street where riders boarded Tuesday includes push-button heaters, seats, trash cans, screens that will show arrival times for the next bus — expected to run every 7½ minutes — a system under the platform to melt snow in the winter and solar panels on the roof that feed electricity back into the grid, according to city Transportation Department planner Liz Callin. Thirty-six of the 43 new shelters will have solar panels, she said.

Callin said the shelters and the bus system they serve “feel like light rail, which is really the goal of BRT,” although a light rail system would be from eight to 12 times more expensive than BRT, according to city transportation director Tom Lynch.

At the ends of the east-west route are chargers that extend from an overhang and connect to rails on the top of the new, 60-foot articulated BRT buses. A battery fully charged overnight at Metro’s bus depot will last several hours, depending on what the bus is being used for, according to Metro operations manager Phil Gadke, but the chargers seemed like a prudent idea given that Wisconsin’s weather can affect battery performance, Lynch said.

The route-end chargers, which will also be installed on the coming north-south route, add about 1% of battery life every 30 seconds and will be deployed for 10 to 20 minutes before a bus turns around to go back or is deployed to another route, Gadke said.

As Metro gears up for the full Route A rollout, it’s in the midst of training 300 drivers, switching to a new fare card system and adopting a new bus-tracking system — work Lynch compared to “trying to land three airplanes on the same runway at the same time.”

Tuesday’s trip didn’t include a full complement of stops, and none that would provide a dry run of some of the unusual traffic maneuvers other motorists will have to get used to with BRT.

In particular, at some intersections, traffic waiting to turn left will be to the right of a bus that intends to go straight. In most cases, the left-turning drivers will get to go first, signaled by traditional left-turn arrows, Gadke said. Bus drivers will obey a separate white-lighted system, he said, with a horizontal line meaning stop, a vertical line go, and a triangle equivalent to a yellow light on traditional stoplights.

“We have been practicing it,” Gadke said. “It seems to work really well.”

Still $2 per ride

Cost to ride BRT will be the same as riding the current system: $2 per ride, with a variety of pass and targeted-price options. Initially, riders will use cards loaded with value and single-ride tickets purchased at stations to board the buses, which are equipped with scanners at their three entrances on the right side and two on the left. Metro hopes in the future to allow people to use credit cards or services like Apple Pay to pay on the bus. Drivers will not be responsible for collecting fares in cash.

To cut down on the possibility that some will ride without paying — which has become a major problem with New York City’s bus system — Metro spokesperson Mick Rusch said a recording will be played on the bus reminding people to swipe their fare cards, and drivers will be able to see the other entrances using cameras mounted inside the bus.

He said that drivers will be trained to alert their supervisors if they have passengers who are regularly failing to pay, and video recordings from inside the buses could be used to identify repeat non-payers. But he said bus drivers will not be responsible for confronting passengers who don’t pay and won’t stop the bus and get off schedule to remind people to pay.

The BRT lanes align

BRT has been in the planning stages for more than a decade, according to Lynch, but it got a boost with bus enthusiast Satya Rhodes-Conway’s election as mayor in 2019 and a federal infrastructure law in 2021 that doled out more than $1 trillion to fund infrastructure needs nationwide.

Riders are promised shorter travel times that especially benefit Madison’s low-wage workers. Detractors have pointed to worries about the system’s cost, that bus stops won’t be as close to riders as they used to be and that dedicated bus lanes will slow down and disrupt other vehicle traffic.

Madison residents will decide in November whether to approve a $22 million funding referendum to cover structural city budget deficits years in the making, but city officials say BRT’s operational costs will be the same as Metro’s current, traditional system and that only about 6% of the initial BRT route’s cost is made up of city borrowing.

Editor's note: A photo caption accompanying this story inaccurately quoted Ald. Derek Field and has been corrected.