This year was nearly the end of the line for a Milwaukee County bus route used largely to ferry residents of Milwaukee’s inner city to jobs that would otherwise be miles out of reach.
The county’s bus Route 61, although not even four years old, has more than 800 riders on average for its weekday trips to commercial districts found along Appleton Avenue, both in Milwaukee and across the county line in Menomonee Falls. More impressive, the number of people taking this so-called JobLine has increased even as passenger figures for the entire Milwaukee County Transit System have generally declined.
It’s a story that policymakers would seem eager to embrace: a shining example of public transportation living up to its promise to bring people to jobs that would otherwise be too far afield. But, even with such patent benefits, local officials struggled this year to keep the Route 61 JobLine going. As is always the case with public transportation, the biggest source of trouble has been funding. Route 61 was set up in 2015, alongside two other JobLines—routes 6 and 279—using money from a lawsuit settlement reached over the state’s reconstruction of the massive Zoo Interchange.
Activist groups, such as the Milwaukee Inner-City Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH) and the Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin (BHCW), argued that the Zoo Interchange project, taking place well west of Milwaukee’s Downtown, would primarily benefit affluent residents of the city’s suburbs. In a settlement reached with the state, the plaintiffs secured $11.5 million for the new JobLines. The money, though, had to be all spent by a specific date: Oct. 1 of this year.
Well before that deadline, local officials had recognized Route 279 wasn’t going to work. The line was canceled in 2016 after generating little interest in its daily trips to an industrial park in Menomonee Falls. The same fate now awaits Route 6, which attracts only between 100 and 150 riders a day for its journeys southwest of Milwaukee to the city of New Berlin.
Getting to Work
With such low passenger numbers, Route 6 probably wasn’t worth keeping around, according to a study released in October by the UW-Milwaukee Center for Economic Development. Route 61, though, is another matter. The Route 61 line, according to the study, provides many inner-city residents with their sole means of getting to nearly 700 employers with 15,000 jobs. They include many of the biggest names in retail—Walmart, Home Depot, Target, Costco, Menards and Kohl’s—as well as manufacturers, various sorts of professional-service firms, smaller shops and restaurants.
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Crucially, the biggest employer served by the route—Alto-Shaam Inc., which has about 360 people on its payroll making commercial-kitchen equipment—is in Waukesha County. As noted in the UWM report, the only businesses at risk of losing workers, should Route 61 be shut down, would be those operating across the county line. Companies in Milwaukee County could still be reached by other routes.
Joel Rast, director of the UWM Center for Economic Development and author of the report, said one of the biggest lessons he learned from studying the passenger numbers is that route design matters a lot. Route 6 was a long haul and took riders on a meandering path through the New Berlin Industrial Park. Route 61 is similarly long, but it goes through parts of the city that give people lots of reasons to hop on and off. There are not just jobs, but also places for shopping and food. “So, you have to ask yourself, ‘What are the destinations?’,” Rast said, “and configure a route that people are going to want to get to.”
Rast’s study further revealed just how dependent passengers are on the JobLines. A survey of riders found that only 26% had a driver’s license and 14% had access to a car. A full two thirds of the passengers surveyed reported taking the JobLines to get to jobs. “I think that’s appreciated by very few people and only by certain lawmakers, the fact that poor people don’t always have cars, or they don’t have a driver’s license in some cases,” Rast said. “And then these people are very limited in the job opportunities they can get to.”
Waukesha Still on the Line
County officials’ latest budget doesn’t actually save Route 61. Instead, it modifies two existing lines—Routes 57 and 22—to ensure riders can continue getting to the same employers. Most important of all, the plan continues service into Waukesha County until August 2019, when county officials will have to take yet another look at the budget.
County Supervisor Marina Dimitrijevic said she and other county officials were able to continue the service in part because of additional transportation-aid money Milwaukee County is receiving from the state. Keeping it going next year will most likely require more from the same source. Dimitrijevic said she thinks county officials have a good case to make for receiving additional assistance. Republicans in Madison have gone to great lengths in recent years to try to get unemployed people off public benefits as quickly possible and back into the workforce. But if people are going to be expected to work, Dimitrijevic said, they have to have a reliable means of getting to a job. “Anyone who runs on getting people to work and economic development must also support public transit,” she said. “The two go hand and hand.”
Dimitrijevic and Rast also said Milwaukee County officials may have to look for support a little closer to home. The two noted that both Waukesha and Washington counties have benefitted from the Route 61 line, yet they have contributed nothing toward it. The time may have come, they said, for the formation of some sort of regional partnership that helps ensure that places with high demand for employees are paying some of the cost of getting people to work. “It’s simply not fair to be footing the entire bill to get employees out to employers in Waukesha County and other places that can’t find enough workers,” Rast said.
But Allison Bussler, Waukesha County’s director of public works, said she and her colleagues are not quite ready to add a JobLine to the bus routes Waukesha County now helps Milwaukee County fund. In talks with Milwaukee County Transit officials, Bussler said she has learned that passenger data suggest most riders of Route 61 were getting off the bus in Milwaukee County rather than staying to cross the county line. She also said employer surveys, which were conducted by the Waukesha County Business Alliance, rank a lack of public transportation very low on the list of reasons why local companies sometimes struggle to find workers.
However the current and future JobLines are to be paid for, Rast said the story of Route 61 has given skeptics reason to doubt at least some of their convictions about public transportation. Above all, it has shown that there can be great demand for a well-designed service that helps people show up for work. “I think this was an important first step,” he said. “It was at least partially successful, and we can do even better based on whatever we learned from this experience.”
