It's taken decades, but here comes BRT
The Bus Rapid Transit system Madison will launch on Sunday has been brewing longer than much of the city is old enough to remember.
It's been more than 40 years since local transportation planners first pitched the idea of building BRT — a specialized bus system that is intended to be faster and more reliable than ordinary bus service — through the Isthmus.
In 1981, the since-dissolved Dane County Regional Planning Commission called for preliminary planning work to begin on a "13-mile exclusive right-of-way system which could be used by light rail or bus." Later transit studies were completed about every decade between 1992 and 2013, as Madison's Downtown grew denser and its neighborhoods sprawled outward.
The studies' goal, said Mike Cechvala, Metro Transit's capital projects manager, was "to provide transit systems to give people better ways of moving around our city." Though the studies each recommended different solutions, they all recognized the same problem: Madison's population was increasing, and the size of the Isthmus was not. Unless the city provided more alternatives to driving, congestion would keep getting worse.
And so, after several false starts and a lot of disagreement, Madison got BRT.
Transit in Madison has long been politically divisive. BRT was no exception. Residents' opinions have run the gamut as the new bus system inched from concept to reality. Some in the city believe they and their neighbors will benefit from having a more convenient way to get around without a car. Others fear it will be an impediment to drivers or a drain on the city's limited resources.
But in the days before the 15-mile east-west BRT route launches, the city officials and staff who championed it still believe strongly in their cause.
"We've made a really significant investment in both the economy and the quality of life in Madison," Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said.
"Even if you are a person who will never take the bus and will only ever drive, your life will be better because there is Bus Rapid Transit, because it will reduce congestion on our streets," Rhodes-Conway said.
From then to now
Madison officials and transportation advocates have been pushing for generations for a more efficient form of transit that would make it easier for people to get to, and through, Downtown.
The city proposed light rail. Then commuter rail. Then streetcars. None of the projects made it off the drawing board, in large part because they were too expensive for a city of Madison's size. They were also, invariably, politically divisive.
In the early 2010s, embattled city planners backed off some of their loftier transit ambitions and took a closer look at BRT. Other cities were trying it, and many were finding that it offered similar efficiency to a rail system for a much lower price.
A study that ran from 2011 to 2013 tried to answer two of the most pressing questions, Cechvala said: Could BRT work in Madison? And would the city be able to afford it?
The answers, he said, were encouraging. The study, which identified the east-west corridor where Route A will go into service this weekend and the north-south corridor coming next, determined that BRT "does seem to solve the problems we're trying to solve," Cechvala said. "It does seem possible on the streets and networks that we have."
To onlookers, the process after that may have seemed to move at a snail's pace, stretching more than a decade from the study's release to BRT's launch this weekend. But Cechvala said the city moved "deliberately" through the many steps it took to put a transit service into operation. All through the process, BRT kept making sense, Cechvala said. "It kind of fell into place."
Madison's City Council directed staff to proceed with planning work for the east-west line in 2017. It approved the purchase of the first 27 fully electric buses for the route in 2022. Construction began later that year . Only then, for many BRT proponents, did it start to feel real.
"We have talked about so many different ways of moving people, and somebody comes up with an idea, and everybody's very excited about it, and then it never happens," said Robbie Webber, a former council member who serves on the city's Transportation Commission.
"To see something finally, finally happen is just such a relief," Webber said. "We're finally getting something done."
BRT's big break
After Rhodes-Conway was elected mayor in 2019, she came into office worried about how Madison would fare in the long run if the city couldn't solve its transit problem.
"What I saw was that the bus system was sort of languishing," she said. "We weren't moving the transit system into the future like we needed to be."
From Rhodes-Conway's perspective, doing nothing wasn't an option. Without more transit, "we were going to start running into problems that other communities have experienced," she said. BRT seemed feasible. The serious planning work was already well underway.
"The thing that I really did was say, 'Yes, go. Do it,'" she said.
Not everyone thought it was the right choice. Against some drivers' wishes, the city reduced the number of lanes available to cars along parts of the BRT route to make room for the more frequent buses. The reorganization of Metro Transit's bus routes last year — separate from BRT but nevertheless part of a systemic redesign of the busing system — frustrated some riders. And the city's decision to put BRT stops on the first few blocks of State Street drew pushback even from some supporters of the new system who thought it would be a mistake to run transit through the popular area and risk impeding pedestrian and bicycle access.
The project's price tag, which ultimately came out to about $194 million, also has been a source of division as Madison seeks to close a $22 million budget gap for 2025. But most of the project's funding came from the federal government, including roughly $100 million from the Small Starts Program, which helps cities pay for transit initiatives. The city doesn't expect BRT to increase Metro Transit's annual operating costs.
In total, the city approved just less than $22 million in general obligation borrowing to pay for BRT. Metro estimates that it would've taken on about $15 million in general obligation borrowing between 2022 and 2024 for regular bus replacements, which were no longer needed after the city used federal grants to buy electric buses. By that measure, BRT resulted in a net debt increase of nearly $7 million.
The city's plan always was to apply for Small Starts funding, Rhodes-Conway said. But the passage of the $1 trillion infrastructure law in 2021 put more money into the program, boosting Madison's chances of securing federal funding.
"Historically, you would get yourself on the list, and you'd hope you scored high enough to be close enough to the top of the list that the pot of money that they had would reach down to you," Rhodes-Conway said.
She believes BRT would've gone forward either way. "But it likely would have taken longer," she said. "And I don't know that we would have been able to do electric vehicles."
Rhodes-Conway acknowledges that BRT has brought a lot of change to Madison at once. She's hopeful that people will come to embrace it.
"In every other city that has adopted Bus Rapid Transit, there has been initial resistance and confusion, and after the system rolls out, people understand it and they like it and they ride it," she said.
She had one last message for those who just aren't convinced.
"Give it a chance."
Growth and development reporter
