City of Madison
Revised shelter design for State Street
Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway has responded to concerns about State Street bus stops with a smaller, sleeker design, above, for the bus shelters.
Do we really have to be all “Madison” about this, people?
The city is on the verge of doing something historic. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) will be the biggest improvement in urban mobility in these parts in at least a couple of generations. The high comfort, high frequency, limited-stop system will compete well versus car travel and provide a lot more capacity for movement through the narrow isthmus.
The initial phase will run from East Towne to West Towne with 30 stops along a 15-mile route. The planning and approvals were done with lightning speed by Madison standards and the funding is already secured.
But there’s a catch. Of course there is. It wouldn’t be Madison if there wasn’t. To be “Madisoned” is to see a good idea get ground to a pulp in the city’s culture of nitpicking and endless debate. Sure, it’s who we are and it’s even kind of charming, but only to a point. Just as a good snowball fight is fun until somebody loses an eye, being Madisoned is entertaining until a positive development gets crushed under its weight.
The catch is that a couple of the stops for the BRT would be on upper State Street, where the businesses are worried that they will block out storefronts, eliminate the possibility of sidewalk cafes and just generally be out of scale with the street.
I thought they made good points and so I’ve been supportive of moving the stops a few hundred feet away to Johnson and Gorham streets.
Since I wrote that, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway has responded to the business concerns with a sleek, much smaller design for the stops. But Downtown Madison Inc. and the Business Improvement District don’t think that goes far enough. They want the stops off the street altogether.
The mayor seems dug in on this for reasons that I can’t quite comprehend. She makes an “equity” argument. But I can’t see what difference it makes whether the stops are on State Street itself or just around the corner on the cross streets. Moreover, if the measure of racial equity is how many stops there are on State Street, well then, what about her promise that BRT will reduce the total number of all bus stops on the street from the current 10 down to just those two? Wouldn’t that represent an 80 percent reduction in equity?
And, yet, it seems to me like the stop redesign addresses most of the legitimate concerns of the businesses. I would have hoped that they would compromise and commit to making it work. But they are also dug in and so, there ya go.
In the last analysis, I still don’t think that two stops on a 30-stop, 15-mile route are going to make or break the BRT system. If I were still a pol I might want to stop spending political capital on this and just go with the Johnson and Gorham stops with a promise to revisit the siting after a couple of years.
Yeah, I think the business owners are being a little unreasonable, but they’ve put up with a lot the last year and a half. Moving the stops a few hundred feet isn’t all that much to ask if it increases their confidence in investing their time and money on the street.
