David Michael Miller
On a recent bus trip to visit her daughter in La Crosse, Gerrie Martini came across what would be an amazing sight for many in Madison: a modern, indoor bus station.
Although La Crosse has a population of only 50,000, people waiting to catch a bus there have a comfortable place to get out of the elements.
“There’s a person there. Can you imagine, a real person that sells you bus tickets?” she says. “And there are bathrooms and machines with refreshments and drinks.”
Not so in Madison. Here, buses pick up and drop off on the curb in front of the Chazen Museum of Art on University Avenue and at the Dutch Mill Park and Ride on the city’s southeast side.
Martini doesn’t understand why Madison can’t have something similar. “It just seems that with all the students we have we should have a place to get out of the weather,” Martini says. “At the Chazen, there aren’t even benches. You have to sit on the retaining wall. It’s just deplorable.”
Martini isn’t the only one who feels this way.
“It’s embarrassing that Wisconsin’s capital city has no inner-city bus station of any sort,” says Ald. Mike Verveer. “If it wasn’t for the Chazen and Dutch Mill Park and Ride, the buses would be stopping at a street corner here and there.”
Since the Badger Bus Depot on West Washington Avenue closed in August 2009, Madison has been without a station where people can wait for buses to take them to other cities. The main bus companies serving the city — Badger Bus, Van Galder and Mega Bus — make stops downtown at Chazen and at Dutch Mill.
City planners have been looking at finding a new location for a bus depot, but it hasn’t been a high priority in recent budget cycles.
For a while, there was a proposal to put the station on the ground floor of an apartment complex now under construction at Bedford Street between West Mifflin Street and West Washington Avenue. But the developer eventually decided against it.
“The short story is the developer doesn’t want to be in the bus business, but it was a nice fit for that piece of land,” says city planner David Trowbridge. “The cost of the bus terminal piece, just to build it, was $10 million. Nobody was willing to step up with that cost. The development morphed into something else.”
Since then, city officials have turned their attention to the city’s own property. The Madison Parking Utility garage located at Lake Street near the campus end of State Street is slated to be rebuilt in five to 10 years.
“The idea is, why don’t we incorporate a bus terminal and put parking above that and maybe even apartments above that,” says Trowbridge. “There’d be parking for half a dozen to 10 buses. There’d be a waiting area separated from the fumes, maybe even a coffee shop, who knows?”
For now, the idea is very much just a concept, with no formal proposals on the table, and more importantly, no funding identified. The parking utility is currently focused on replacing the Government East garage, as part of the Judge Doyle Square project. It is expected to kick in about $20 million for that.
The replacement of the Lake Street garage has been delayed by at least five years because the city proposes building a new, 600-stall garage on East Washington Avenue to accommodate development there, Verveer says.
Nice bus depots with amenities like the one in La Crosse are usually built by municipalities, not bus companies, which “show no interest in pursuing a facility,” he adds.
For now, bus riders in Madison will be forced to wait for the bus on the sidewalk of University Avenue, in the rain, heat, cold and snow.
“It seems that we’ve all agreed we have no better option for the foreseeable future,” Verveer says. “Until we get one again, [the bus stop] will remain the Chazen.”