Signs of an RTA revival?

A hostile state legislature has loomed over Madison’s transit debate for years.

Some transportation planets are aligning in interesting ways in the coming weeks. September 1 marks the beginning of the latest Smart Trips challenge, one of the Greater Madison Metropolitan Planning Organization’s periodic month-long efforts, through its Round Trip commuting options program, to encourage alternatives to driving.

Once that challenge ends another will begin: the national Week Without Driving (September 30 - October 6) that several area groups are using to highlight the difficulties of getting around our communities without a car.

And more or less mid-way through this five-week stretch Madison Metro Transit is set to inaugurate its first (East-West) Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line on September 22, marking the arrival, at long last, of greater Madison’s first really serious attempt to make transit an attractive alternative to driving.

That BRT launch is the culmination of a decades-long effort by the city of Madison and Dane County to graduate from a basic municipal bus service to something more like a regional rapid transit system. Notably, after years of transit studies exploring all manner of different corridor options and routing scenarios, the new East-West BRT line basically replicates the proposed light rail corridor with which that exploration began in the early 1990s, as if to bring a thirty-year process full-circle, albeit with a different transit technology.

That area conversation about transit gave rise, for a brief moment fourteen years or so ago, to a Dane County regional transit authority (RTA) designed to fund and administer a multi-modal transit system on a regional basis. That RTA lasted little more than a year before the Wisconsin state legislature withdrew its legal authorization and greater Madison’s most ambitious dreams of regional transit based on rail evaporated.

Although the concept of BRT had surfaced occasionally throughout the various transit studies focused on rail, BRT planning only began in earnest after the demise of the RTA and amid the ruins of those earlier rail plans. While it built on some elements of the latter, it mostly represented a new project driven as much by Metro’s particular operational needs as by any grand regional transit vision.

Crucially, although recurrent talk of a new RTA push accompanied the BRT study and development process, BRT proved possible to plan and build without an RTA. Yet now the arrival of BRT is being accompanied by a tentative revival of the RTA discussion, and of the idea of a regional sales tax to fund transit.

Some of that discussion is occasioned by BRT itself—by questions of financing its future expansion or improved local connections with it. Some of it is driven by the search for new transit funding options amid the Madison budget crisis that forms an unhappy backdrop to BRT start-up. In either case, those discussions are fueled by hope that a newly redistricted state legislature may look more favorably on RTAs.

Years ago DART helped sponsor the Dane Transit Coalition (or DaneTransit, for short) to support the then-nascent RTA. The coalition wound down not long after the RTA itself, but not before generating some publicity materials and the website which DART now shares.

DART kept the site live (if mostly dormant) partly because we liked many of its elements and didn’t want to waste them and partly in hopes, however vague, for possible future use. We’ve updated it occasionally, redesigning and repurposing it as an “online community” for discussion of the RTA idea, but haven’t attracted much traffic to it—or really tried to. It’s stayed up mainly for the day an RTA becomes a serious possibility once again.

Could it be that day has finally come?

A full-fledged RTA campaign may be premature, given the uncertainties of state legislative politics. Until the current Republican roadblock ends, any RTA discussion is moot.

But some preliminary and initial planning of such a campaign, accompanied by discussion of what an RTA might look like, seems not just possible but even prudent, if only to be ready should the political winds shift. The Dane Transit Coalition could, if nothing else, provide a name and a place for that exploratory renewal of an RTA conversation even if the resulting coalition eventually migrates to another platform or group.

It may be a bit of a reach to frame re-booting DaneTransit as a way to observe Smart Trips Challenge month or the Week Without Driving (DART is working on some ways of supporting these events more directly). It’s less of a reach to cast doing so as a way to celebrate the inauguration of BRT.

But it’s not a reach at all to see the confluence of these events with the uptick in local interest in RTAs as a signal that the time is ripe to resume a focused, deliberate, and strategic community discussion of RTAs. DART has, as noted, some tools to facilitate that discussion. We’re interested in hearing from anyone else who would like to help us do so in the weeks and months ahead.