Milwaukee is opening a streetcar line to a construction site one day a week during Wisconsin winter. Your tax dollars at work.
“When federal money is involved, local officials often make odd decisions because they are not really accountable for the spending,” writes Mike Nichols, president of the Badger Institute, a Wisconsin-based free-market think tank. A great example of that phenomenon is taking place right now in Milwaukee.
Milwaukee has a streetcar called “The Hop” that opened in 2018. It has one line that covers 2.1 miles and functions more as a novelty than as effective transportation. No fares are charged to passengers, but it cost $15.03 per ride in operating expenses in 2021. Even if total yearly ridership gets up to 500,000 (it was only 372,000 last year, or about 1,000 per day in a city of over 550,000 people), that would still come out to about $10 per ride.
To keep that federal money coming in, the streetcar will begin operating this winter through a construction site only on Sundays.
A federal grant supporting the project stipulates that service on a 0.4-mile branch line begin on October 31 of this year. It’s supposed to connect to a residential tower, but that project is still under construction.
The residential tower is on the site of a previous federally funded Milwaukee transportation project, the Downtown Transit Center. Nichols writes:
The transit center sat empty for a quarter-century until the county agreed to sell it . . . for $500,000. Only there was a catch. Because it was developed using federal money, the deal needed the approval of the Federal Transit Administration.
The FTA did approve the sale, but only on the condition the site be used for “another (transportation) capital project” — the streetcar.
So one federally funded boondoggle led to another federally funded boondoggle, and now to keep the money coming in, Milwaukee is opening a streetcar line to a construction site one day a week during Wisconsin winter. Your tax dollars at work.