Five years is a long time to wait for a streetcar. But when daily service on The Hop’s much-delayed L Line finally arrived this spring, passengers were ready.
Streetcar ridership jumped 30% during Summerfest, even as attendance fell 11% at this year’s rain-soaked Big Gig. Ridership was up for other festivals and lakefront events as well.
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The L (for Lakefront) Line is the first addition to The Hop’s original M (for Main) Line, which debuted in fall 2018. Plans called for the L Line to start service the following year, and most of its tracks were built by then. But those plans depended on completion of a transit concourse in The Couture, a lakefront apartment tower and retail complex that faced repeated construction delays. When that concourse still wasn’t done by fall 2023, the L Line started Sunday-only service to avoid losing federal funding.
Regular L Line service started April 11, drawing 11,109 passengers in its first two months. Then, on June 15, streetcar management combined the L and M lines into a summer-only F (for Festivals) Line, with all streetcars stopping at all stations.
The new service made its mark during Summerfest, when ridership surged from 21,780 on the M Line for those three weekends in 2023 to 28,383 on the F Line. Of the 6,603 additional riders, 3,872 boarded at The Couture’s new Lakefront stop.
But July was more disappointing, with total ridership dipping 3%. That included a 28% drop during the Republican National Convention, when local residents avoided Downtown and visitors rode chartered buses. RNC security preparations also dragged ridership down 22% for Bastille Days, usually The Hop’s best weekend.
At the same time, commuters were complaining that the F Line setup was adding as much as 10 minutes to their weekday trips to work, leading the Common Council to order an early return to separate L and M lines, starting Aug. 11.
However, the F Line could be back in a more limited form next summer, streetcar manager Andrew Davis says.
“I think that there’s a place for it,” Davis says. That might mean running the combined service only on festival weekends, but “it wouldn’t be throughout the week,” he adds.
The L Line carried 5,301 passengers during the last part of August. Total streetcar ridership rose 7%, to 260,049, from April through August.
While the Lakefront stop was busiest during Summerfest, it registered smaller spikes for other lakefront events, including 684 boardings on the three-day July weekend when German Fest, Harley Fest and the Milwaukee Air & Water Show overlapped, and 425 for the four days of Irish Fest in August.
Those festive weekends aside, city streetcar manager Andrew Davis says his biggest takeaway from the data is that L Line weekday ridership averaged 183 during August.
“It’s starting to get ingrained,” Davis says of the new service. “We like where it’s going.”
