Let’s go to The Hop; I don’t mean a dance
One of Milwaukee’s oldest ideas, the streetcar, is new again.
The tracks are going in, and its name was announced last week. The Hop. It sounds dumb at first, and reminiscent of a dance for teenagers during the Eisenhower administration.
But it’s growing on me. You hop on the streetcar. It’s that easy. I think it’s also supposed to make us think of beer. And it rolls off the tongue far better than the catchy name for our buses, Milwaukee County Transit System.
We also learned last week from Mayor Tom Barrett that the Forest County Potawatomi Community has agreed to sponsor the streetcar for 12 years in a $10 million deal. That’s very generous, especially when you consider that their casino is not even on the downtown route, at least when operation begins in 2018.
It’s easier to understand how the tribe could afford this arrangement when you consider the fact that we lose about $400 million every year at their Milwaukee casino. We love leaving money at that place.
The most exciting news for us frugal Milwaukeeans is that the Potawatomi will cover the cost of every ride on the streetcar the entire first year. And you don’t need a transfer, mostly because the route is just 2.5 miles long and there’s no other route to transfer to.
Critics of the streetcar have long predicted it will fail and that we’ll see it driving around with hardly any riders. A big-time Barrett boondoggle.
I prefer to hope for the best and to trust that millennials in particular will ride the rails like it’s 1939 again. But if we can’t fill the streetcar the first year when it’s free, I’ll be concerned. After that, they’re saying it’s a buck a ride.
Our previous streetcar system was amazing and traveled nearly 200 miles of track throughout metro Milwaukee until we killed it off in 1958. Everyone assumed we’d have flying cars by 2017, but here we are bringing back streetcars to qualify as a modern city.
“You can swing it, you can groove it, you can really start to move it at The Hop!” DANNY AND THE JUNIORS’ PREVIOUS STREETCAR JINGLE
No one is going very far to start off with. The Hop will link the lower east side to the Third Ward and cross the Milwaukee River to reach the Intermodal Station, or what you call the train station or bus depot. But additional routes to the lakefront and other neighborhoods are planned.
The official streetcar website answers many questions about the project. It says people who dislike riding the bus, which is most of us, for some reason like streetcars. It says we shouldn’t call them trolleys like they do on talk radio. It says local taxes won’t increase, “not a penny,” for the $128 million project.
And the streetcars will work in the snow. If they don’t, we now have a team of unemployed Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office horses that can pull them. That’s the way streetcars began here in 1860.
The city won’t have to look too hard for a streetcar jingle. It could use the Danny and the Juniors hit from the very year the previous streetcar died:
“You can swing it, you can groove it, you can really start to move it at The Hop!”