City Council votes to keep full bus wraps
Madison's City Council voted Tuesday night to keep Metro bus windows covered by full-wrap advertising after a heated debate over the trade-offs between advertising revenue and the wraps' effects on the riding experience.
Council members voted on three versions of the resolution throughout the night, with two council members proposing amendments that would have eliminated full-wrap advertising and limited partial-wrap advertising that covers some or none of the windows on a bus.
Ultimately, however, the higher revenues of full-wrap advertising and the potential to maintain and expand bus service with that revenue outweighed concerns that the advertising diminished the experience for riders and, in some cases, aggravated medical conditions. The resolution, approved 11-7, kept full-wrap advertisements, but limited them to 20 buses and did not place any limits on partial wraps.
Those voting against the full bus wraps cited a survey completed by Madison Metro in which almost 60 percent of respondents said the full wraps negatively affected their riding experiences by making the windows harder to see out of and causing motion sickness or migraines in some people. Some council members and citizens also expressed concerns that cognitively or visually impaired people often have a hard time recognizing the covered buses and then miss their bus and that people with epilepsy could have their condition aggravated by riding inside a wrapped bus.
Ald. Satya Rhodes-Conway highlighted the citizen complaints against bus wraps as a primary reason she proposed one of the alternate plans to eliminate full-wrap advertising. She estimated that between the Metro survey, online petitions against the ads and e-mails to her and other council members, more than 1,000 citizens weighed in on the issue, the vast majority negatively.
"I don't think we often get comments from that many citizens on an issue, and I think we have to take that seriously," she said.
Ald. Robbie Webber added that singling out Madison Metro for advertising and not other city vehicles sent the message that bus riders were second-class citizens and could be treated like "Spam in a can."
Those who voted in favor of full wraps, however, said that before the survey was administered, "99 percent" of complaints at the Transit and Parking Commission in recent months had to do with route cuts, late buses or other service issues, and eliminating the revenue from bus wraps could worsen these service issues.
"If you were at the TPC during the public hearings the last couple months and you heard people speak, 99 percent of the people were there to speak about route cuts, not about wraps," Ald. Brian Solomon said. "And when people did speak about wraps, what they said was, 'I don't like wraps,' and then they moved on and were driven to tears in talking about how their livelihood would be impacted because of the route and service cuts."
According to Metro manager Chuck Kamp, the yearly difference in revenue in allowing full-wrap advertising could range from $75,000 to $200,000 in Metro's multimillion-dollar budget. Solomon pointed out that one south side route, Route 13, was nearly eliminated this year over $27,000 in funding. Funding problems such as that, he said, make changes in advertising revenue significant in spite of its relatively small proportion -- less than 1 percent -- of Metro's budget.
The resolution approved Tuesday night effectively ended the pilot program for bus wrap advertising that was set to expire next spring, creating a long-term policy for the advertising in its place.
