We’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. More than 58,000 rides on The Hop in June 2024. We watched The Hop have its second-best month in four years. All those rides will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to argue.

Milwaukee’s streetcar system, The Hop, reported 58,441 rides in June 2024. The number represents The Hop’s highest monthly ridership since July 2023 (65,749), and its second-highest monthly ridership since December 2019 (61,274). The June 2024 ridership works out to an average of 1,948 rides per day.

Quite an experience to live in Milwaukee, isn’t it? That’s what it is to have a modest downtown streetcar system that somehow inspires people to pop a blood vessel every time we write about it…

How does The Hop count its rides? According to The Hop…

The Hop streetcars are equipped with Automatic Passenger Counter (APC) equipment to record actual boarding data. Each door on the vehicle is equipped with three sensors that emit a beam of infrared light. Each time the beam is broken the APC system records it as a passenger. The three sensors are spaced so that the order in which the beams are broken determines if a passenger is boarding or exiting—only the boarding totals are included in the final ridership counts. APC systems are becoming standard equipment in the transit industry.

Full ridership data, dating back to The Hop’s launch in November 2018, can be found HERE.

The Hop recently made some route adjustments to accommodate Milwaukee’s busy summer festival season. The system’s M-Line and L-Line (the latter of which runs through The Couture, and opened in April) have been combined into a single Festivals Line. “Rather than having three streetcars on the M-Line and one on the L-Line,” explains The Hop, “the ‘Festivals Line’ will see all four in-service vehicles serving the entire route.”

And, well, that’s it. Argue, we guess. Don’t ask why we did a Blade Runner thing with this. It just came to us last night while we were drunk, taking an Uber home from the Wiggle Room. It’s too bad we won’t live to see The Hop expanded to Bay View. But then again, who will?