Surprising number of riders use taxi to get to work

As officials look at adjusting the hours of the Ozaukee County Shared Ride Taxi, they were surprised to find that nearly half the service’s rides are used to take people to and from work.

According to figures provided to the county Public Works Committee last week, a recent survey showed that 4,034 of the 8,229 trips, or 49%, were used for employment purposes.

“That’s a much higher number than I expected,” Public Works Director Jon Edgren told the committee.

Officials have often said that 75% or more of riders were elderly or disabled based on anecdotal evidence and driver reports.

But the May survey showed that 1,188 rides, or 14%, were for medical purposes, with 1,121, or 13.6%, for personal business. The rest of the rides were split between social/recreational, education/training and nutrition categories.

“It’s important to see it is more employees based,” Transit Supt. Kerise Zutz said.

Edgren said the Shared Ride Taxi is less conducive to getting people to work than a commuter bus, such as the defunct Ozaukee Express, which provided rides on a strict schedule from park-and-ride lots as far north as Port Washington to downtown Milwaukee. The county shut it down in 2024 due to low ridership and high costs.

The Shared Ride Taxi, however, has a 45-minute window to arrive at a rider’s house or other location to pick them up.

“It’s not always the best way to get to work on time,” he said.

Zutz and some supervisors theorized that many of the work-related rides may be for students going to after-school jobs.

Overall ridership on the service had been on an upward trajectory until May, when it dropped by 874 rides from 9,061 in April.

Even with the drop, it still reflected a 3.3% increase over May 2025 and the highest ridership in May since 2019, before the pandemic.

Officials credited the drop in part not only to a recent increase in fares and chronic “no-shows” — people who aren’t ready when the taxi arrives to pick them up — being denied service, but also to taxis being stressed by the increased ridership, causing them to be late,

“The existing service capacity is becoming increasingly constrained,” Edgren wrote in a memo to the committee.

As a result, the committee last week approved adjusting its contract with Go Riteway to operate the service.

Go Riteway has operated the Shared Ride Taxi since 2023 under a contract that provides 58,800 annual billable service hours at a cost of about $2.17 million.

“Recent increases in denied trip requests provide further evidence that demand is approaching or exceeding available service capacity during certain periods,” Edgren wrote.

Go Riteway estimates that it would need an additional 147 hours per week to meet current demand and avoid denying rides at the recent request levels, Edgren said.

Zutz, however, told supervisors she would prefer to not expand hours that much and explore other schedule changes, such as cutting back on late-night hours and increasing rides during busiest times of the day, such as in the early morning and at mid-day.

She recommended increasing service hours by 100 hours per week, increasing the cost of the service by about $192,000 a year.

With the additional hours going into effect on July 1, it would cost $96,000 this year.

About half that added cost would be covered by the county out of its transit reserve fund, which currently totals $2.3 million, according to Dzwinel.

The other half would come from the state Department of Transportation and fare-box revenue.