By the numbers
The downtown Milwaukee streetcar branded as “The Hop” is seeing its post-pandemic recovery fade, with just-released ridership figures from January and February down again from previous years.
Monthly ridership, typically highest in summer and lowest in winter, had climbed steadily from its 2020–21 trough, and in the summer of 2023 delivered a July peak of 65,749 riders, its best month since before COVID.
The picture since then is less encouraging. First, the warm-weather ceiling has been dropping: July ridership fell to 63,383 in 2024 and 60,413 in 2025, a decline of roughly 8 percent from 2023.
Second, the winter floor is eroding, too. January and February ridership in early 2024 reached nearly 35,000 on average between the two months. It has fallen since to around 25,000 in early 2026, a drop of about 28 percent. That average is indicated by the dotted line on the accompanying graph.
On the whole, the system’s ridership appears to have stalled. Ridership crested at 44,393 average monthly riders in 2024 and retreated to 41,213 average monthly riders in 2025 — still well short of the pre-pandemic monthly average of 63,455 riders.
Wyatt Eichholz is a policy and legislative associate at the Badger Institute.
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