At $5 each way, daily cab rides to Evanston Memorial Hospital are too pricey for Mortimer Abramson.

Instead, Abramson, 87, relies on Pace bus Route 423 to get him from his Wilmette home to the Linden Chicago Transit Authority station, where he takes an El train to the hospital on Central Street.

But if Pace eliminates the route, Abramson said, he wouldn’t know how to get to his daily doctor visits.

“I sure hope they don’t stop this bus, because it’s handy for a lot of people,” he said.

Pace officials are considering eliminating or cutting back service to 22 bus routes, including Route 423, to compensate for high operation costs facing the bus service.

“Right now, we are considering cutting a few routes because of a budget issue,” said Blaine Krage, a Pace spokesman. “We have limited resources and higher costs. So we have to take a close look at routes that have low ridership to make sure we are being as efficient as possible.”

Pace Marketing Director Mindy LaFlamme said the bus service expects to be about $2 million over its budget by the end of the year.

She said rising costs of diesel fuel, natural gas, health care for employees and labor contracts kept Pace from staying within its budget.

Currently Pace has about 240 bus routes in the Chicago area.

Out of the 22 routes to face possible cuts, Evanston riders could be affected by the elimination of Routes 421 and 423, which service north Evanston, Wilmette and Glenview.

“These 22 routes are being looked at because they are low-performing,” LaFlamme said. “These 22 routes represent less than one percent of our ridership.”

Out of Pace’s annual ridership of about 38.4 million people, the cutback will affect about 216,950 people, LaFlamme said.

Not all of the 22 routes will be eliminated.

“Some routes will just have service reduction,” LaFlamme said. “Maybe some will have a little evening or afternoon service trimmed.”

Within the next month, Pace plans to hold 19 public hearings for the routes up for possible cutbacks.

Routes 421 and 423 will be discussed from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. June 2 at Wilmette Village Hall, 1200 Wilmette Ave.

Once Pace receives public feedback on the service reductions, LaFlamme said, it will pass the information on to the board of directors in June.

The board of directors then will make the final decision on the routes.

In April, Pace decided to eliminate Route 560, which runs between the Great Lakes Naval Station and Gurnee Mills, and Route 737, which runs between the CTA Green Line at Harlem and the Blue Line’s Forest Park transit center.

The last day of service on those routes is Saturday.

Also slated for elimination is Route 1018, which runs from Lincoln Park to Wrigleyville. This route will halt service June 8.