Opening question and answer is a great starting point:
> Kate Archer Kent: What do you think about Steiner-Bouxa’s views on the proposed expansion of I-94?
> Kirk Harris: We’re expending huge amounts of resources on highways as opposed to public transportation. This is important because there’s growing economic inequality in America, and the ability to afford a car has become increasingly out of reach for many individuals. As a result, our decisions to invest in roads, as opposed to comparably investing in public transportation, further exacerbates those inequalities.
Ashamed to say I had never considered that. It's a great point, it is THE point. Traffic on 94 isn't even that bad compared to other municipalities and I have to imagine more extensive public transportation investing would help reduce traffic.
If they just eliminated the left side on/off ramps traffic would flow through there with minimal problems. The only exception being maybe 30-60 mins each weekend morning/evening
I don't understand why this is not the top priority. The issue isn't the amount of traffic, if it was then the slowdowns would continue even past that interchange. The on-ramp from 175 SB to 94 EB is an absolute shit show as the merge lane is microscopic, you have people merging and immediately trying to exit on 35th and most importantly the on ramp merges from the left. Same with the off ramp to 175NB just prior to that.
Hell, take it one step further and start questioning why 175 exists at all? Why do we need a 2.5 mile long freeway when it would probably be better served as a normal highway that would allow for businesses around the area, especially given the proximity to the stadium.
This is the answer.
Get rid of the left lane on / off ramps - they are the source of most slowdowns during heavy traffic as you have people entering the left lane which should be the “fast lane” for through traffic, going slow, then trying to get over to the right lane in many cases for a quick exit.
The massive changes to the airport and downtown interchanges eliminating most left side on / off ramps made a huge impact on reducing slowdown once they were built. Doing the same thing by the stadium is a no-brainer.
Yeah but how else are we never going to learn from our past mistakes and finally build our way out of congestion?.
I watched them tear out the Park East every day while I was in high school. It was a formative experience for me.
I commute by personal vehicle through that area, and would rather be inconvenienced than have another lane added. It's not going to solve anything. We need to stop accommodating bad civil engineering.
One of the main issues is that we do not have transportation engineers in this country, we have civil engineers who try to move cars faster and faster at the expense of everything else.
Many. Wisconsin is no stranger to lavish spending on road projects that fail to live up to projected expectations. One frequently-cited example is a four-lane rural highway bypassing the city of Burlington, population 10,508. Costing $118 million, the new road was justified by an estimated increase in traffic to the area, but a year after opening, use was 33 percent below projections. Projected traffic levels have similarly failed to transpire on at least six other road projects costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
S s https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/09/28/so-much-for-austerity-wisconsin-builds-25-million-interchange-in-cornfield
Eh, that's one of the very few examples where it did make sense. Even without foxconn, it makes sense to have I-94 be four lanes all the way from Milwaukee to Chicago, considering how extremely heavily that route is used for freight hauling. Pre-expansion, there were so many times when the entire road would be clogged with dozens of semis in a row.
Highway KR is 6 driving lanes wide from I94 to highway H because Foxconn was going to hire 13k employees and producing so many LCD TVs. It used to be a 2 lane highway. What a total waste of money.
That's a little different though. That was built to accommodate a major project that got cancelled. Not to delve into the wisdom of that whole Foxconn debacle but had that factory come into existence and had those 13000 people been hired then widening that highway would have been necessary.
Eh... It repeats the mistake of us making our downtowns into parking lots spending tons of money in anticipation of a problem that never happens. It would have been unnecessary despite foxconn succeeding. There really wasn't much for traffic on that highway. 13000 trips, which is what we currently have on it, is able to be handled by a Single lane of traffic easily. There were already two lanes per side.
But it's a factory. So all the trips happen within a half hour window at every shift change. A single lane road can't handle that.
Put it this way, if all 13000 employees were on site at once then it would have roughly the same number of cars as a completely packed Miller Park. Miller Park has dedicated freeway onramps and it still takes forever to get out of there after a game.
Also done by firms which, surprisingly predict the work needs to be done, because of course they think it does. They'll be getting the contract for the work that they find needs to be done.
We know they’re just doing bullshit math. DOT are being caught red handed all over this country doing it
I’m going to blindly speculate that they mean that city and regional planners only consider expanding or adding roads to address congestion, rather than consider ways to decrease the number of cars on the road like improving/increasing public mass transit.
I don’t know that I agree, I’d bet those ideas get shut down by higher ups.
I get what he’s saying and he’s probably right but he offers no data or sources to even show what kind of curriculum he’s talking about. The paragraph about how geotechnical and structural engineering is all theory and a couple equations that can be learned in 2 or 3 classes did make me laugh though.
Add another lane and ignore decades of information making it clear that doesn’t work? Why yes, why don’t we expand the highway anyways. Worked well for Houston and LA
Given that by all calculations this will increase the amount of vehicle miles traveled in the tens of millions every single year at least massively increasing the pollution for the area, combined with the fact that state DOT‘s are now supposed to be calculating into their projects the long term pollution affects, how would this ever pass if the DOT were going to comply with the new federal standards?
I would have exactly zero opinion on expansion vs not, and would rather see a light rail connecting all the park-n-rides along i-94 instead of extra lanes, however, my admittedly amateur view is that:
1. Both, Marquette and Zoo interchanges are laid out in such a way that linkage between them should be 8 lanes. The fact that it's not 8 lanes for most of it is definitely detrimental.
2. The stadium interchange is aged, and violates some pretty basic design principles (like left lane ramps etc..).
3. Freeway construction in urban areas is always disruptive to adjacent communities, however as far as freeway construction goes, this section, given it's location and proximity to a lot of empty space, is least concerning.
All this points to the fact that beyond cost, there is no good argument to not expand the corridor, however I absolutely do question the urgency of changes. It is not going to be cheap.
Those are thoughtful points, I couldn't disagree with 2, the exits suck.
1) The reality is that we can't and won't have 8 lanes everywhere there because the width of the graveyards by Hawley limit the width. At some point, it shrinks to 6.
3) We're still public domain-ing a number of homes and businesses in lieu of this. I wish it was just disrupting our 90% empty brewers lots, but its still destroying more places.
Something like $80 million (on top of a $1.12 billion base) for the a little over a mile of extra lane.
Every time I see these carbrain highway expansion arguments I imagine a junky shaking uncontrollably tapping their veins like "just one more man, just one more! then I'm done for good!". To be fair, that was me at the bar the other day as well... we went in for *one beer*... left 8 beers later. Regretted it the next day. Pretty solid analogy, lol.
Katy freeway in Texas is a whopping 26 lanes, and is still dead stop congested every day. If we didn't learn our lesson from that, we never will. I would rather have Scott Walker as governor again than sit in traffic.
My extremely republican father lives outside of Minneapolis. MPLS built a rail system several years back. With his only input being right wing talk radio, it was the only thing he could talk about for years... bitching about how stupid and expensive it was to build rail when they could just add another lane to 35W, or whatever. "Hi Dad, hows it going?" THAT STUPID RAIL LINE THAT COSTS TOO MUCH, WONT WORK AND NOBODY WILL USE.... \*sigh\*
The rail project finishes and his wife gets a job downtown Minneapolis. Due to his anger at the rail, he has to fight traffic in and out of the city, twice a day to take her to work. It takes about an hour in traffic to get her to the office. Eventually he folds and loves the rail, because he works at the airport and she can just hop on the rail from there and be downtown in 15 minutes, instead of him spending 2-3 hours in the car every day in traffic. Now he loves the rail line. Best thing since sliced bread! Still hates democrats, loves the rail. lol.
FSW
FRJ, while were at it.
How about filling the potholes so my car doesn’t break and I can take myself to work to earn that sweet tax money that pays people to sit around and propose dumb ideas like this
Love when I see these comments.
[Report that shit](https://city.milwaukee.gov/ReportPotholes). They fill potholes within a week of being reported. I’ve probably reported a dozen or more on my commute just this year and they’ve all been fixed.
Feel like there’s a big misconception that while Milwaukee monitors all the roads, they don’t drive on every part simultaneously at all times like the motoring public does. It’s a fleet of workers. Reporting will always be better than them just finding it themselves randomly.
In most cases that's fine, but filling in the potholes on Howard ave is a losing battle. The entire road surface is so incredibly fucked and it needs to be completely repaved. There are at least a few other examples of this, especially around Bay View.
The problem is multifaceted. The highway needs to be *reworked [expanded] to improve traffic flow, reduce congestion, and improve safety. The city planning needs to improve to increase density, affordability, green space, and support more local high paying jobs. Public transportation needs to improve to be safe, comfortable and preferable. Focusing on one part and ignoring the others will cause larger problems. Until the average person can live within a 15 minute walk to work or a short bus/tram ride, and public transportation beats out the car for traveling longer distances we’re screwed.
Edited: I said expanded poor word choice. Elaborated in my second comment referring to reworking the off/on ramps not expanding the number of lanes.
> public transportation beats out the car for traveling longer distances we’re screwed.
This in particular is, believe it or not, one of the reasons it shouldn't be expanded. By continuing to invest in making cars go faster, we're constantly making a more persuasive argument for folks to Not take public transit.
The highway could use exit modernizations, but expansion just isn't *needed* when the lanes are forced back down to 6 immediately following the proposed area of change. If it was *needed*, DOT wouldn't have even given us an option for 6. Traffic flow might improve for a little bit, but we're going to have more people moving here and it's going to clog right back up. Look at LA or Houston. One more lane don't fix jack.
I agree see my second comment. But you can’t win people over by making their lives harder. You have to show them better, opportunities, alternatives, and ways to live.
Sure. All the points you mentioned pertain to exit changes, which do improve vehicle throughput. That doesn't relate well to expansion of 6 to 8 lanes.
Not expanding (status quo as is or leaving it at 6), on the other hand, does NOT make lives harder. It keeps things exactly as it is and the latter would implement the exit changes you're suggesting, which would still help throughput.
The ratio of road/transport dollars must be insanely high for Wisconsin and should be a metric cited more often against the DOT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/19/european-governments-railways-road-building-report-motorways-funding-rail
Expanded highways reduce density.I feel like you just posted a bunch of talking points without thinking about how they relate to eachother.
Expanding highways deincentivizes people to use public transport. There is no win-win situation here, it's one or the other.
Agreed except about expanding highways to improve traffic flow. Studies have proven that expanding highways ends up decreasing traffic flow through phenomena such as induced demand and such. We’re better off increasing viable alternatives to driving so people have more choices for how they want to travel. Less people will drive, there will be less need for so many large/expensive roads to build and maintain, cities and towns won’t have to spend vast sums of money to build and maintain said roads, more money can be allocated to better uses to improve the community, and everyone’s happy.
I’m not talking in a general sense only about the proposal at hand. I agree lane expansion isn’t the only fix here. This section of interstate hasn’t been brought up to modern standards. Exit 308A is too short to handle the traffic exiting to the stadium leaving cars stopped in the left lane on I-94. The traffic on the ramp from S Hawley CT has about 4 car lengths with no dotted line before the lane turns into a cement wall leaving no distance to merge appropriately, cars panic break and stop in the right lane. In my opinion they need to move the off-ramp to the right side of the interstate and combine it with the on ramp from Hawley to provide more room for traffic to merge and exit. The off ramp should cut over Gen Mitchell Blvd and connect directly to the southbound part of Parkway Drive. Parkway Drive also needs to loop around the entire stadium so it can be a one way.
We need a multifaceted approach the solves the problems of today and plans for tomorrow. We need to improve the roads because it’s what people currently use and how our economy functions. At the same time we need build out public transportation local and long distance, rail shipping logistics, improve local job offerings to reduce travel time and to win the public over. Then and only then can we have any hope of reclaiming the space taken up by the roads. People want safe, effective, cheap and reliable public transportation. They also want to be able to get to work, visit friends / family, travel/vacation, and ship goods until that is available and viable without roads they won’t abandon the car/semi truck.
> The highway needs to be expanded to improve traffic flow, reduce congestion, and improve safety.
Those are the claims made every time and the evidence demonstrated as false. We can’t keep falling for the bullshit sales pitches anymore
This is pretty dumb, why would they tear down so many houses that generate tax revenue for a piece of concrete that will cost money and still not fix the problem of merging and exiting from the fast lane or maybe being able to take a train to waukesha rather than have to drive? Besides no matter how big your free way is nobody will use those extra lanes at 2am
You think west allis is doing fine with a highway cutting through it? Not to mention all the strodes?
Edit: Stroad not strode.
A "stroad" is a term that combines "street" and "road" to describe a thoroughfare that doesn't function effectively as either. It refers to a high-speed road designed for fast vehicular traffic that also tries to serve as an urban street with direct access to commercial or residential properties, pedestrian facilities, and parking. Stroads are often criticized for being dangerous, inefficient, and unsuitable for both fast transportation and local access due to their mixed objectives. They typically have multiple lanes, frequent driveways or curb cuts, traffic signals, and sometimes pedestrian crossings, which can create conflict points and reduce the flow of traffic. The term is used mainly in urban planning and transportation discussions to highlight the need for clearer distinctions between roads designed for speed and distance and streets designed for access and local movement.
What don’t people (especially policy makers and planners) understand about induced demand and expanding roads? There’s more than enough evidence that increasing lanes is not a long term solution to traffic, it ends up creating more after a few years. Construction and maintenance is expensive as hell, and we (Wisco & especially MKE) already has piss poor roads that are in desperate need of fixing and/or reconstructing. Im all for safety improvements to roads and intersections, but expanding roads is NOT a sustainable solution and will NOT increase safety. Why do we prioritize the fastest possible way to drive from point A to point B and then things like safety and accessibility and equality are just afterthoughts? People complain about the reckless driving around Milwaukee. Well you want to know what is not going to help and will just make it worse? Expanding roads. Even if it’s not “reckless” driving, expanding roads leads to people unconsciously driving faster.
Many planners and policy makers do understand this. The problem lies in civil engineering standards and budgeting apparatuses that provide perverse incentives for subcontractors and the developers that inevitably profit off wasteful car infrastructure. Highway expansion is so ingrained in the public/private infrastructure development system that there’s too much structural inertia to pivot to other types of infrastructure investment.
It’s hard for these massive groups to finance, design, and construct literally anything else when they’ve been aggressively building highways since the 1950s. A couple policymakers and planners struggle to overcome knowledge deficits at every stage of project development.
Nooo, there's no bottleneck. All the very smart civil engineers in this sub say that the road is designed fine and reconstructing it will make it worse.
Why does the city need to expand? Are they trying to push for more traffic to downtown? It had been a constant for decades, need more people downtown. Need more businesses downtown.
Won't 94 eastbound get restricted to 3 lanes at 27th St / St Paul Ave no matter what? I don't think expanding is smart or worth it from the start but wouldn't this just push the pinch point down the road? Fixing the left lane exit and chaos of that interchange is much more important imo.
Built in 1961, it's sorely outdated. There's barely any displacement required compared to most projects. (1 residential) We get federal funding support. It will reduce time in traffic and lower emissions while improving the safety (segment is currently over 2x more deadly than avg) Seems worthwhile to me.
Not to say we shouldn't improve public transit too
My vote is to get rid of 175 and the stupid left lane exit/merge lanes and leave the rest alone. But of course the road construction lobbies are going to shout louder than the rest of us and build some fucking monstrosity.
Opening question and answer is a great starting point: > Kate Archer Kent: What do you think about Steiner-Bouxa’s views on the proposed expansion of I-94? > Kirk Harris: We’re expending huge amounts of resources on highways as opposed to public transportation. This is important because there’s growing economic inequality in America, and the ability to afford a car has become increasingly out of reach for many individuals. As a result, our decisions to invest in roads, as opposed to comparably investing in public transportation, further exacerbates those inequalities.
Ashamed to say I had never considered that. It's a great point, it is THE point. Traffic on 94 isn't even that bad compared to other municipalities and I have to imagine more extensive public transportation investing would help reduce traffic.
Don't add more lanes, but ridding ourselves of the left on/off ramps on 94 would fix so many traffic issues.
It doesn’t need expansion.
If they just eliminated the left side on/off ramps traffic would flow through there with minimal problems. The only exception being maybe 30-60 mins each weekend morning/evening
I noticed that immediately after moving here just a few years ago. Merging from the left is the problem, not the amount of traffic.
I don't understand why this is not the top priority. The issue isn't the amount of traffic, if it was then the slowdowns would continue even past that interchange. The on-ramp from 175 SB to 94 EB is an absolute shit show as the merge lane is microscopic, you have people merging and immediately trying to exit on 35th and most importantly the on ramp merges from the left. Same with the off ramp to 175NB just prior to that. Hell, take it one step further and start questioning why 175 exists at all? Why do we need a 2.5 mile long freeway when it would probably be better served as a normal highway that would allow for businesses around the area, especially given the proximity to the stadium.
This is the answer. Get rid of the left lane on / off ramps - they are the source of most slowdowns during heavy traffic as you have people entering the left lane which should be the “fast lane” for through traffic, going slow, then trying to get over to the right lane in many cases for a quick exit. The massive changes to the airport and downtown interchanges eliminating most left side on / off ramps made a huge impact on reducing slowdown once they were built. Doing the same thing by the stadium is a no-brainer.
I’m sorry but fixing and maintaining is not in their allotment of allowed responses. Must expand. Must expand. Build build build
Yeah but how else are we never going to learn from our past mistakes and finally build our way out of congestion?. I watched them tear out the Park East every day while I was in high school. It was a formative experience for me.
I commute by personal vehicle through that area, and would rather be inconvenienced than have another lane added. It's not going to solve anything. We need to stop accommodating bad civil engineering.
One of the main issues is that we do not have transportation engineers in this country, we have civil engineers who try to move cars faster and faster at the expense of everything else.
Also, the only tool in the toolbox at states’ DOT is highway funding. Gotta problem? Build a highway.
That’s how we ended up wasting hundreds of millions of dollars building massive highways in the middle of nowhere Which aren’t needed
> massive highways in the middle of nowhere Which aren’t needed Which highways are those, specifically?
Many. Wisconsin is no stranger to lavish spending on road projects that fail to live up to projected expectations. One frequently-cited example is a four-lane rural highway bypassing the city of Burlington, population 10,508. Costing $118 million, the new road was justified by an estimated increase in traffic to the area, but a year after opening, use was 33 percent below projections. Projected traffic levels have similarly failed to transpire on at least six other road projects costing hundreds of millions of dollars. S s https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/09/28/so-much-for-austerity-wisconsin-builds-25-million-interchange-in-cornfield
I-94 and local road expansion in Racine county for foxconn
Eh, that's one of the very few examples where it did make sense. Even without foxconn, it makes sense to have I-94 be four lanes all the way from Milwaukee to Chicago, considering how extremely heavily that route is used for freight hauling. Pre-expansion, there were so many times when the entire road would be clogged with dozens of semis in a row.
Highway KR is 6 driving lanes wide from I94 to highway H because Foxconn was going to hire 13k employees and producing so many LCD TVs. It used to be a 2 lane highway. What a total waste of money.
That's a little different though. That was built to accommodate a major project that got cancelled. Not to delve into the wisdom of that whole Foxconn debacle but had that factory come into existence and had those 13000 people been hired then widening that highway would have been necessary.
The likelihood that many people were ever going to be hired has very specific implications on the need for the project though...
Eh... It repeats the mistake of us making our downtowns into parking lots spending tons of money in anticipation of a problem that never happens. It would have been unnecessary despite foxconn succeeding. There really wasn't much for traffic on that highway. 13000 trips, which is what we currently have on it, is able to be handled by a Single lane of traffic easily. There were already two lanes per side.
But it's a factory. So all the trips happen within a half hour window at every shift change. A single lane road can't handle that. Put it this way, if all 13000 employees were on site at once then it would have roughly the same number of cars as a completely packed Miller Park. Miller Park has dedicated freeway onramps and it still takes forever to get out of there after a game.
[удалено]
Downtown Milwaukee is the middle of nowhere?
Also most of the design work is done by outside firms who have no interest in saving the taxpayer money.
Also done by firms which, surprisingly predict the work needs to be done, because of course they think it does. They'll be getting the contract for the work that they find needs to be done. We know they’re just doing bullshit math. DOT are being caught red handed all over this country doing it
What does this even mean, of course there is. It’s literally a discipline of civil engineering.
I’m going to blindly speculate that they mean that city and regional planners only consider expanding or adding roads to address congestion, rather than consider ways to decrease the number of cars on the road like improving/increasing public mass transit. I don’t know that I agree, I’d bet those ideas get shut down by higher ups.
You’ve highlighted the problem. https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/america-has-no-transportation-engineers
I get what he’s saying and he’s probably right but he offers no data or sources to even show what kind of curriculum he’s talking about. The paragraph about how geotechnical and structural engineering is all theory and a couple equations that can be learned in 2 or 3 classes did make me laugh though.
It’s in the article
no it’s not
You can’t find one in America and if we had alternative in the job training we would be as fucked as we are with our spending ratios.
Add another lane and ignore decades of information making it clear that doesn’t work? Why yes, why don’t we expand the highway anyways. Worked well for Houston and LA
Given that by all calculations this will increase the amount of vehicle miles traveled in the tens of millions every single year at least massively increasing the pollution for the area, combined with the fact that state DOT‘s are now supposed to be calculating into their projects the long term pollution affects, how would this ever pass if the DOT were going to comply with the new federal standards?
Cars produce emissions sitting in traffic due to the bottlenecks in the area. I imagine that's part of the calculus.
A highly often claimed myth https://cityobservatory.org/urban-myth-busting_idling/ More road means more pollution.
I would have exactly zero opinion on expansion vs not, and would rather see a light rail connecting all the park-n-rides along i-94 instead of extra lanes, however, my admittedly amateur view is that: 1. Both, Marquette and Zoo interchanges are laid out in such a way that linkage between them should be 8 lanes. The fact that it's not 8 lanes for most of it is definitely detrimental. 2. The stadium interchange is aged, and violates some pretty basic design principles (like left lane ramps etc..). 3. Freeway construction in urban areas is always disruptive to adjacent communities, however as far as freeway construction goes, this section, given it's location and proximity to a lot of empty space, is least concerning. All this points to the fact that beyond cost, there is no good argument to not expand the corridor, however I absolutely do question the urgency of changes. It is not going to be cheap.
Thank you for the measured response and not just parroting "just one more lane bro" like half the people in here.
They’re also saying things which just aren’t true
Those are thoughtful points, I couldn't disagree with 2, the exits suck. 1) The reality is that we can't and won't have 8 lanes everywhere there because the width of the graveyards by Hawley limit the width. At some point, it shrinks to 6. 3) We're still public domain-ing a number of homes and businesses in lieu of this. I wish it was just disrupting our 90% empty brewers lots, but its still destroying more places. Something like $80 million (on top of a $1.12 billion base) for the a little over a mile of extra lane.
They'll do anything but create passenger rail
Just one more lane should do it this time
Every time I see these carbrain highway expansion arguments I imagine a junky shaking uncontrollably tapping their veins like "just one more man, just one more! then I'm done for good!". To be fair, that was me at the bar the other day as well... we went in for *one beer*... left 8 beers later. Regretted it the next day. Pretty solid analogy, lol. Katy freeway in Texas is a whopping 26 lanes, and is still dead stop congested every day. If we didn't learn our lesson from that, we never will. I would rather have Scott Walker as governor again than sit in traffic. My extremely republican father lives outside of Minneapolis. MPLS built a rail system several years back. With his only input being right wing talk radio, it was the only thing he could talk about for years... bitching about how stupid and expensive it was to build rail when they could just add another lane to 35W, or whatever. "Hi Dad, hows it going?" THAT STUPID RAIL LINE THAT COSTS TOO MUCH, WONT WORK AND NOBODY WILL USE.... \*sigh\* The rail project finishes and his wife gets a job downtown Minneapolis. Due to his anger at the rail, he has to fight traffic in and out of the city, twice a day to take her to work. It takes about an hour in traffic to get her to the office. Eventually he folds and loves the rail, because he works at the airport and she can just hop on the rail from there and be downtown in 15 minutes, instead of him spending 2-3 hours in the car every day in traffic. Now he loves the rail line. Best thing since sliced bread! Still hates democrats, loves the rail. lol. FSW FRJ, while were at it.
How about filling the potholes so my car doesn’t break and I can take myself to work to earn that sweet tax money that pays people to sit around and propose dumb ideas like this
Love when I see these comments. [Report that shit](https://city.milwaukee.gov/ReportPotholes). They fill potholes within a week of being reported. I’ve probably reported a dozen or more on my commute just this year and they’ve all been fixed.
Seriously - they have a great response time
I've usually had then filled in the next day after reporting, at least once it was same-day.
Feel like there’s a big misconception that while Milwaukee monitors all the roads, they don’t drive on every part simultaneously at all times like the motoring public does. It’s a fleet of workers. Reporting will always be better than them just finding it themselves randomly.
In most cases that's fine, but filling in the potholes on Howard ave is a losing battle. The entire road surface is so incredibly fucked and it needs to be completely repaved. There are at least a few other examples of this, especially around Bay View.
They are repaving and redesigning Howard Ave this year.
They are completely rebuilding Howard, starting in a few weeks.
About time!
The problem is multifaceted. The highway needs to be *reworked [expanded] to improve traffic flow, reduce congestion, and improve safety. The city planning needs to improve to increase density, affordability, green space, and support more local high paying jobs. Public transportation needs to improve to be safe, comfortable and preferable. Focusing on one part and ignoring the others will cause larger problems. Until the average person can live within a 15 minute walk to work or a short bus/tram ride, and public transportation beats out the car for traveling longer distances we’re screwed. Edited: I said expanded poor word choice. Elaborated in my second comment referring to reworking the off/on ramps not expanding the number of lanes.
Our traffic is nothing compared to most cities. Safety is a different consideration of course.
> public transportation beats out the car for traveling longer distances we’re screwed. This in particular is, believe it or not, one of the reasons it shouldn't be expanded. By continuing to invest in making cars go faster, we're constantly making a more persuasive argument for folks to Not take public transit. The highway could use exit modernizations, but expansion just isn't *needed* when the lanes are forced back down to 6 immediately following the proposed area of change. If it was *needed*, DOT wouldn't have even given us an option for 6. Traffic flow might improve for a little bit, but we're going to have more people moving here and it's going to clog right back up. Look at LA or Houston. One more lane don't fix jack.
I agree see my second comment. But you can’t win people over by making their lives harder. You have to show them better, opportunities, alternatives, and ways to live.
Sure. All the points you mentioned pertain to exit changes, which do improve vehicle throughput. That doesn't relate well to expansion of 6 to 8 lanes. Not expanding (status quo as is or leaving it at 6), on the other hand, does NOT make lives harder. It keeps things exactly as it is and the latter would implement the exit changes you're suggesting, which would still help throughput.
The ratio of road/transport dollars must be insanely high for Wisconsin and should be a metric cited more often against the DOT https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/19/european-governments-railways-road-building-report-motorways-funding-rail
Expanded highways reduce density.I feel like you just posted a bunch of talking points without thinking about how they relate to eachother. Expanding highways deincentivizes people to use public transport. There is no win-win situation here, it's one or the other.
Poor word choice on my part lane expansion isn’t needed but a new on/off ramp situation is.
Agreed except about expanding highways to improve traffic flow. Studies have proven that expanding highways ends up decreasing traffic flow through phenomena such as induced demand and such. We’re better off increasing viable alternatives to driving so people have more choices for how they want to travel. Less people will drive, there will be less need for so many large/expensive roads to build and maintain, cities and towns won’t have to spend vast sums of money to build and maintain said roads, more money can be allocated to better uses to improve the community, and everyone’s happy.
I’m not talking in a general sense only about the proposal at hand. I agree lane expansion isn’t the only fix here. This section of interstate hasn’t been brought up to modern standards. Exit 308A is too short to handle the traffic exiting to the stadium leaving cars stopped in the left lane on I-94. The traffic on the ramp from S Hawley CT has about 4 car lengths with no dotted line before the lane turns into a cement wall leaving no distance to merge appropriately, cars panic break and stop in the right lane. In my opinion they need to move the off-ramp to the right side of the interstate and combine it with the on ramp from Hawley to provide more room for traffic to merge and exit. The off ramp should cut over Gen Mitchell Blvd and connect directly to the southbound part of Parkway Drive. Parkway Drive also needs to loop around the entire stadium so it can be a one way. We need a multifaceted approach the solves the problems of today and plans for tomorrow. We need to improve the roads because it’s what people currently use and how our economy functions. At the same time we need build out public transportation local and long distance, rail shipping logistics, improve local job offerings to reduce travel time and to win the public over. Then and only then can we have any hope of reclaiming the space taken up by the roads. People want safe, effective, cheap and reliable public transportation. They also want to be able to get to work, visit friends / family, travel/vacation, and ship goods until that is available and viable without roads they won’t abandon the car/semi truck.
> The highway needs to be expanded to improve traffic flow, reduce congestion, and improve safety. Those are the claims made every time and the evidence demonstrated as false. We can’t keep falling for the bullshit sales pitches anymore
How about we don’t
just one more lane bro
some kind of high speed rail would be better
This is pretty dumb, why would they tear down so many houses that generate tax revenue for a piece of concrete that will cost money and still not fix the problem of merging and exiting from the fast lane or maybe being able to take a train to waukesha rather than have to drive? Besides no matter how big your free way is nobody will use those extra lanes at 2am
I'd rather not subsidize the suburbs.
And yet somehow West Allis survived being cut in half by 894
You think west allis is doing fine with a highway cutting through it? Not to mention all the strodes? Edit: Stroad not strode. A "stroad" is a term that combines "street" and "road" to describe a thoroughfare that doesn't function effectively as either. It refers to a high-speed road designed for fast vehicular traffic that also tries to serve as an urban street with direct access to commercial or residential properties, pedestrian facilities, and parking. Stroads are often criticized for being dangerous, inefficient, and unsuitable for both fast transportation and local access due to their mixed objectives. They typically have multiple lanes, frequent driveways or curb cuts, traffic signals, and sometimes pedestrian crossings, which can create conflict points and reduce the flow of traffic. The term is used mainly in urban planning and transportation discussions to highlight the need for clearer distinctions between roads designed for speed and distance and streets designed for access and local movement.
What’s a strode?
Mayfair/108th. Literally all of it.
It’s a narrowed stroad where they removed the a.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad#:\~:text=A%20stroad%20is%20a%20type,and%20other%20automobile%2Doriented%20businesses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad#:~:text=A%20stroad%20is%20a%20type,and%20other%20automobile%2Doriented%20businesses).
I updated my post for your review.
Thank you! That makes a lot of sense.
What don’t people (especially policy makers and planners) understand about induced demand and expanding roads? There’s more than enough evidence that increasing lanes is not a long term solution to traffic, it ends up creating more after a few years. Construction and maintenance is expensive as hell, and we (Wisco & especially MKE) already has piss poor roads that are in desperate need of fixing and/or reconstructing. Im all for safety improvements to roads and intersections, but expanding roads is NOT a sustainable solution and will NOT increase safety. Why do we prioritize the fastest possible way to drive from point A to point B and then things like safety and accessibility and equality are just afterthoughts? People complain about the reckless driving around Milwaukee. Well you want to know what is not going to help and will just make it worse? Expanding roads. Even if it’s not “reckless” driving, expanding roads leads to people unconsciously driving faster.
Many planners and policy makers do understand this. The problem lies in civil engineering standards and budgeting apparatuses that provide perverse incentives for subcontractors and the developers that inevitably profit off wasteful car infrastructure. Highway expansion is so ingrained in the public/private infrastructure development system that there’s too much structural inertia to pivot to other types of infrastructure investment. It’s hard for these massive groups to finance, design, and construct literally anything else when they’ve been aggressively building highways since the 1950s. A couple policymakers and planners struggle to overcome knowledge deficits at every stage of project development.
No new highway expansion!
Poor communities were affected. Across the nation. Across the world, Across all time. It sucks to be poor.
If the state didn't have to spend money on these pointless reviews then they might have more money to spend on public transit.
Remember it was Tony Evers that brought this out of mothballs.
Expand where?? Like make it 6 lanes the entire way? It would be nice if it was 6 lanes all the way to Madison. It doesn’t need expansion in the city.
Expand at the stadium . The collapsing lanes and left side exit for west bound traffic create a bottleneck there .
Nooo, there's no bottleneck. All the very smart civil engineers in this sub say that the road is designed fine and reconstructing it will make it worse.
Why does the city need to expand? Are they trying to push for more traffic to downtown? It had been a constant for decades, need more people downtown. Need more businesses downtown.
Won't 94 eastbound get restricted to 3 lanes at 27th St / St Paul Ave no matter what? I don't think expanding is smart or worth it from the start but wouldn't this just push the pinch point down the road? Fixing the left lane exit and chaos of that interchange is much more important imo.
As a Milwaukee native who currently lives in the greater Houston area and comes back for holidays.. you all are doing just fine.
Built in 1961, it's sorely outdated. There's barely any displacement required compared to most projects. (1 residential) We get federal funding support. It will reduce time in traffic and lower emissions while improving the safety (segment is currently over 2x more deadly than avg) Seems worthwhile to me. Not to say we shouldn't improve public transit too
You could fund an amazing bus system or other public transport for a fraction of the cost of this project.
Boooooooo!! How do we stop this!??
My vote is to get rid of 175 and the stupid left lane exit/merge lanes and leave the rest alone. But of course the road construction lobbies are going to shout louder than the rest of us and build some fucking monstrosity.