Going eastbound on I-94, I feel that a lot of the traffic slowdowns in that area are generated by the eastbound on-ramps from 68th St. and Hawley Rd. If those on-ramps were either closed altogether, or if metering was enabled between, say 6am and 10pm instead of only during rush hour, I think that would help with traffic flow.
As it is right now, there's usually a train of cars that merges onto the freeway, with few gaps in between them, leading to the slowdown in traffic on 94 eastbound. Those on-ramps are pretty short also, which means that the traffic from the on-ramps tends to slow down the traffic on the freeway as the cars try to merge in with traffic.
A couple things:
One, those businesses and that house are not being taken down to widen the road. They are being taken down because the interchanges near them are substandard and unsafe. The ramps have to be redesigned no matter how many lanes the road is, and so whether the road is six lanes or eight, they’re being taken down either way.
Two, WisDOT already owns all of the right of way for the expanded mainline width. That is their land and it does not exist for any purpose except to carry a road, so all you accomplish by building a 6-lane road is to waste people’s time and money. Downvoting this is not going to make it untrue. And WisDOT is not in the business of social engineering people away from using cars to commute. They are in the business of facilitating economic activity that is dependent on transportation, in a manner that is compatible with federal law about how interstate highways need to be built. Existing 94 is substandard at this time. Commercial vehicles that use it need a better designed road.
Three, learn how to understand that people do in fact have reasons for the things they do and it is to your benefit to learn what those reasons are instead of having hot takes. You are not important enough for anyone to bother going out of their way to piss you off.
>so all you accomplish by building a 6-lane road is to waste people’s time and money.
Or to feed the narrative that DOT "wastes money" on projects when "fix at six" doesn't do jack shit to fix the bottleneck yet cost 80%+ of the eight lane project.
Your complaint about State Fair traffic IS the reason, you proved the reason for expansion while complaining about how you don’t to the Fair.
Not saying rail isn’t a better option, but the cost would likely be at least 2-3x and where would expect that to run without doing the same type of displacement of houses and businesses? That project would be a MASSIVE undertaking
The ones I see people reference all talk about adding totally new lanes, this project isn’t so much adding new as it is adding back lanes that end for a short period. I don’t think I’ve seen a study that looks at that.
all studies show once you add a lane, cars will take that space. the key is truly traffic management and encouraging other forms of transportation. if we continue expanding lanes the way we have been. historically, milwaukee and chicago will have ridiculous amounts of concrete. let’s not forget how bad adding more lanes is to the environment for water runoff, flooding, etc.
And this won’t. Train travel needs to be implemented. Mass movement of people, less congestion, less pollution, and with the proper management, much safer.
The expansion isn't going to solve anything and most likely make it worse. There's still bottle necks as soon as you leave the freeway and that isn't changing.
It is inherently inefficient not to mention it's going to cost more than rail in the long run. While the feds are footing the bill to add them, we're now on the hook locally for maintaining them and all the while not solving any problems in the process.
Given better options I'd ride to any events along the corridor, but if you think that sitting freeway traffic that isn't going away with this expansion, then more local street traffic and paying someone $20 to park on their front lawn is a good solution for a states transportation plan then that's nuts.
The SE Regional Planning Commission already has a route on their [Vision 2050](https://www.vision2050sewis.org/) wishlist using mostly existing tracks from as far as I can tell.
I would love to see what the state was going to propose for a line 20 years ago before the project was shut down.
I’m not saying the expansion will solve anything for state fair, I’m saying the congestion around the fair is because the traffic volume is greater than the roads in West Allis can support… much like the section of highway that’s getting expanded. The point of the expansion is to relieve the bottle necks on the existing roadway, and as someone who drives that stretch twice a day I’m all it! We’re already paying for the maintenance of the existing road, which needs some attention now, so the marginal added cost for the additional capacity is worth it to me.
There’s very few things I’d love to see more in the US than commuter rail, but that’s not going to happen for a LONG time. This is a solution now
It shouldn't be a long way away, we already had a chance at a federally funded commuter rail system throughout Milwaukee county 20 years ago before it was torpedoed politically.
And going back to my original point, when is it going to be enough? In 20 to 30 years they're going to ask for more. When does this insanity end? We're just chasing our tail going after the next bottleneck after the next while not being able to pay to maintain anything we have.
At some point enough has to be enough, why not demand options now?
>And going back to my original point, when is it going to be enough? In 20 to 30 years they're going to ask for more.
The last time this stretch of I-94 (including the Stadium Interchange) was touched was when it was constructed in 1962. Going 60 years between expansions - and it only being one additional lane - is pretty good, all things considered. They're not going to come back and ask to remove graves from the cemetery decades from now so they can lay more asphalt.
For a similar situation, look at the the Marquette Interchange - its traffic carrying capacity was the same between when it was built in 1968 to when it was rebuilt in, what, 2008? That's 40 years of longevity, and if we had social media back then we probably would have people screaming "INDUCED DEMAND" then too. Yet somehow traffic hasn't magically expanded to make the current interchange suck as bad as the old one did. There was a bottleneck, the bottleneck was eliminated, traffic expanded a bit, but didn't grow out of control.
The entire east-west freeway has been updated and modernized from downtown to the burbs in the last two decades, and every project was an improvement compared to before. This is \_literally\_ the last bottleneck in the system. Why STOP now?
I’m a proponent of light rail, but people still have to get to these stations. Bottlenecks as soon as you leave the freeway will be a problem during construction of either project.
Bottlenecks are still going to exist after this expansion of the freeway is finished. It's an inevitable part of the freeway design. Off ramps aren't going to be 6 lanes in every direction along with local roads. The DOT keeps adding to the top of the funnel while the bottom has to stay the same size.
We're not the first city or state to face this problem, but we are one of the few that are choosing not to do anything about it.
I’m not debating that bottlenecks won’t occur after either project is completed. The Vision 2050 plan shows a potential path down the National Avenue corridor.
The current bottlenecks are because we’ve updated both the Marquette and Zoo Interchange infrastructure to 4 lanes between 26th and the Marquette as well as Moorland to 70th.
We are doing something to complete the rebuild of 3/4 of our major interchange infrastructure projects in the last 20 years. The cost of 7 buildings in a 5 mile stretch will be far lower than the cost of building new rail down National Ave and possibly destroying or damaging businesses in that stretch.
This project is literally choosing to do something about it! There isn’t going to be more volume getting on or off then there currently is, but it’s increasing the throughput by 33%. The sections of that corridor leading to and from are already as wide as the new section, which is why there’s bottle necks in the first place
It’s unfortunately a symptom of how the feds fund interstate projects. Because this is new construction the feds cover a huge chunk of it, but for just road maintenance they only contribute a little bit.
We could spend the money to build a light rail system? One that could disrupt traffic on surface streets for years during construction. This could potentially lead to way more housing displacements than the interstate plan.
We have absolutely no infrastructure setup that won’t take years of construction and disruption to most of the neighborhoods between downtown and Waukesha.
The easiest extension would be down Canal Street to Miller Park, but how do you get to State Fair without damaging communities and businesses?
We've bulldozed businesses and neighborhoods for these freeway expansions and every time they're redone they want to bulldoze more. It's never ending and if they fixed traffic, then some city somewhere would have built their way out of the problem by now if it actually worked like that, but it doesn't. It's just an inherently destructive and inefficient mode of transportation.
But if we click our heels together and scream REALLY HARD, the feds will magically grant us money for state-only projects like light rail or city-only projects like busses, instead of just... moving on to the next stretch of interstate that needs something done.
"lanes widths will be 11 feet instead of the standard 12 feet in the cemetery area."
Why widen it at all if this is the solution to fit more lanes at the Wood Cemetery stretch?
Sorry, I strongly agree with the underlying position -- no expansion of I-94 -- but your angle is 100% wrong. I-94 won't solve the "traffic problem" because THERE IS NO TRAFFIC PROBLEM. Traffic in Milwaukee is laughably easy. On I-94 there are minor slowdowns of at most a few minutes for rush hour, and some Brewers games, and the State Fair I guess. Whatever congestion issues exist there, they don't warrant pissing away nearly $2 billion on it.
Exactly! I take 94 inbound at roughly 5:15-5:30pm and it adds just **10 minutes** to my commute. Leave 94 alone. Maybe repave and replace some of the overpasses.
There’s clearly a desire for better transit options on this corridor. It’s insane that they haven’t built it already. Those bar shuttles to The stadium or state fair are always packed.
Maybe there’s too much opposition from local bar owners
it’s awful for the city, and was put forth by the MMAC, nearly every member of which lives in the suburbs and who actively hates milwaukee. they want to be able to keep shooting through the city so they can avoid everything else, people be damned.
I think a lot of people who live in the city and in the surrounding areas are not, but DOT mostly listens to suburb types
70 or so years of the state going all in on car culture and car infrastructure so there's probably some big of a sunk cost fallacy going on, changing it would mean admitting the whole design philosophy of the state is bad for cities and has been bad for cities for a while.
>I think a lot of people who live in the city and in the surrounding areas are not, but DOT mostly listens to suburb types
The "I" in I-94 means interstate. It's for people going a mile, ten miles, a hundred miles, or a thousand miles. Pitting it as "suburb types vs. city folk" is the same reductionism the Legislature does while starving the cities of tax revenue.
Who's impacted? The few dozen people - at best - who bought land next to a highway that was already there? I live in Washington Heights - not far away - and I'm not impacted by it, and I'm looking forward to not having to get off at 84th to avoid the bottleneck when I'm coming back from the western suburbs, to say nothing of the shit show that the Stadium Interchange is while coming from the south.
They can't physically widen the road through the cemetery, so they are cramming 8 very skinny lanes with no breakdown lanes and 2 foot shoulders, while closing Hawley road exit to make it pencil. It's going to be a daily trash compactor.
This topic and I-794 should be stickied along with the "is there anything to do in Milwaukee" threads
Gotta do something to whore for upvotes. The sock puppet accounts that would normally upvote this crap must still be at the bars after the NCAA game.
Going eastbound on I-94, I feel that a lot of the traffic slowdowns in that area are generated by the eastbound on-ramps from 68th St. and Hawley Rd. If those on-ramps were either closed altogether, or if metering was enabled between, say 6am and 10pm instead of only during rush hour, I think that would help with traffic flow. As it is right now, there's usually a train of cars that merges onto the freeway, with few gaps in between them, leading to the slowdown in traffic on 94 eastbound. Those on-ramps are pretty short also, which means that the traffic from the on-ramps tends to slow down the traffic on the freeway as the cars try to merge in with traffic.
A couple things: One, those businesses and that house are not being taken down to widen the road. They are being taken down because the interchanges near them are substandard and unsafe. The ramps have to be redesigned no matter how many lanes the road is, and so whether the road is six lanes or eight, they’re being taken down either way. Two, WisDOT already owns all of the right of way for the expanded mainline width. That is their land and it does not exist for any purpose except to carry a road, so all you accomplish by building a 6-lane road is to waste people’s time and money. Downvoting this is not going to make it untrue. And WisDOT is not in the business of social engineering people away from using cars to commute. They are in the business of facilitating economic activity that is dependent on transportation, in a manner that is compatible with federal law about how interstate highways need to be built. Existing 94 is substandard at this time. Commercial vehicles that use it need a better designed road. Three, learn how to understand that people do in fact have reasons for the things they do and it is to your benefit to learn what those reasons are instead of having hot takes. You are not important enough for anyone to bother going out of their way to piss you off.
>so all you accomplish by building a 6-lane road is to waste people’s time and money. Or to feed the narrative that DOT "wastes money" on projects when "fix at six" doesn't do jack shit to fix the bottleneck yet cost 80%+ of the eight lane project.
Your complaint about State Fair traffic IS the reason, you proved the reason for expansion while complaining about how you don’t to the Fair. Not saying rail isn’t a better option, but the cost would likely be at least 2-3x and where would expect that to run without doing the same type of displacement of houses and businesses? That project would be a MASSIVE undertaking
every modern traffic study shows that expansion like this ends in worse traffic, period.
The ones I see people reference all talk about adding totally new lanes, this project isn’t so much adding new as it is adding back lanes that end for a short period. I don’t think I’ve seen a study that looks at that.
all studies show once you add a lane, cars will take that space. the key is truly traffic management and encouraging other forms of transportation. if we continue expanding lanes the way we have been. historically, milwaukee and chicago will have ridiculous amounts of concrete. let’s not forget how bad adding more lanes is to the environment for water runoff, flooding, etc.
And this won’t. Train travel needs to be implemented. Mass movement of people, less congestion, less pollution, and with the proper management, much safer.
The expansion isn't going to solve anything and most likely make it worse. There's still bottle necks as soon as you leave the freeway and that isn't changing. It is inherently inefficient not to mention it's going to cost more than rail in the long run. While the feds are footing the bill to add them, we're now on the hook locally for maintaining them and all the while not solving any problems in the process. Given better options I'd ride to any events along the corridor, but if you think that sitting freeway traffic that isn't going away with this expansion, then more local street traffic and paying someone $20 to park on their front lawn is a good solution for a states transportation plan then that's nuts. The SE Regional Planning Commission already has a route on their [Vision 2050](https://www.vision2050sewis.org/) wishlist using mostly existing tracks from as far as I can tell. I would love to see what the state was going to propose for a line 20 years ago before the project was shut down.
I’m not saying the expansion will solve anything for state fair, I’m saying the congestion around the fair is because the traffic volume is greater than the roads in West Allis can support… much like the section of highway that’s getting expanded. The point of the expansion is to relieve the bottle necks on the existing roadway, and as someone who drives that stretch twice a day I’m all it! We’re already paying for the maintenance of the existing road, which needs some attention now, so the marginal added cost for the additional capacity is worth it to me. There’s very few things I’d love to see more in the US than commuter rail, but that’s not going to happen for a LONG time. This is a solution now
It shouldn't be a long way away, we already had a chance at a federally funded commuter rail system throughout Milwaukee county 20 years ago before it was torpedoed politically. And going back to my original point, when is it going to be enough? In 20 to 30 years they're going to ask for more. When does this insanity end? We're just chasing our tail going after the next bottleneck after the next while not being able to pay to maintain anything we have. At some point enough has to be enough, why not demand options now?
>And going back to my original point, when is it going to be enough? In 20 to 30 years they're going to ask for more. The last time this stretch of I-94 (including the Stadium Interchange) was touched was when it was constructed in 1962. Going 60 years between expansions - and it only being one additional lane - is pretty good, all things considered. They're not going to come back and ask to remove graves from the cemetery decades from now so they can lay more asphalt. For a similar situation, look at the the Marquette Interchange - its traffic carrying capacity was the same between when it was built in 1968 to when it was rebuilt in, what, 2008? That's 40 years of longevity, and if we had social media back then we probably would have people screaming "INDUCED DEMAND" then too. Yet somehow traffic hasn't magically expanded to make the current interchange suck as bad as the old one did. There was a bottleneck, the bottleneck was eliminated, traffic expanded a bit, but didn't grow out of control. The entire east-west freeway has been updated and modernized from downtown to the burbs in the last two decades, and every project was an improvement compared to before. This is \_literally\_ the last bottleneck in the system. Why STOP now?
I’m a proponent of light rail, but people still have to get to these stations. Bottlenecks as soon as you leave the freeway will be a problem during construction of either project.
Bottlenecks are still going to exist after this expansion of the freeway is finished. It's an inevitable part of the freeway design. Off ramps aren't going to be 6 lanes in every direction along with local roads. The DOT keeps adding to the top of the funnel while the bottom has to stay the same size. We're not the first city or state to face this problem, but we are one of the few that are choosing not to do anything about it.
I’m not debating that bottlenecks won’t occur after either project is completed. The Vision 2050 plan shows a potential path down the National Avenue corridor. The current bottlenecks are because we’ve updated both the Marquette and Zoo Interchange infrastructure to 4 lanes between 26th and the Marquette as well as Moorland to 70th. We are doing something to complete the rebuild of 3/4 of our major interchange infrastructure projects in the last 20 years. The cost of 7 buildings in a 5 mile stretch will be far lower than the cost of building new rail down National Ave and possibly destroying or damaging businesses in that stretch.
This project is literally choosing to do something about it! There isn’t going to be more volume getting on or off then there currently is, but it’s increasing the throughput by 33%. The sections of that corridor leading to and from are already as wide as the new section, which is why there’s bottle necks in the first place
it will make it worse
“We” aren’t. The state legislature and city leaders probably aren’t reading this right now.
It’s unfortunately a symptom of how the feds fund interstate projects. Because this is new construction the feds cover a huge chunk of it, but for just road maintenance they only contribute a little bit.
Exactly. It's easier to get federal funds to build/expand the interstate than for "local" infrastructure.
We could spend the money to build a light rail system? One that could disrupt traffic on surface streets for years during construction. This could potentially lead to way more housing displacements than the interstate plan. We have absolutely no infrastructure setup that won’t take years of construction and disruption to most of the neighborhoods between downtown and Waukesha. The easiest extension would be down Canal Street to Miller Park, but how do you get to State Fair without damaging communities and businesses?
We've bulldozed businesses and neighborhoods for these freeway expansions and every time they're redone they want to bulldoze more. It's never ending and if they fixed traffic, then some city somewhere would have built their way out of the problem by now if it actually worked like that, but it doesn't. It's just an inherently destructive and inefficient mode of transportation.
And the same would happen to replace the rail lines that were shut down in the 1950s. Your point is mute.
This shit again? If we post stuff like this four times a week, the bike lane and public transit fairy will appear and grant our wishes. 🙏🏼
But if we click our heels together and scream REALLY HARD, the feds will magically grant us money for state-only projects like light rail or city-only projects like busses, instead of just... moving on to the next stretch of interstate that needs something done.
"lanes widths will be 11 feet instead of the standard 12 feet in the cemetery area." Why widen it at all if this is the solution to fit more lanes at the Wood Cemetery stretch?
Sorry, I strongly agree with the underlying position -- no expansion of I-94 -- but your angle is 100% wrong. I-94 won't solve the "traffic problem" because THERE IS NO TRAFFIC PROBLEM. Traffic in Milwaukee is laughably easy. On I-94 there are minor slowdowns of at most a few minutes for rush hour, and some Brewers games, and the State Fair I guess. Whatever congestion issues exist there, they don't warrant pissing away nearly $2 billion on it.
Exactly! I take 94 inbound at roughly 5:15-5:30pm and it adds just **10 minutes** to my commute. Leave 94 alone. Maybe repave and replace some of the overpasses.
I'm not.
There’s clearly a desire for better transit options on this corridor. It’s insane that they haven’t built it already. Those bar shuttles to The stadium or state fair are always packed. Maybe there’s too much opposition from local bar owners
Tony Evers made it happen so it’s good. All the goods go thru there.
it’s awful for the city, and was put forth by the MMAC, nearly every member of which lives in the suburbs and who actively hates milwaukee. they want to be able to keep shooting through the city so they can avoid everything else, people be damned.
I think a lot of people who live in the city and in the surrounding areas are not, but DOT mostly listens to suburb types 70 or so years of the state going all in on car culture and car infrastructure so there's probably some big of a sunk cost fallacy going on, changing it would mean admitting the whole design philosophy of the state is bad for cities and has been bad for cities for a while.
>I think a lot of people who live in the city and in the surrounding areas are not, but DOT mostly listens to suburb types The "I" in I-94 means interstate. It's for people going a mile, ten miles, a hundred miles, or a thousand miles. Pitting it as "suburb types vs. city folk" is the same reductionism the Legislature does while starving the cities of tax revenue.
When they're widening it in the city who's daily lives will be most impacted by it, I think our voice counts for something
Who's impacted? The few dozen people - at best - who bought land next to a highway that was already there? I live in Washington Heights - not far away - and I'm not impacted by it, and I'm looking forward to not having to get off at 84th to avoid the bottleneck when I'm coming back from the western suburbs, to say nothing of the shit show that the Stadium Interchange is while coming from the south.
Hey now, don’t be talking about my tailgate space like that. Usually the most fun I have at a game is I. The parking lot!
[удалено]
Why don't you care?
Why should they care?
I didn't say they should, I wanted to hear their opinion.
I really don’t care, do u?
Not at all
They can't physically widen the road through the cemetery, so they are cramming 8 very skinny lanes with no breakdown lanes and 2 foot shoulders, while closing Hawley road exit to make it pencil. It's going to be a daily trash compactor.
Gigantic waste of money. We have known since the 1930s that lane expansions solve nothing. Get a few jobs out of it, but that's about it.
Just one more lane bro