Milwaukee

We talked to transportation advocacy organizations in Oakland, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Madison, Wisconsin. 

To combat racial segregation and disparities in public health, attorney Dennis Grzezinski is confronting the state's penchant for road expansion.

Milwaukee will be getting its first bike boulevards, the city announced this week, the beginning of what should eventually be a citywide network of low-traffic, low-stress streets for cycling.

Perhaps nowhere has the tactic of trashing cities to win elections played out more starkly than in Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker blows his dog whistle by portraying Milwaukee as a welfare case. But Walker's got it all wrong: New data shows Milwaukee's wealth is in fact being siphoned off by the rest of the state.

It just keeps getting easier to combine bike and train trips in Chicago. Last month, after years of lobbying by advocates (including Streetsblog’s Steven Vance) the South Shore Line, which runs between Chicago and South Bend, Indiana, finally launched a bikes-on-board pilot.

In a surprise move, the Chicago Department of Transportation recently began building the city’s first curb-protected bike lanes on Sacramento Drive through Douglas Park. This morning, assistant director of transportation planning Mike Amsden provided an update on this game-changing facility, plus a slew of other bikeways projects slated for 2015.

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation is set on widening Interstate 94, a highway that runs east-west through Milwaukee. The agency is so committed to this idea that it is proceeding, at great expense and over the objections of Milwaukee's mayor, with a project to double-deck a portion of the road through a relatively densely populated area. The money that WisDOT is prepared to shell out for this highway expansion could be better spent providing quality transit options along the corridor, the Wisconsin Public Interest Research says in a new report  [PDF].

Monday night, as the Wisconsin DOT went through the motions of a Power Point presentation about the latest highway expansion it wants to gouge through Milwaukee, a groups of protesters outside the meeting shouted their frustration with an agency that has spent lavishly on roads to the exclusion of all other modes.