I-94 N/S OBJECTIONS RAMP UP

Special to the Readers of Milwaukeeworld.com

By Michael Horne

and the Milwaukee World Hound Dog Team

Two studies released this week focus on freeway ramps as another example of highway planners' mindless assaults on Wisconsin's largest city.
The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Wisconsin issued a position paper and press release Thursday, October 30th, 2008, decrying WisDOT plans to eliminate the S. 27th Street exit ramp at I-794 as part of the department's unfunded $1.9 billion plan to reconstruct and widen the freeway. Retaining the ramp would require highway engineers to abandon their slavish adherence to construction engineering standards designed for wide-open spaces in favor of an urbanist approach.
The Chamber fears closing the exit would be a blighting influence in an area where the Hispanic population is expected to grow.
Hispanic Chamber President & CEO Maria Monreal-Cameron urged Governor Jim Doyle and Transportation Secretary Frank Busalacchi "to tell their highway engineers to make the very modest changes that will enable the South 27^th Street Corridor – the Main Street of Hispanic prosperity – to remain a vibrant thoroughfare."
Although the department plans to shut down the urban S. 27th St. exit, a new, very suburban exit is planned for the same street -- a few miles south where Milwaukee's longest street bisects the Cities of Franklin and Oak Creek.
Call it the Northwestern Mutual exit. Franklin and Oak Creek are expected to pitch in to share $7.6 million -- or about half -- of the costs of a new exit east of S. 27th St. at W. Drexel Avenue, convenient to the giant insurer's isolated "South Campus."
This should please the DOT, since a reconstruction of the Milwaukee S. 27th St. ramp would come out of its own budget, and not out of that of two suburbs pretending to cooperate to develop their 6 mile shared border.

The study for the I-94 expansion makes it clear that WisDOT understands a new exit at Drexel would depress the city of Milwaukee:
"Redevelopment along 27th Street in Milwaukee may be discouraged as the ease of developing 'greenfield' sites in Oak Creek and Franklin increases." [Source: I-94 FEIS Milwaukee County Indirect Effects Summary Exhibit 4-2.] [Emphasis added.]
As always, WisDOT, like its handmaiden SEWRPC, prefers the over-engineered suburban alternative to a pragmatic, urban approach.
The department would gobble up acres of "greenfields" for land-intensive interchanges and ramps, especially when growing suburban communities, eager to increase their tax bases with strip malls and mega marts, would pay half the bill.
Meanwhile, an exit ramp in a redeveloping urban area would require the acquisition of a number of homes in order to be built to the DOT's exurban standards. Since the home acquisition has been deemed politically infeasible, and since the DOT would have to pay the full cost of the improvements, the DOT is happy to abandon the ramp in Milwaukee and reroute drivers through non-commercial territory to reach the 27th Street Corridor. If you want a full ramp, then go to the suburbs.

THE OPTION NOT CONSIDERED

One option not considered by the DOT and requested by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce would be to rethink the design of freeway ramps in densely populated urban areas. Do we really need to engineer extremely wide and straight ramps for freeway entrances and exits?
"Less is More," we learn from Steve Filmanowicz of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Filmanowicz, who lives in Milwaukee and commutes by rail to work in Chicago, compared the downtown interchange geography of the two cities in a new study entitled "When Highway Designers Met Chicago (and Milwaukee)."
Filmanowicz includes a photograph of each city's principal interchange, and the contrasts are striking.
"The skyline is big and imposing in Chicago," he writes, "so you might think the freeway interchanges would be too. But no. ... The interchanges in and around downtown are mostly minor monsters. Instead of casting frightening shadows on the city landscape, they're often submerged or partially-submerged. The footprints are relatively small."
However, in Milwaukee, Filmanowicz sees a disaster in the Doyle administration's obnoxiously unrestrained Marquette Interchange, completed this year at an $800 million cost:
"City forces failed in their efforts to rein in the expansion of the already colossal Marquette Interchange and its many tentacles," he writes. "
The Chicago interchange fits within the city's overall grid, while the Marquette makes a mockery of it. And, the Chicago interchange serves the purpose of integrating freeway traffic into city street patterns.
"Although the interchange certainly depresses real estate values around it, its design at least recognizes the value of important surface streets and the city grid itself. To do this, highway designers must employ tighter, narrower loops and shorter ramps, which must be used at lower speeds." [Emphasis added.]
"The ramps connecting the Kennedy Expressway with Adams Street in Chicago are short and narrow. As they approach Adams, they start looking and behaving more and more like regular city intersections, with tight corners that require cars to slow to a crawl before turning and aren't hard for pedestrians to cross.
"Although these short ramps are technically considered 'functionally deficient' infrastructure because of their inability to move traffic at interstate speeds, the Illinois DOT simply reduces posted speed on this stretch of the Kennedy to 45 miles per hour so that merging can occur."

So there you have it. With a little counterintuitive engineering, the South 27th Street ramps can be retained. No houses need be lost, no crazy widening must occur. And considering the feud going on between Oak Creek and Franklin over splitting the cost for their expensive new interchange to feed yet more urban sprawl, perhaps Governor Doyle and Secretary Busalacchi should follow the advice of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Congress for the New Urbanism and tell their engineers to design an urban freeway interchange that would not destroy the city it was built to serve.
[For another take on the story, see Sean Ryan's account of the continuing battle to save the ramp in The Daily Reporter.--Ed.]
[Traffic World is reporting today, Wednesday, November 5th, 2008, that Secretary Frank Busalacchi is considered to be a potential candidate for a top job in the United States Department of Transportation. -- Ed.]