Building a Better Biking Milwaukee

Cyclists aren’t the only ones who benefit from bike lanes

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As Walker’s Point continues to shed its industrial roots and become a destination for trendy restaurants and bustling nightlife, the revitalization has raised property values and spurred a slew of new construction projects. While you would be remiss to discount the hard work individual restaurateurs, chefs and property developers put in to make that area what it is, experts also cite South Second Street’s 2011 roadway redesign as a factor in the neighborhood’s success.

“South Second Street is one of the most thriving restaurant districts that we have in the city,” said Robert Schneider, a professor of urban planning at UW-Milwaukee. “This is a place that, while I don’t give all of the credit to redesigning the roadway, the redesign made that into a place where people would feel more comfortable walking, biking and feeling safe when they’re going to those restaurants.”

Juli Kaufmann, who developed the Clock Shadow Building on the corner of South Second and Bruce streets as president of Fix Development, also partly credits Walker’s Point’s success to the roadway redesign. “I view the real estate development that followed the redesign as a direct result correlated, at least in part, to these enhancements,” she said. “I not only built the Clock Shadow Building but also redeveloped the Purple Door Ice Cream building. The roadway changes were pivotal to those developments.”

Pedestrian and bicycle-focused urban planning is often framed as an issue for pedestrians and cyclists only. In a car-dependent city like Milwaukee, investments in other forms of transportation are often viewed as wasted resources (look no further than the streetcar debate). But research suggests that building pedestrian and bicycle-friendly infrastructure also drives economic growth.

According to the Alliance for Biking & Walking’s 2016 Benchmarking Report, eight of its 10 recently studied complete streets projects (projects where bicyclists and pedestrians are considered equally to motorists) showed increased property values near the improved areas. A study of San Francisco’s Valencia Street found that two-thirds of business owners felt that new bike lanes had a positive impact on their business. A study of greater Portland, Ore., also found that bicycling customers spent more per month than drivers. Over the last decade, Milwaukee has been slowly getting in on this success.

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‘Picking the Low-Hanging Fruit’

In 2010, the City of Milwaukee released “Milwaukee by Bike,” a bicycle master plan. It laid out a vision that imagined by 2020 “Milwaukee’s neighborhoods will be filled with a noticeable diversity of people riding bicycles on innovative bicycle facilities.” The plan’s three overarching goals were to increase bicycle use so that 5% of all trips are made by bike; create an attractive, safe and accessible network of bicycle facilities within one-quarter mile of all city residents; and to reduce bicycle crashes by 50%.

Since adopting the plan, the city has taken a number of steps to embrace bicycling. “The city has done a pretty good job at picking the low-hanging fruit,” Dave Schlabowske, executive director of the Wisconsin Bike Federation, said. “Pretty much everywhere where a bike lane fits just by adding those two lines of paint, they’ve been added. That’s great progress.”

Milwaukee had fewer than 20 miles of bike lanes as recently as the mid-2000s. As a part of its High-Impact Paving Program, the city has made bike lanes a part of most roadway repaving projects, installing more than 120 miles. In an effort to improve bicyclist visibility, green thermoplastic markings have been added to some locations to highlight traffic “conflict zones.” Milwaukee DPW has also installed more than 1,500 bike racks throughout the city.

The city has also developed its own trail network. The Beerline Trail opened in 2010 and has since expanded. The Kinnickinnic River Trail opened in 2013. These city projects add to the miles of trail that the county-owned Oak Leaf and state-owned Hank Aaron trails provide.

An Expansion of Bublr Bikes

Milwaukee’s most visible bicycle project has been the addition of Bublr Bikes, the city’s bike share program. Bike share has become an essential part of urban life across the country, with at least 55 programs nationwide and 28 million trips taken in 2016, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

“It’s just expected that a first-class city in 2018 is going to have a bike share program, and if you don’t that’s a ding,” said Sally Shepherdson, executive director of Bublr Bikes, explaining: “It’s a factor used against you when companies are looking to locate or when potential employees are looking to come to your city.”

The blue-biked nonprofit began in Milwaukee with 10 stations in August 2014. It now boasts 87 stations and 90,000 trips taken in 2017. Bublr is rapidly expanding, but a reliance on grants and donations, coupled with the $75,000 price tag per station, has made it difficult to serve every neighborhood. “They certainly aren’t reaching all parts of the city yet,” Schneider said. “Riverwest, the area that has the highest rate of bike commuting, doesn’t even have a Bublr station yet.”

Bublr may not be able to put a station everywhere, but it has partnered with a number of local organizations to make access to cycling easier. A program with the Housing Authority allows residents of public housing to purchase annual Bublr passes for $8 (the regular price is $80). A recent grant will allow Bublr to expand this $8 membership to any Milwaukee resident that qualifies for FoodShare.

Serving the unbanked is a common struggle for bike share programs across the nation, which typically require a credit or debit card to complete transactions. A network of community partners, including Pete’s Fruit Market, allows the unbanked to pay for their Bublr memberships with cash.

A goal of both programs is to give more low-income Milwaukeeans the ability to get to work or run errands without having to purchase a costly car. “One of the pillars of the foundation is access for under-resourced areas,” Shepherdson said. “Equity was always baked in.”

Bublr has also partnered with the Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) on the Buslr Pass. The program allows riders to pay for Bublr and MCTS buses with one card. “We have these different modes of transportation, and smart cities have integration of intermodal transportation,” Shepherdson said. She hopes to have a similar arrangement with the Milwaukee streetcar in the future and is making plans with the city to have streetcar stops coincide with Bublr stations whenever possible.

All of these steps have made Milwaukee a much better bike city, but there is still a long way to go.

On the Bike Path to Platinum

On Bike to Work Day in June 2016, Mayor Tom Barrett announced the Path to Platinum initiative, a reference to the “platinum” status that the League of American Bicyclists gives out to certain cities. Madison was awarded platinum status in 2015. Milwaukee is currently a bronze city.

The Path to Platinum committee released its first report in March 2017 and found that surveyed Milwaukeeans’ top barrier to cycling was driver behavior. This fear is backed by a 2017 Wisconsin Bike Federation report, which concluded, “The city of Milwaukee as a whole, and in each district, has a pedestrian safety problem.” The research showed that, while Milwaukee makes up 10.4% of the state’s population, it accounts for 29.1% of crashes in Wisconsin.

One solution is to build separated bike lanes, which use planters, parked cars or curbs to separate bikes from drivers. “Currently with the bike lanes that we have in most parts of the city, or if there’s no bike lane at all, you only really see the most experienced bicyclists out in these locations,” said Schneider, who is also on the Path to Platinum committee. “Separated bike lanes make it possible for people of more ages and more abilities to feel comfortable out biking. It’s more like having a trail that goes through the street system.” The City of Milwaukee Department of Public Works will install the city’s first separated bike lanes on the East Locust Street and East North Avenue bridges over the Milwaukee River this summer.

Riverwest Leading the Way

While 88% of Path to Platinum survey respondents desired more separation from vehicle traffic, separated bike lanes are costly and don’t fit everywhere in the city. Another option is to create bicycle boulevards, also known as neighborhood greenways or safe street networks. These are city streets with traffic-calming treatments such as speed bumps, traffic circles and curb extensions. The city is moving forward with plans for the first bicycle boulevard in Riverwest on North Fratney and East Wright streets to begin construction in 2020.

“By building a safe local street network, it’s safer for everyone and it improves everyone’s property values,” Schlabowske said. “Who doesn’t want to live on a street that has fewer cars speeding down it? It turns out that if you build a safe street network that reduces speeding and reduces cut-through traffic, at the same time you create great streets to ride bikes on if you do it right.”

The biggest obstacle to achieving these goals is, of course, money. Installing a separated bike lane can cost between $100,000-500,000 per mile, and a regular bike lane may cost around $15,000 per mile. Riverwest’s bicycle boulevard project will cost around $800,000, though a federal transportation grant will cover about 80% of that cost.

These costs are very real, but pale in comparison to other transportation projects. “$100,000 per mile is miniscule compared to the cost of an urban freeway expansion,” Schneider said. “If you look at the proposed cost of the three-mile I-94 expansion project between 16th Street and 70th Street, the cost of that is $800 million for three miles. It’s such a fraction of the cost when we think about these walking and biking improvements, and they have real benefits to the people in the local neighborhoods.”

While bicycle infrastructure alone cannot solve a city’s problems, when teamed with other solutions, it can help combat a wide range of issues. “I recognize the many significant problems that face our city,” Schlabowske said. “The entrenched poverty, the racism, all that sort of stuff that is incredibly difficult to solve. I know all of those things should be a top priority. I would say though, that bicycling should always be considered as a simple, inexpensive strategy to address almost any of those problems.”