Among its many assets, Milwaukee can boast of some of the shortest commute times in the country. According to a recent study by the real estate site Commercial Café, the average round-trip commute time in Milwaukee in 2017 was 44.4 minutes a day. That made Milwaukee better off in this regard than other Midwestern cities like Indianapolis (where the average time is 46.8 minutes a day) and Detroit (where it’s 50.8 minutes).
Added up over the course of a year, Milwaukee’s commute time comes to eight days of sitting in traffic on average annually. That may seem like a lot, but, once again, it could be worse. Just to our south in Chicago, people spend 69.8 minutes a day commuting, equaling 12.6 days a year.
But before they start rushing to congratulate themselves, Milwaukeeans have at least one reason for taking pause. Commercial Café contends that the cities that have done the best combating congestion are often those that have spent the most in recent years on improving roads and other infrastructure. That admonition touches on a sore spot in Wisconsin, where transportation advocates have long argued that highway improvements have failed to keep pace with increasing traffic numbers in the Milwaukee area.
Debby Jackson, executive director of the Wisconsin Transportation Development Association, noted that Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s 2019 Urban Mobility Report found that traffic congestion costs Milwaukee-area drivers $790 a year in additional fuel and lost productivity. Although Milwaukee may have low commute times on average, she said, “it really depends on your route. If you routinely sit in traffic on I-94 east or west between the Marquette and Zoo interchanges, this ranking likely doesn’t reflect your daily reality.”
Still, the reasons for being grateful are undeniable. Milwaukee’s commute times, along with being relatively short, are also remarkable for having changed very little in recent years. The Commercial Café study found that the average commute time in this city increased by only 0.9 minutes a day during the period 2008-’17. During those same years, average commute times increased by 19.9 minutes a day in Portland, Ore., and 21.7 minutes in Sacramento, Calif.
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Slow Population Growth, Working Remotely
To be sure, Milwaukee’s moderate increase in average commutes came at a time when the population itself was growing fairly slowly. The Milwaukee metropolitan statistical area—which takes in not only the city proper but also all of Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha counties—went from having an estimated 1,555,908 residents in 2010 to 1,576,236 in 2017, an increase of only 1.3%.
Other developments have also helped to hold commute times in check. Advances in internet services have allowed more people to work from home or from remote offices and thus forgo the need to drive to and from an office in the city, and the recent influx of young people to the many new condominiums and apartment buildings in or near Milwaukee’s center has reduced drive times, or walk times, to less than 10 minutes. But, as Jackson and others note, all that’s likely of little consolation to drivers who still find themselves stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-94 or I-43 on trips to and from the Milwaukee suburbs.
Fortunately, transportation advocates have seen some reason for hope in recent years. The state’s latest budget, for instance, includes plans to widen I-43 from Silver Spring Drive north of Milwaukee to Grafton. That long-contemplated project is just one of several deemed essential by the Southeast Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission (SEWRPC) in its Vision 2050 plan. Kevin Muhs, SEWRPC’s executive director, said he’s also hopeful the state will soon renew working on plans to rebuild the section of I-94 running between the Zoo and Marquette interchanges.
The interchanges themselves have undergone billions of dollars’ worth of construction work in the past two decades. Yet plans to expand the intervening stretch of interstate—to give it four lanes to match the four coming out of the rebuilt Zoo interchange—were allowed to lose their federal stamp of approval amid Republican former Gov. Scott Walker’s adamant refusal to consider raising the state’s gas tax or vehicle registration fees. The result has been a bottleneck on the main artery into the city from the west.
Muhs said the only proven solution to congestion is so-called “dynamic tolling.” A system of this kind allows drivers to be charged more for use of the roads when they choose to drive at busy times of the day, but dynamic tolling remains unpopular and is unlikely to be adopted in Wisconsin. Barring that, the best way to keep commute times reasonable is to expand the roads.
“When it comes to addressing congestion in the Milwaukee area, we have long recommended slight increases in capacity in the interstate system,” Muhs said. “Over time, as new businesses and residents continue to move in, this should be enough to roughly maintain our current level of congestion.”
What About Public Transportation?
Muhs acknowledged there is a place for public transportation. This is one area of policy where many believe local officials could decidedly do better. In Milwaukee County, County Executive Chris Abele recently proposed cutting 16 bus lines in order to make up for a $5.9 million budgetary shortfall. That change, if adopted, would eliminate not only lines that run primarily inside the city but also six “Freeway Flyers,” which suburbanites often hop onto after parking their cars at an outlying lot and ride into the city.
The possible loss of those routes, which are meant to reduce traffic congestion, is just one of the many reasons why the proposal is shortsighted, says Bruce Colburn, former president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 998, which represents transit workers in the Milwaukee area. “It’s especially true for the routes they are talking about eliminating,” Colburn said. “A lot of the people who are riding these buses also have cars.” To him, eliminating bus routes will only add to the vicious cycle that got underway when fares were increased in recent years by Abele. By making the bus service both more expensive and less useful, public officials are doing nothing more than detracting from the overall appeal of public transportation and ensuring passenger numbers will be depressed even further.
Colburn said he has some sympathy for public officials who are struggling with budget shortfalls, but he also asserted that policymakers somehow always manage to find ways to pay for their priorities. Although state government is not necessarily flush with money, he noted, lawmakers were able to pony up incentives for both the construction of Fiserv Forum and the Mount Pleasant Foxconn plant. “They need to recognize that our transit system is a vital service for our whole community,” Colburn said. “Right now, it’s just phony excuses they are giving.”
