Christmas has come and gone, and 2008 has been another interesting year for urbanism in Milwaukee. It’s time to look forward to what we can hope for and plan on in 2009. We broke our thoughts down into three separate categories. The first chronicles the projects we think would genuinely promote urbanism in Milwaukee. The second are proposed projects that we would like to see break ground. The third and final list is of projects that we’ll almost certainly be following in Milwaukee this next year.

Milwaukee should explore how land sales are managed in order to achieve the highest and best use. If Milwaukee can become better at converting land from public and vacant to private and developed it will only be a benefit to the entire city by building a better urban fabric and raising the city tax base.

The massive amount of snow that fell on Milwaukee on Thursday night wrecked some serious havoc on the MCTS 10 bus route on Friday. Lyon Street, to which I call home, appeared to have some kind of magnetic snow that attracted buses. By 10:30 a.m. three buses were stuck in the snow on Lyon Street (which ironically only crosses the 10 route, but isn’t actually part of it), and three more were stuck in the snow within two blocks.

While the title may not sound that exciting, the Lake Express High-Speed Ferry docks in the Menomonee River valley for the winter. So to get there, it must travel in from Lake Michigan. They created a time-lapse photography video to show the journey and published it online. If you’ve got two minutes, it’s interesting to watch the bridges rise and see what your view would be like if owned a yacht (or coal barge).

Back in March, 2008 I started an organization that worked to convince the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that expanding into Wauwatosa was the wrong choice for the university, the City of Milwaukee, and Southeast Wisconsin. The range of issues the Wauwatosa site presents is broad, but generally we focused on showing how a downtown location could meet and exceed UWM’s goals without the additional hurdles that the Wauwatosa site brings with it.

The Milwaukee County Board Task Force on the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Transit Authority Recommendations, chaired by Supervisor Patricia Jursik, met for the first time on Monday December 29th, 2008. Other members of the task force present at the meeting included Supervisor Chris Larson, Supervisor John Thomas (who arrived late), Thomas Kujawa (formerly of MCTS), and Lloyd Grant (attending on behalf of Ms. Anita Gulotta-Connelly). The goal of the task force is to present recommendations to the Transportation Committee, which will then be presented to the full Milwaukee County Board on February 5th, 2009.