Yet another sign that logic is prevailing and the city of Milwaukee is improving, the Menomonee Valley Partners have announced the construction of a pedestrian tunnel and bridge to link up the Menomonee Valley with the bordering Silver City neighborhood to the south.

While the sides of the valley are not unreasonably steep, they’re lined with pedestrian barriers. On the north side of the valley you have Interstate 94 blocking access for pedestrians, and on the south side you have the Menomonee River and railroad tracks. Jobs exist in the valley and more are coming, but getting people that don’t own cars to the jobs has been a challenge so far.

Previous attempts included the idea of attaching an elevator to the 35th Street viaduct that crosses the valley and having people use the small staircases attached to the 35th and 27th Street viaducts.

While the idea of a massive elevator sounds exciting, it doesn’t seem logical to have people standing out on the middle of a bridge in the winter waiting for an elevator when they could be walking along a path on the valley floor.

In short, this is the information you need to know about why this development makes sense…

“For the people who are living in the neighborhood right around the (Menomonee) Valley to access the jobs or recreational value of the valley, it’s about a three-mile walk,” said Menomonee Valley Partners Executive Director Laura Bray. “This will make it less than two blocks.”

Linking central city residents with jobs through public/private development partnerships is just one of the many reasons that I believe that urban Milwaukee is on the right track.

You can see this kind of "intelligent design" with developments like the 6th Street Viaduct, the Canal Street extension, and perhaps most impressively the Marsupial Bridge under the Holton Ave Viaduct.

Construction won’t actually start until 2009, which is unfortunate, but the connection will undoubtedly be of benefit to both ends of the connection. CSA Commercial is renovating a building on the Silver City neighborhood-side of the tunnel to be turned into an office building, which will help kick-start development in the area.

The Brookings Institution recently ranked America’s most walkable big cities. Milwaukee didn’t crack the top 25 unfortunately, but consider this…

However, the Brookings report itself has some major flaws. I know I’m going to sound like a major hater here, but somehow out of 30 metropolitan regions nationwide, the Miami-Ft Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro ranked 8th place – above metros like New York and Philadelphia! For anyone who knows anything about cities and metropolitan regions, this should immediately raise a red flag.

So how is such a ranking possible, you ask? It comes down to Brookings’ flawed methodology for calculating walkable areas in each metro. Instead of calculating the percentage of area that is walkable in each metropolitan region, the Institution instead chose to go by arbitrary districts or neighborhoods, which vary considerably in size and functionality. For example, both Center City, Philadelphia and Coconut Grove, Miami were chosen as walkable locales within their respective metros. However, despite Center City being much, much larger than Coconut Grove, the two areas count the same…. Read more from Transit Miami

Milwaukee, while far from the ranks of Chicago and New York in terms of walkability, has made significant strides in the past few year. Things like the Marsupial Bridge, Oak Leaf Trail, and Riverwalk are significant and growing assets that signal the emergence of a pedestrian culture in urban Milwaukee.

It’s hard to find developments today in Milwaukee that aren’t pedestrian friendly. Developments like The Residences on Water, The Catalyst, and Edison Green all replace parking lots or underused gravel lots with intelligently-designed, sustainable towers that only will increase the pedestrian-centric transformation underway in Milwaukee.

Plus, it’s hard to ignore a city that has willingly removed an urban freeway to replace it with pedestrian-minded buildings.

So yeah, Milwaukee isn’t on a flawed list today, but the community at-large is working to set the standard for tomorrow.