Park East Removal Didn’t ‘Devastate’ Downtown
Controversy over its removal offers lessons to those opposing plan to take down I-794 link.
2015 image provided by Milwaukee County.
As soon as he was first elected to the position of Milwaukee’s Mayor in 1988, John Norquist began considering an effort to remove the one-mile long Park East freeway spur. On those occasions when the idea was floated it got opposition. A 1994 Milwaukee Sentinel article co-written by Tom Daykin warned that the Park East spur “plays a valuable role in moving cars and trucks through the city’s heart, transportation planners say…Vehicles that now use the Park East would be forced onto city streets not built to handle as much volume as the freeway.”
But in April 1999, Norquist got Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson and Milwaukee County Executive Tom Ament to agree to a transportation plan that included removing rather than reconstructing the freeway spur as the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) had planned.
The idea soon met with outrage led by downtown china shop owner George Watts, who called for Norquist’s recall from office. Watts denounced the Park East plan as “crass stupidity” that would cause traffic jams, congestion, noise, and pollution while costing downtown jobs, increasing traffic deaths and delaying emergency vehicles.
“This will be absolutely devastating, economically, to Downtown,” Watts forecasted. “We are in the hands of a mayor who doesn’t believe in freeways. He wants the city to shrivel up and die.”
Or as one letter writer to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, predicted, taking away freeways like this would “give us the same despair that Third World countries have now.”
Watts ultimately ran against Norquist in 2000, making the Park East Freeway the major issue in his campaign for mayor and running newspaper and TV ads attacking the plan. He also filed a lawsuit to block the spur’s removal. But Watts lost, getting only 44% of the vote and his lawsuit was ultimately dismissed by a court.
In 2003, the freeway was removed and replaced with a four-lane McKinley Avenue that connects to Knapp Street. And none of the traffic jams and other ills predicted by Watts occurred.
Instead the impact was all positive. Taxpayers saved $25 to $55 million in funding by tearing down rather than reconstructing the spur and 24 acres of land was freed up for economic development. “By 2006, land values in the area of the Park East increased an estimated 180 percent, and property taxes grew by 45 percent. Three new neighborhoods emerged from the freeway’s rubble: McKinley Avenue District, Lower Water Street District, and Upper Water Street District,” according to an analysis by the American Planning Association. ‘Now known as the Park East Corridor, the area has generated over $1B in investment funding “
The current proposal to replace the elevated I-794 freeway between 6th Street and the Hoan Bridge with a street-level boulevard has many similarities. It is just under nine-tenths of a mile in length, with some WisDOT proposals calling for replacing a shorter section of the elevated freeway. It will yield more urban land, 32.5 acres that could be could be developed as apartments, offices and other buildings with estimated values totaling $1.5 billion, according to Rethink 794. And it would knit together the trendy Third Ward and the East Town area of Downtown, which has some of the most expensive real estate in Wisconsin.
And aș with the McKinley-Knapp Street replacement for the Park East, the elevated I-794 would be replaced by Clybourn Street, which would be converted to a two-way street, and St. Paul Avenue. In both cases, replacing the freeway with the more efficient street grid provides many more points to exit, enter or turn.
That said, this section of the freeway has more daily traffic, 67,700 vehicles per day, WisDOT has estimated, versus an estimated 54,000 for the Park East spur. But only 26,600 of those 67,700 vehicles are driving the entire length from 6th St. to the Hoan Bridge; the rest are already descending into the downtown area, as Urban Milwaukee reported.
Yet there are fears, once again, of traffic jams or that the commute time will increase for suburbanites driving to downtown office towers. Milwaukee alderman Robert Bauman has said there are some people in the business community who are “dead set against” the proposals, as Urban Milwaukee reported. “I was called crazy for supporting this. Literally crazy,” said Bauman.
That’s just the kind of language George Watts used to oppose the Park East removal. A more calming prediction was offered by former City of Milwaukee planner Peter Park at a July conference sponsored by Rethink794. Historically, “every single time a freeway came down, a neighborhood got better and access got better,” Park noted. “Every time a freeway was cut into a neighborhood, it didn’t get better.”
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More about the Interstate 794 Rebuild
- Mayor Backs Boulevard To Replace I-794 Downtown - Jeramey Jannene - Apr 16th, 2024
- Murphy’s Law: No, I-794 Won’t Be Eliminated - Bruce Murphy - Jan 31st, 2024
- Transportation: WisDOT Getting Closer to I-794 Project Recommendations - Graham Kilmer - Jan 24th, 2024
- Port Officials Have Concern With Potential I-794 Removal - Jeramey Jannene - Oct 13th, 2023
- Murphy’s Law: Park East Removal Didn’t ‘Devastate’ Downtown - Bruce Murphy - Aug 14th, 2023
- How Committed Is City To Tearing Down 794? - Jeramey Jannene - Jul 26th, 2023
- Transportation: State Wants Feedback On Plans For I-794 - Jeramey Jannene - Jul 18th, 2023
- Transportation: See The State’s Design Concepts For Replacing Or Rebuilding Interstate 794 - Jeramey Jannene - Jun 23rd, 2023
- Interstate 794 Named Freeway Without A Future - Jeramey Jannene - Jan 25th, 2023
- Group Unveils Plans To Replace 794 With Boulevard - Jeramey Jannene - Oct 17th, 2022
Read more about Interstate 794 Rebuild here
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The only sticking point about removing the overhead I-794 freeway link is fear.
The fear is that, once the freeway spur is gone, automobile drivers will mindlessly motor on the same path and, like bulls in a china shop, clog the remaining streets out of a blind urge to follow a ghost freeway.
However, decades of case studies show the opposite. As they always do, automobile drivers continually adjust their paths and find ways to travel in a distributed manner on a street grid. Surface streets currently occluded by the existing freeway spur, including restored and new street segments, can form a restored grid. An intelligent traffic signal system could guide traffic using computerized methods specific to flow conditions like Summerfest or rush hour. Automobile drivers can make choices from an improved grid, and more choices make possible a finer distribution of traffic than the blunt force of the existing freeway trough.
Peter Park made an environmental analogy: For too long, engineers thought flood control meant constructing concrete troughs to replace natural riverbeds. Rather than controlling flooding, those concrete troughs intensified flooding, leading to the costly reconstruction work of removing concrete riverbeds and restoring natural riverbeds–such as in the Kinnickinnic River Watershed.
The Congress for the New Urbanism’s “Freeways Without Futures” project shows how cities are dismantling urban freeway spurs to unlock the prosperity of the underlying land. Among shadows of the freeway spurs and forests of piers holding up the concrete trough of cars lies a tremendous potential for productive land, improved circulation, and access to businesses, housing, recreation, and new city features.
Time and time again, opponents of freeway removal have cried wolf. Terms like “carmageddon,” “disaster,” and accusations of “crazy” for those in favor of freeway removal–all sounded relevant and important in the heat of the debate that was stoked and clouded by fear. However, these fears never materialized, and case study after case study shows it. The underlying principle is what Todd Litman describes in “Generated Traffic and Induced Travel: Implications for Transport Planning.” (Victoria Transport Policy Institute). Induced traffic happens when automobile travel capacity is added (such as expanding a freeway)–and cars flow in like a gas filling a space. Removing this capacity causes the reverse: car drivers decide to go a different way on alternate pathways. After these freeway removals, the most remarkable statements come from the opponents of the freeway removal, who often express baffled surprise that their fears, once so strong, were unfounded.
Folks What is the difference between the Park East and I 794 Hummm
The Park East allowed folks in apartment buildings quicker access to the Freeway system
The I 794 provides large trucks carrying full loads easy access to the Milwaukee Harbor which services Ocean going ships etc Even using the proposed local streets will have all of these trucks (How many is not mentioned) to interact with all the pedestrians and local traffic.
One might not build it BUT it already exist and the destroy public capital when there seems to be NO BENEFIT Buildable land? which will then be bisected by heavy traffic that others can then complain about. WE HAVE A HARBOR Now it we are going to get rid of the harbor and have lots of land for nice homes and apartments on the lake front then yes we do not need I 794.
Thomas Spellman, you need to calm down. You are literally recycling the arguments from the article. You’re also forgetting that the 794 to Hoan connection does not allow traffic to enter the street grid north of the Harbor cut to the Port, meaning they need to get off at the Port of Milwaukee, meaning they can just use the PARALLEL FREEWAY CALLED I-94 and cut across Beecher to get to the Port. Or if the city REALLY wants to keep that freeway connection they can have it connect with the Airport freeway spur since 794 Terminates less than a mile from that spur’s end. It makes no sense to rebuild 794 as is especially with only 26,000 vehicles using the full length. That’s less than the amount of cars that travel the intersection of Main St and Appleton Avenue in Menomonee Falls and I don’t see you advocating to throw a freeway interchange in the center of that Village. Like, think about what you’re saying, Thomas. I bet you’re a Boomer.
John makes the point as succintly as possible right here.
“Time and time again, opponents of freeway removal have cried wolf. Terms like “carmageddon,” “disaster,” and accusations of “crazy” for those in favor of freeway removal–all sounded relevant and important in the heat of the debate that was stoked and clouded by fear. However, these fears never materialized, and case study after case study shows it.”
That’s it. That’s the tweet (or whatever).
Those who shriek about Carmageddon will dwindle in numbers as people come to realize we were engineered into car-dependency and we can, in fact, get out of it. We start by understanding that freeways were never supposed to carve up downtowns in the first place.
I’m surprised to see such a biased article published in the Urban Milwaukee. The impetus for “ ReThink I-794 proposal is clearly in the value of the land and making it available for RE Developers to profit; NOT the betterment of our communities and transit system.
“It will yield more urban land, 32.5 acres that could be could be developed as apartments, offices and other buildings with estimated values totaling $1.5 billion, according to Rethink 794.”
Our city has historically high rates of vacancy in it’s commercial properties and is losing residential population. Wouldn’t it make more sense to invest these millions in our existing communities before chasing RE Developers’ presentations of buzz-word catch phrases & blue-sky dreams?
I live on the south side and use the Hoan I-794 for access into the Third Ward & Veteran’s Park lakeshore drive; I-794 works fine. I have South Side friends who commute to the Downtown & Western suburbs via 794; it works fine (including commercial trucking)
When it’s Festival season I see / experience vehicles pouring in on I-94/ I-794 from western suburbs to spend their money downtown; It works fine.
The residents of the South Side were not thrilled with I-794 the spitting of their neighborhoods. (who would be?)
However, every time I watch the Disney Movie “Cars” with my grandchildren I am reminded of what happened to the fictitious town of “Radiator Springs” when the “New Interstate “ by-passed them. ( & real life Route 66 )
Freeways are not always bad,& tearing down Freeways is not always Good.
Lets not allow the profits dreams of RE Developers selling lake view condos & offices to drive the growth plans of the City of Milwaukee.
794 is not a dead end like the Park Freeway was. I’m sure all of this wisdom come from people who don’t depend on this route to get somewhere. Let’s get rid of I-43 Downtown as well. That would also open up development sites and make people less car dependant.
There aren’t many trips where 794 makes a major difference for through traffic. Most of the southeast side only saves a minute or two on 794 vs 94. Removing the connection through downtown just means that most people leaving the city from Bay View will take 94 north instead of the Hoan.
DanRyan, the intersection your comparing to is a backed up all the time with 26,000 cars! Now you want to add that to already busy Milwaukee streets.
Only because I am not a boomer 79 Lived in Milwaukee for 30 years Freeway Heavy trucks HARBOR without the harbor 794 goes just like the Park East BUT it is the HARBOR and a new grain terminal on top of that Millions invested and then street traffic to get all ships full of grain for export The starting point of the discussion is SHIPS and HARBOR
PS There is no mention of the elimination of the Park West that was to link the interchange with the Park East to whatever the name of the stub end along Fond du Lac Ave is called That saved whole neighborhoods and yet still has some land to be developed as the DOT took advantage of he depressed land values caused by the Civil “UnRest” and bought up all the land along North Avenue hence how all that land became vacant for years and years. Yes I am old enough to have been part of the effort to STOP was it going to be a 12 lane freeway