Parks Plans to Replace 2 Oak Leaf Trail Bridges

One of the Oak Leaf Trail Bridges Milwaukee County Parks plans to replace. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

Milwaukee County Parks is looking to replace two Oak Leaf Trail bridges spanning I-43.

The aging bridges are part of a segment of the Oak Leaf Trail network called The Zip Line. It crosses the freeway in Glendale, near Lincoln Park and W. Hampton Avenue. They were once part of the Union Pacific Railway Corridor and they came into the parks system as part of a rails-to-trails project.

Maintenance costs for the bridge have been mounting, and Parks has spent “upwards of five figures” in recent years, said Sarah Toomsen, Parks planning and development manager, at a recent meeting of the board’s Finance Committee. The oldest of the bridges was built in 1936.

Parks has identified them for replacement at some point in the next five years. The department estimates the cost would be $2.7 million.

Beyond their growing maintenance needs, the bridges also have a clearance issue. They sit low enough that a large semi-truck once hit the bridge, sending the top of its load into the car behind it, Toomsen recently told the board’s Committee on Parks and Culture.

“We do think that when replacing the bridge we could change the vertical clearance over I-43,” Toomsen said.

Parks plans to go after a grant program that it has successfully used for trail projects in the past: the Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP). Parks has successfully used TAP grants to make major repairs to trail infrastructure and to construct new segments. It’s a federal grant program managed in Wisconsin by the state Department of Transportation, and it received an influx of additional funding thanks to the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

“[TAP]is a grant program that the parks department has used for many, many trail improvements over the years,” Toomsen said. “And we’ve been reasonably successful, even for large requests.”

While the bridges are old, The Zip Line is relatively new. The six-mile trail is an offshoot of the Milwaukee River Line running from Estabrook Park to Brown Deer Park. It was constructed, in part, using three miles of abandoned railway corridor, which supplied the bridges Parks has identified for replacement. The trail gets its name from Harold “Zip” Morgan, an early advocate for cycling in Milwaukee.

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