35th Street Bike-Bus Study Begins This Summer

Bike-Bus only lane in downtown Pittsburgh. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Milwaukee County transportation officials will study temporary infrastructure interventions this summer aimed at making 35th Street safer for cyclists and pedestrians.

The project, funded by a $400,000 federal grant, will temporarily add dedicated lanes for buses and cyclists to the street between W. Vliet Street and W. National Avenue.

The Milwaukee County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) will test several configurations of infrastructure to determine what works best. The ultimate goal of the study is to find the most effective methods for improving multi-modal safety in a transportation corridor.

The project will temporarily stripe new dedicated lanes and employ traffic cones, barrels to test configurations for barriers between the dedicated lanes and traffic.

“This is the first of its kind project here for the county,” said Jeff Sponcia, MCDOT manager of planning, at a recent meeting of the county board’s Committee on Transportation and Transit.

The 35th Street corridor regularly has traffic that is traveling at “extremely high speeds,” Sponcia said, also noting that six people have died in crashes on this segment of roadway over a five-year period, and there is no bicycle infrastructure.

“We need to learn in order to hopefully advocate for a more permanent solution on 35th Street, which is what all the users of this roadway deserve,” Sponcia said.

The federal funding comes via the Areas of Persistent Poverty Program, which targets areas that have historically lacked investment and where the people have struggled with poverty. “Milwaukee County is receiving a welcome investment to a long overlooked area of the Milwaukee community that has experienced segregation, isolation and has been subjected to auto-centric infrastructure for decades,” Donna Brown-Martin, MCDOT Director, previously said.

The temporary infrastructure will decrease the roads capacity for motor vehicles, Sponcia said. Though, that is essentially the goal of the project. “We have too many roadways that are too wide,” he said. “That induces higher speeds, which means more fatal crashes, which obviously, we want to decrease.”

The Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) currently operates two bus routes along the 35th Street corridor: routes 30 and 35. Brown-Martin said the routes provide more than 1,000 daily rides along 35th Street.