Milwaukee County Seeking $25 Million Federal Grant For Road Safety

Pinned on concrete curb bump-outs on W. Congress Street at N. 55th Street. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Milwaukee County is pursuing a $25 million federal grant for road safety projects.

If awarded, the grant would allow the Milwaukee County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) to begin implementing the comprehensive road safety plan it finalized earlier this year. The county’s Safety Action Plan was required to access the Safe Streets and Roads For All grant program.

“This is now the implementation portion of this program,” said Jeff Sponcia, MCDOT transportation planning manager, told the county board’s Committee on Transportation and Transit. “It’s all intended to assess, identify and then obtain funding to actually build out, to construct permanent safe streets infrastructure and countermeasures.

MCDOT started planning the project three years ago. In 2023, it held nearly two dozen public meetings around the county to collect public input on reckless driving and road safety. The planning process was also funded by federal and state grants.

“From that, we derived our corridors of concern: 25 of the most hazardous roadways in the whole county,” Sponcia said.

Through the planning process, officials found that fatal crashes have been increasing in Milwaukee County at a rate faster than the national average, though the number of fatal crashes annually remains below the national average.

The Safety Action Plan includes than 500 potential traffic safety infrastructure projects across all 19 county municipalities. MCDOT has already partnered with five municipalities to launch temporary traffic calming measures, collecting data on their effectiveness in reducing crashes at high-risk intersections and calming traffic on busy streets.

Federal grant money secured by the county would be paired, in many cases, with local matching dollars from municipalities to begin implementing some of the safety interventions. In total, the grant could result in $31 million being invested in road safety projects.

“When those projects are built out… and we have every belief that that this will happen, fatal crashes, serious injury crashes will decrease and we will be on our way to our goal of Vision Zero by 2037,” Sponcia said.

In 2024, as part of the planning process for the federal program, the county committed to a Vision Zero policy, which states the county will commit to doing what is necessary to achieve zero deaths and serious injuries on county roadways by 2037.

President Donald Trump‘s second administration has disrupted, and in some cases clawed back, payments and grants from the federal government to states and local municipalities for various services, including health care and transportation. Which resulted in Sup. Justin Bielinski asking how confident the department was that it would secure a grant award.

Sponcia declined to speculate. “This administration they have their their priorities, and so we’re going to put our best application out there and we’ll see what happens,” he said.