Zoo’s New Parking System Is a Success

Milwaukee County Zoo. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

The Milwaukee County Zoo‘s new entrance was an expensive project, but it has proved a success.

In April, the zoo finished construction on the first phase of a $15.3 million redesign of the entrance and ticketing operation. The new entryway allows visitors to breeze into the zoo’s parking lot and pay for admission at the main entrance in the U.S. Bank Gathering Place.

The project is also an example of the sort of infrastructure improvements that directly impact local quality of life and county officials often struggle to fund. The government’s structural budget gap — the result of a disastrous pension plan adopted more than 20 years ago and two decades of flat state aid — has left county policymakers cutting budgets for many years. The budget gap in 2027 is estimated at about $50.8 million.

The zoo project solved a major safety concern for zoo officials. Before the redesign, visitors paid for admission and parking at a gate shortly after getting off the roadway. That setup created a bottleneck and frequently caused a long line of vehicles backed up into W. Blue Mound Road, which the Wisconsin Department of Transportation will tear up for repaving in 2028.

Two pedestrians have been killed along this section of the roadway in recent years, Adam Walter, a design consultant with Strand & Associates working on the project, told county officials in 2025. One of the individuals was a friend of Wauwatosa Mayor Dennis McBride, who supported the project on the border of his municipality.

The county’s structural budget challenges and a backlog of infrastructure projects estimated at about $1 billion over five years meant the project almost didn’t make the cut in recent budgets. But Sup. Shawn Rolland started pushing for funding in 2023 and managed to secure funding for construction in the 2026 budget.

The first phase of work included the build-out of improvements to the parking lot and the implementation of a new QR code system for parking. Visitors now scan a code and pay for parking while walking into the zoo. Admission is paid at the front entrance. Both transactions used to occur at the vehicle gate.

“So now you drive right into the zoo where you used to have to stop and talk to a gate attendant. Everyone just drives right in,” Megan O’Shea, communications manager for the Milwaukee County Zoo, told Urban Milwaukee. “It’s a free flow system, and you park wherever you want.”

The new parking system has effectively eliminated wait times to get into the zoo, said Andrew Stockel, director of operations for the Milwaukee County Zoo. The zoo entryway now easily handles twice as many visitors an hour as it did before, Stockel said.

The second phase of the zoo’s entrance project will redesign the lanes leading in and out of the parking lot and add a signalized intersection at N. 99th Street and W. Blue Mound Road. The goal of the second phase is to slow traffic around the entrance and allow vehicles to approach without first crossing two or four lanes of uncontrolled traffic.

Rolland said he was “thrilled” with the results of the new parking system, adding that he hopes in the long run it will also boost zoo revenue, now that it’s easier and requires less time to visit.

“It just makes a family’s day that much better, right, where you can spend more time enjoying the zoo and less time stuck in lines dodging cars,” he said.

The project wasn’t an easy budget lift. Rolland managed to find support for the project, but there were more than $100 million in project requests the county couldn’t fund. Roughly 50% of the county’s infrastructure backlog is in the Milwaukee County Parks system, one of the most public-facing aspects of county government. At a recent ribbon-cutting for a county-owned trail in Wauwatosa, Mayor McBride said it was “sort of a miracle” that the county managed to find the money to build it.

“There are examples like this up and down the list of things that would make our lives more fun or safer or better. In order to fund them, we just need the dollars to be able to make them happen.”