Urban Freeways

 I grew up with urban highways, and I have never really lived anywhere without them, so I'm well aware of the costs of urban highways. 

I also understand the impulse to build them.

When you're in a city and all you have is a car, or all you imagine your population will have is a car, then access to a highway feels like a necessity. You want to get places faster, don't you? You want people from elsewhere to come to you, don't you? You want to be integrated into the nationwide system, don't you?

Well, yes, you do. But that of course ignores the negative externalities of urban highways. And while from Seattle to Boston to Chicago to Rochester to the Quad Cities, I've never actually gotten away from them, I want to expand on why I wish I could.

1. Making Pleasant Spaces Unpleasant

A highway is a fine place for driving, usually. But underneath or around a highway is not a pleasant place for people.

That's usually fine in the middle of rural areas where there aren't many people to experience the unpleasantness, and those who are there generally have wide open non-freeway spaces to escape into.

It's less fine in an urban setting where the literal point is to have a lot of people.

It's even less fine when the freeway is not only urban but taking up prime urban real estate, places you should want people congregating. Places that, because of the positive aggregate effects of density, would be really pleasant if there weren't, you know, a freeway overhead.

I'm going to pick on Milwaukee here for the paradoxical reason that they've done about as well as I think you can do with an urban downtown freeway. The area around the Public Market is great. But it would be infinitely better without a literal freeway just above you.

They've used this space very inventively, and it's nicely decorated, and it's a space I want to spend time in when I'm there.

It's also impossible to pretend you aren't actually directly beneath a huge multilane freeway deck.

This is a space that is pleasant, and should be more pleasant, but the existence of the urban freeway depresses its excellence. 

2. Disconnecting Cities

The  Milwaukee Public Market is the best case in some ways because it is made less pleasant by the freeway but at least you can walk under the freeway. In many places, the freeway is an actual barrier, cut across only by a few overpasses or literally nothing.

Here in Louisville, yes, I'm taking the photo from an overpass. But look: no one is going to cross this in any direction down there. And while there are nice trees implying that you're in a rural area where you wouldn't need or want to cross, that's not actually the case. Behind those trees are city. If there were no highway, that city could connect across (but it doesn't, of course).

Even in some cases where the main freeway is elevated, like here in Toronto, the Gardiner Expressway is accompanied by a big surface road, which breaks up the continuity of pedestrian or even just street-level non-car transportation. This is what Alaska Way is (or at least was) with the viaduct and the surface street both blocking Seattle's waterfront when I was growing up.

There are more vile examples of redlining and the destruction of whole neighborhoods by urban freeways, but even when that didn't happen freeways tend to break apart a city.

Even when there is legally a sidewalk, there isn't necessarily connectivity, Boston. This is why I say Milwaukee is the best version here: it's made less pleasant, but they at least put a there there.

3. Noise

All of this is about the physical built environment. Now let's talk about there being cars going 55-75 mph at all times on a freeway. 

This guy is quiet when parked, but not when moving.

The tires, the engines, the roar of traffic; freeways are loud. And if the cars aren't moving, that has other problems: gas fumes, to start, not to mention the removal of the supposed benefit of speed.

Basically this: almost every city I like has urban freeways but I'd like them a lot better without.

Hmmm, maybe there's a reason Vancouver and London, with their lack of (downtown) freeways did so well in my CityBracket...after all, no one wants to live next to a freeway.

Why Suburbs Should Love Urbanism

We often see transit planning and urbanist design cast as a fight between suburban and urban interests: spending money on transit in urban areas, for instance, as an attack on suburban drivers, as in Ontario politics, or congestion pricing as an attack on suburbanists, as was widely suggested around New Jersey opposition to NYC's recent implementation of a congestion zone in lower Manhattan. But as this article reminds us, it's never that simple: suburbs are part of their urban design, and what benefits the latter often also benefits the former, no matter how much they complain beforehand.

Here I want to highlight a few ways in which urban development is good, actually, for surburban interests. These may seem obvious, but somehow they often get missed in the contrived binary between the two.

1. Suburbs Use Urban Amenities

Look, I'm not saying there's no one who primarily remains within their suburb. In fact, if we really built quality fifteen-minute city design into our suburbs, there could perhaps be many--and if we count people with limited mobility and car access, there undoubtedly are.

But by and large, suburban areas exist because they are "outside the walls" of urban areas, and they draw on the benefits of those cities in larger conurbations and metropolitan areas. The Patriots may play in Foxboro, but the Red Sox are in Boston proper; NYC congestion pricing operates precisely because so many people come across from New Jersey (and down from Connecticut and upstate New York, and over from Long Island); London has grown again and again up from the single square mile "City of London" out to what we know as Greater London today and still manages to have massive entanglement with the suburbs even beyond that. Imagining that what's good for the city is bad for the suburbs is like pretending that killing an oak tree would be good for the fungi growing on its roots. It's a mutualistic relationship: the city benefits too, of course. But it often makes more sense to concentrate building and development in the city itself, which allows every suburb to benefit, rather than focusing building in each suburb to make them equal.

There's a reason most of Sound Transit's first stage of building (and the second, and in theory the third) is focused in Seattle, even if the Board of Directors has required representation from the suburbs as well.

The expansion has taken these guys out of Seattle, and there was always an airport line, but service is still concentrated in the urban core--for good reason! 

This goes even for suburbanites who don't directly use the urban transit themselves, as in the NYC example linked above: suburban drivers in the city get to go faster if there are fewer others using the roads.

2. Virtuous Cycles

As we've discussed before in terms of Paris and London, extensive transit (and other urban development) builds on itself to something greater than the sum of its parts.

I love the Milwaukee HOP tram, but its downtown-only, limited functionality makes it less effective as transit. It implies a potential without delivering on it fully. I say that with love; I really enjoy using the HOP. But it's not a full-scale system.

Free her!

Also not a full system on its own? The Paris tramways.

But the Paris trams, unlike the HOP, are not the only intra-city rail service. They can be partial (albeit significantly more extensive than the HOP) because they are part of something greater. This particular tram pictured above is pulling into a stop at a station for the RER, which looks like this:

The integration between them makes both of them more effective: a heavy-rail can't go everywhere, and neither can a tram, but they can work together in a virtuous cycle to make the whole city easier to transit.

And before anyone points out that the HOP also goes to a train station, I know. Here's a sign about it, in fact:

But Amtrak at Milwaukee Intermodal Station isn't the RER. It's an intercity rail station, like this one in Paris too: Gare du Nord.

The tram doesn't go here, but the RER line does (in fact, I took line B between them on the trip where I took this picture). So Milwaukee has two but not three of these links in the Paris system (both stripped down to have fewer connections and less track as well), and thus has less access to the cumulative benefits of that kind of urban infrastructure.

What does this have to do with urban vs suburban? Well, the RER and the tram in Paris actually go primarily to suburban areas, because the virtuous cycle is so powerful that it enables transit outside of the urban core. Milwaukee's HOP is purely downtown. Heavier investment in the urban space allows suburban connections to that urban center become more viable, and thus benefits the suburbs as well.

I'm not dissing Milwaukee here. It punches well above its weight in US terms. I'm saying that the more we allow this kind of virtuous cycle anywhere, the more powerful it becomes.

3. City Borders Are Semi-Arbitrary

OK, quick quiz: what city is this photo from?

What about this one?

They're from the same metro area, but different legal entities. And neither is the city that most people actually associate with this metro area. The first is Cambridge, MA; the second, Somerville, MA. Both are part of the Boston Metro Area--there's a reason that Harvard graduates, who went to school in Cambridge, stereotypically say they went to school in "Boston," and its not just weirdness about saying they went to Harvard.

It's because the city-suburb division is a continuum, not a binary, and the lines are sometimes almost as arbitrary as some diplomats carving up the Middle East along straight lines. Inner suburbs of New York in New Jersey can be just as or more urbanist than the city proper. 

Yes, there are suburbs that differ widely from their city in terms of transit use and density. But there are also ones that are fundamentally part of the same place. And while politicians might have incentives to emphasize the latter, and I'm not advocating for wanton, willy-nilly absorption of suburbs into cities, we all benefit when we realize that "suburban" and "urban" investment in transit, development, and urbanist infrastructure is not a zero-sum game.

Revisiting Milwaukee

I recently had the opportunity to go back to Milwaukee without my family in tow, which slightly expanded the scope of how much of it I could see. I still love Milwaukee as a place to visit with a family, don't get me wrong! But I wanted to take the chance to speak a bit more about the city as an urbanist destination, with an emphasis still on downtown, and with a focus on the positive (rather than, say, on comparing it to New York).

A very pretty city on a very nice river (with giant parking garages).

1. Punching Above Its Weight

My main impression of Milwaukee urbanism is that, for a city in the US, it punches above its weight in terms of transportation and general urban principles. It's still a city in the US, so it still has our typical American issues: major downtown space used for freeways, an aversion to deeply meaningful rail transit despite opportunities, and car-centric street design. But what it makes of those would be a wonderful pattern for other US cities that share the same issues but don't manage to work around them as well as Milwaukee does.

In other words, my ideal city is not Milwaukee, but if the Quad Cities could be more like Milwaukee I would be over the dang moon.

Just look at how they make urban space underneath a giant freeway work:

Would it be better not to have the freeway? Yes. The exhaust fumes stink, the sound is oppressive at times, and the sight of the sky would be a bonus.

But compared to most urban freeway underpasses, this is Edenic.

2. Standout Attractions

I think Milwaukee's cultural amenities also stand above where you might expect a city of its size and location to be: despite proximity to Chicago, for instance, there's very little need to go to somewhere else for major attractions like the art museum, sports arenas, top-notch libraries, or (especially) a public market. 

Look, I'm from Seattle originally, so it's a major compliment when I say that the Milwaukee Public Market reminds me strongly of a smaller Pike Place Market. It's easily accessible but also justifiably packed. Should the parking lot be as large or larger than the market itself? Ideally not. But that's not the point: the point is that it rocks.

So do the art museum and children's museum. The reason having kids with me meant that I didn't get out as much isn't the kids: it's the awesome experience they were having in a small space of downtown and didn't want to leave it.

3. Good Transit Integration 

The flip side of my grumpiness about Milwaukee's transit app not working when I first used it is that when it does work it's great. Everything is well-integrated, the buses are clean, frequent, and predictable, and the bus stops are well-lit, visible, and basically everything I'd want bus stops to be.

Kudos on an effective system, Milwaukee.

And the free downtown tram, while small, is again frequent, well-integrated, and convenient where it does run.

Plus all of this integrates with Amtrak's downtown Milwaukee Intermodal Station.

I don't think I misrepresented Milwaukee in CityBracket, but I do think that the comparison it ended up in wasn't totally fair to what the city is doing. It's a thriving Midwest hub, and I am always glad to go to it.

In other words, much like these pink birds, I love it even though it's right next to a freeway.

CityBracket 2025 Round 1, Matchup 6: Milwaukee vs New York

This matchup features my daughter's favorite city against what Hamilton calls the greatest city in the world: Milwaukee vs New York. I was a late visitor to Milwaukee, and it was the last city added to this bracket; I've visited New York from multiple other cities for many reasons. Let's see how things shake out (we probably know how this will shake out)!

 Category 1: Visiting Without A Car

a) How can you get to the city? 

Milwaukee has increasingly frequent train service to Chicago in one direction and Minneapolis/St. Paul and points west in the other. It also does have an airport, but hardly ideal transit service from the airport (though some of those same trains do serve it).

New York has Acela, which in the US at least is a gamechanger, and high frequency bus service from the Port Authority. It also has two major airports in town (JFK and La Guardia) and one close by (Newark) all of which are accessible by transit, though famously not easily or smoothly integrated into the city's transit network.

VERDICT: Milwaukee 0, New York 1

b) How do you get around?

Downtown Milwaukee is quite walkable in the times when temperatures and weather allow it to be (to be fair to the city, I visit a lot in deep winter) and features a skyway of interconnections that allow travelers to roam major parts of downtown with minimal time outside. There is also a burgeoning streetcar network, the Hop, which is free to ride, and a BRT system, Connect, with level boarding and off-bus payment, and integration into a larger bus system with a digital fare card. If it works right. 

New York has probably the best subway in the US if not North America, a much more extensive bus network, a railway to Long Island, and that's not even touching the New Jersey transit in the greater metro region. There can be quibbles with its transit, but that isn't something Milwaukee is prepared to take advantage of.

VERDICT: Milwaukee 0, New York 2

c) What are the limits on a visitor without a car?

Well, in Milwaukee your access without a car is limited to basically downtown. In New York there are places it is hard to get to, but nowhere it's really impossible. 

Even, sometimes, by boat.

VERDICT: Milwaukee 0, New York 3

Category 2: Living Without A Car

a) Can you expect to get to work?

For Milwaukee this will
depend heavily on where you live and work, but the answer is probably no, especially not year-round.

In New York the answer is yes.

VERDICT: Milwaukee 0, New York 4

b) Can you live the rest of your life?

Again, Milwaukee certainly has neighborhoods and places you can do this. New York just has a lot more of them, and they are distributed throughout the metro area. Jersey City and Hoboken, just across the river, might be the easiest places to do this in the US.

VERDICT: Milwaukee 0, New York 5

c) How are the basic amenities?

Here I'm going to speak on behalf of Milwaukee as I did for the Quad Cities in the Seattle matchup: it really does have the basics here, with good libraries and parks, and both the art museum and children's museum (easily accessed by transit) are excellent. New York is amazing, but until we raise the standards in round 2, we'll call this a push.

VERDICT: Milwaukee 1, New York 6

Category 3: Miscellaneous

a) Are there people on the street?

Milwaukee doesn't, not to the same extent as New York at least. Maybe it's climate, maybe it's culture, maybe it's city design, but for all Jane Jacobs may have thought the old eyes on the street design was going away in New York, it's still pretty darn good at it.

VERDICT: Milwaukee 1, New York 7

b) Where is the city's urbanism going?

Milwaukee is really improving. It has built the tram and BRT, the trains are running more often to Chicago, and they plan to keep it up.

New York just implemented congestion pricing and is finally starting construction on the Second Avenue Subway after years and years and years.

Until the government retracts congestion pricing, or rather until a court permits them to do so, it's going to have to be New York.

VERDICT: Milwaukee 1, New York 8

c) Is it functionally diverse?

I mean, as always, there are lots of bad things to note here. Milwaukee has been called the most segregated city in America in my lifetime. NYC has major issues with school segregation, still. Milwaukee is actually plurality Black, but that's just the city limits, and it has a reputation as an awful place for African-Americans to live. NYC has its own significant issues, particularly with the aforementioned schools and policing, but not to that extent.

VERDICT: Milwaukee 1, New York 9

d) How do people there react to knowing you're not using a car?

This is as simple as some of the living without a car ones: NYC has less than 2/3 of a car per household; Milwaukee is pretty average in the US for car ownership in larger communities. While I visit Milwaukee and leave my car, that's only because of my very specific touristy attitude (and a hotel connected to a food hall). No one at all would be confused by someone without a car in NYC, whereas it would definitely be worth comment in Milwaukee.

VERDICT: Milwaukee 1, New York 10

e) How do people react to people living close together?

Again, the densities involved make it simple. NYC and its environs are basically the densest part of America. Milwaukee is a bit more than 20% as dense, which is high for the US but not comparable. NYC is very, very used to living close to others, and Milwaukee isn't bad at it but not on the same level.

FINAL VERDICT: Milwaukee 1, New York 11

Problems with Apps, Problems with Riding Transit

Today I want to flag an issue I found with Milwaukee's Umo app and wayfinding, not to call them out or anything but to use it as an example of how while a good app can help you find your way on public transit, an error in the app can create an equally large problem and discourage transit use.

The issue I found is this: directions to take a bus from a stop it does not serve.

Here we have what seem like pretty useful directions! We did in fact follow these and get home. However, we did not take the 30 bus from the Wisconsin & Jackson BRT Station, because the 30 bus does not actually serve that station. It turns at the corner immediately past the station and stops one block away.

I know this because I saw it turn and not come to our stop while we were waiting. To make things worse, the weather that day was, to say the least, not weather you want to wait extra time in. 

Now, it happened that the CN-1 did come to the BRT station 1 minute later, and we were able to catch that and get where we were going anyway. But if the CN-1 hadn't come (and it was off-schedule by a few minutes, so it shouldn't have) and if I hadn't known that the CN-1 was an acceptable alternative (which to be fair the app did have as an alternative option) then we could have stood there forever, because that 30 bus was not coming to that stop. And I know people who would, indeed, just wait for that bus, neither taking a different bus nor moving stops--even though I obviously know people who wouldn't, too, since we did take a different bus.

This is the kind of issue that can create a real problem for a transit system if it happens to the wrong people at the wrong time, or too often, because it undermines trust in the system to actually get you where you want or need to go. When we're planning transit, we need to make sure that we report schedules correctly, routes correctly, bus names correctly. Anytime we have an error or a mistake, we risk someone not getting where they need to--and maybe not using transit at all for their next journey.

This is compounded at places where (unlike Milwaukee but like the QC) you don't have well-marked stops or clear schedules. Unmarked diversions, unclear routes, bad app instructions: these all risk making transit ridership even harder, and drive people away.

Milwaukee's Connect BRT: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

I recently had a chance to ride Milwaukee's bus rapid transit system (BRT), branded Connect (buses bearing CN and a numeral) for the first time, and I wanted to share a few thoughts on what I liked, what I didn't like, and one thing that I think they've done very, very wrong.

I do want to specify here that I didn't do a full system review or ride every line (or even all of one line). Rather, these are impressions based on using the line just to travel for ordinary purposes, in this case between downtown and the waterfront, which ought to be a fairly heavily trafficked area (and indeed, even on an absolutely freezing January day, there was a fair amount of ridership both on the CN-1 and on the other buses its route overlapped). Thus this is not conclusory about everything about the Milwaukee BRT, but merely observations that might help us think about how a similar BRT might be best implemented.

1. The Good

I always prefer to start out positive, and so I'll begin with this: the BRT stops are well-indicated, have off-bus ticket purchase and validation options, and a good visual presence on the street without blocking pedestrian access around them. 

Also, the ticketing is very straightforward: all of Milwaukee buses, BRT included, are a single fare for 90 minutes including transfers, and tickets (and the app you can also load money in) have a QR code that you simply scan (off--bus for BRT, on-bus for regular buses). 

These are good elements of a useable system even for visitors: clear, well-comnunicated, easy to use.

2. The Bad

There are some flaws, however. The shelters are unheated (unlike some of Chicago's El stops and bus shelters, where in winter months you can press a button to trigger heat lamps), and that's a bigger issue than you might think until you remember what winter can be like in Wisconsin. The BRT is frequent, almost turn up and go, but not quite -- and that means that sometimes, either in a dead zone on the schedule or when a bus is delayed (see below), you can be waiting in very chilly weather with a canopy but no other protection. That discourages use, especially for vulnerable users like the elderly and children.

Also, the BRT runs, at least in the section I rode, in a shared bus lane with other buses. That's not a deal breaker, but it does remove the speed benefits (or most of them) from the BRT skipping stops. We got caught behind a 30 bus, which meant the "rapid" of bus rapid transit wasn't actually happening.  Sure, it was no worse than the regular bus, but it meant the bus was more likely to get delayed (see above) and the line is less attractive in terms of speed than it could be. Also, that same bus lane is only partly bus-only (it's not separated from general traffic throughout) and so again the system is slower than it could be, reducing the advantages of a supposedly rapid system.

3. The Ugly

I did not get a picture of this because I was swinging a child over it, and needed both hands, but the BRT doesn't always end up level with the stations. As such, there was a good foot of gap that I jumped over and had to swing my kid over in order to exit. This is because Milwaukee hasn't cleared the parking spaces next to BRT stations/stops, so the bus doesn't necessarily have direct access to the zone it needs to be in to line up with the high-floor stop level evenly. Instead, because it had to go around a parked car, it ends up at an angle, creating this gap.

This is a massive issue for accessibility and for the feel of the system; nothing says "we don't really care about transit users" than a gap that gapes between the bus and the actual sidewalk, with a drop in between. It's ugly, it's dangerous, and it should not be that hard to eliminate.

Overall, I would take this system again, and I'm sure I will since I visit Milwaukee often (only 3-3.5 hours from the QC!). I'm eager to see how it performs in better weather, and maybe outside the downtown core. But for now, it is a decent idea let down by some bad implementation steps, and Milwaukee could definitely Connect better.