MKE Transit: Personal Blog

Transportation and Mobility--Forming a Vision

by John December / Updates/More Info: johndecember.com/mke / caveats about my blog before reading this

Posted 2025-12-31

For this essay, I thought about our meetings and discussions, considered my readings and experiences in Milwaukee, and wrote a vision statement consisting of four sentences. I discuss my vision statement below with details and supporting information.

My Vision Statement for the Mobility and Transportation Plan

I envision a city where:

1. People all across Milwaukee can gain the mobility they need to access resources, people, and activities to support their lives.

2. Land use policies and practices allow essential sites for life's needs, accessible by active transportation, to flourish in neighborhoods.

3. Our streets and pathways foster a sense of belonging and offer multiple transportation modes (including active, public, private, and commercial) that share, cooperate, and interact in the managed spaces of the streets and corridors with the goal of safe, reliable, equitable, and affordable transportation.

4. Our neighborhoods support health, equality, livability, and prosperity for all people because our land and the ways people can inhabit and travel on it allow for a wide spectrum of transportation and living options working together.

Here is the discussion of my vision:

Each sentence begins with a subject noun in this sequence: people, land, streets/pathways, and neighborhoods. These are timeless elements of cities that relate to mobility, land use, transportation, and human needs, which are all intertwined and essential to a vision of mobility and transportation.

My vision statement is representative of Milwaukee because it reflects the city's essential character as a city of neighborhoods (Gurda, 1999; Gurda, 2020). Walking and multiple forms of transportation in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including streetcars (Canfield, 1972), correspond to a time of great mobility for its citizens and vitality for the city.

1. My first vision sentence, "People all across Milwaukee can gain the mobility they need to access resources, people, and activities to support their lives," acknowledges the human need for mobility.

   Mobility--literally the capability to move--is necessary for all living things to thrive, and thus I believe mobility is a human right for all people. This first statement is analogous to an axiom as the basis of a mathematical or logical system. Without this statement, someone might assert that the city should be built for automobile drivers only. With this statement, the starting point of mobility as essential to human thriving is explicitly stated, and the needs of people with different abilities, such as nondrivers, should be a first focus (Zivarts, 2024) (For reference, see my comments on Anna Zivart's ideas as they relate to my experience in Milwaukee: https://johndecember.com/places/people/zivarts2024.html).

   Goals to support this first sentence include complying with existing regulations, such as those required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA National Network) and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Federal Transit Administration). Milwaukee County Ordinance No. 20-4 requires a commitment to identify racial equity impacts (Milwaukee County, 2020). A new goal might be to state that human flourishing for all persons includes the right to mobility for their well-being, lifetime aspirations, and civic, social, and economic engagement. Work by the International Association of Public Transport (2025) identifies strategies to define mobility as a right (MaaR) for urban policy.

   Strategies to accomplish this vision include looking at mobility available--including active and multimodal transportation (covered below in sentences (2) and (3)). A strategy could be devised using a methodology to survey residents and neighborhoods and to score mobility needs and how they are met (or not) by present active and public transit.

2. My second vision sentence, "Land use policies and practices allow essential sites for life's needs, accessible by active transportation, to flourish in neighborhoods," identifies the importance of nearby locations for life-serving enterprises that people can reach by active transportation (walking, assistive devices, or bicycle). These locations could include grocery stores, pharmacies, clinics, residences with ADA-accessible transit, transit stops, affordable housing, job sites, recreational pathways, libraries or schools, social services, and essential service mixed-use areas.

   Active transportation (walking, assistive, bicycling) can be the first "line of defense" for people seeking mobility, and this second statement identifies active transportation as a priority in neighborhoods where many needs can be met nearby (Moreno, 2024). The point is not to eliminate car access, but to make the option for active transportation to life's needs more available (Capasso Da Silva et al, 1999). Without proximity for active transportation access, the transportation network, infrastructure, and vehicle requirements for a city become more extensive, segregated, expensive, and eventually strained.

   Many city neighborhoods already have multi-use centers, such as shopping streets or areas around markets. However, many of these areas retain the legacy of large surface parking lots or areas offering free parking, and of housing separated from mixed-use buildings. Large parking lots are an enormous burden on active transportation, particularly for people walking or using assistive devices, because parking lots make destinations farther away and often inaccessible to transit (Mepham, 2024). Neighborhood clusters of life-serving enterprises allow the city to grow in scale by leveraging urban densities (versus suburban densities) where active and public transportation can work well (Leinberger, 2008).

   Goals to support proximity include existing work by the City's Community Health Improvement Plan (specific to active transportation) and the Housing Element plan (specific to housing near commercial districts and transit corridors and a range of amenities to meet without a car; eliminating parking requirements). New goals to support this might include neighborhood public markets or centers linked by active transportation paths (a city multi-use active transit pathway, analogous to the county Oak Leaf trail) with housing, commercial, retail, educational, and other mixed uses at nodes along the path and at major intersections and transit nodes. An architecturally unique, visible Public Market (which includes not only food but also medical and some social services) in some neighborhoods might anchor these clusters. For example, a Bronzeville Public Market could have housing above, transit stops, bicycle parking, and clear walking connections to the major corridors to the rest of the neighborhood, offering a mix of life-serving services as well as food, medical, job training, and no surface parking immediately nearby to occlude or interrupt the walkable or bikable paths and connections. Another example is to improve transit connections and augment an existing center, such as the Coggs Health and Human Services Center, with a priority on active transportation, public transportation, and mixed-use areas around it, including housing, groceries, medical, and educational, for example (versus car-access with massive parking lots).

   The goal of active transportation access to housing and life services also includes connections to job sites. Significant developments like Granville Station should include provisions for active transportation access from homes proximate to the jobs and life-supporting services at the site. The pattern of business parks, industrial sites, or entertainment sites (festival, baseball, sports) segregated from homes and lacking active transportation access and links builds car-dependency into the landscape. Each city plan should include active transportation nodes, proximate housing, and active transportation paths to housing and other multi-use services.

   Strategies to implement this include: 1) Relax parking, zoning regulations, and height restrictions to allow life-serving enterprises and housing to develop in clusters of mixed-use centers or sites in neighborhoods. 2) Assemble land to provide a site to lease to commercial enterprises to meet basic needs--the definition of a public market--that also includes key life-supporting services like clinics, pharmacy, grocery, or mixed social or educational services with a priority on active transportation to it and in the area around it. (Versus car-favored access with massive free parking lots.) 3) Housing for ADA requirements: I envision a residential building, with first-floor mixed uses, so that people who use scooters, wheelchairs, or walkers can live right at a Hop stop--so that they could go to the ground floor of their building and roll out, level, right to a streetcar platform. 4) Identify how public libraries already serve many roles for lifetime learning and activities, and could be co-located with life-serving services and housing proximate to or within active transportation reach. 5) Create "white box" classroom buildings (or rooms in libraries) located in these neighborhood centers that can serve a wide variety of local colleges and universities. For example, these generic classrooms could change function throughout the day and week: a first-year composition class for MATC, a College of Professional Studies class for Marquette University, or an Osher Lifelong Learning class for UWM. By locating these classroom buildings in neighborhoods, many courses could be held close to students rather than on distant campuses. These educational institutions could benefit from this outreach. 6) Enforce parking laws to eliminate tolerated illegal parking and parked vehicles that block pedestrian and transit vehicle operation, paths, and access, and business visibility and access.

3. My third vision sentence: "Our streets and pathways foster a sense of belonging and offer multiple transportation modes (including active, public, private, and commercial) that share, cooperate, and interact in the managed spaces of the streets and corridors with the goal of safe, reliable, equitable, and affordable transportation" identifies the importance of multimodal transportation on streets with smart spatial management as the key.

   Note that this acknowledges all modes of transportation, including cars, because the needs of automobile drivers, trucking, and freight all play a role in cooperating with all transportation modes. We need to understand those needs to develop a complete plan. By prioritizing public transit through smart spatial management and signals, we can emphasize it as the "second line of defense" for people to meet their mobility needs. With a better understanding of traffic engineering to build this multimodal transportation, we can reassert the purpose of transportation itself (Handy, 2023; Marshall, 2024, pp. 357-358; Marohn, 2021, pp. 147-163; Marshall, 2001). We can redesign the high-use pedestrian areas, such as the Public Market, so that streetspace favors people over cars, as done in New York City's Times Square (Sadik-Khan & Solomonow, 2016).

   Accepting this multimodal emphasis requires addressing conscious or unconscious car bias (Walker, Tapp, & Davis, 2022) as well as acknowledging car harm (Miner et al., 2024). We need to highlight that transportation affordability requires "creating compact, multimodal communities where it is easy to access services and activities without driving" (Litman, 2025, "Evaluating Transportation Affordability: How Planning Can Better Respond to Demands for Lower Cost Travel") and that considerable personal costs can be saved by not owning a car (Moye, 2022). The role of public transportation itself needs to be defended against those who would mischaracterize or denigrate its purpose (claiming that it should "pay for itself," for example with fares or that it is only meant for the poor and uneducated), benefits (Litman, 2025, "Evaluating public transit benefits and costs: best practices guidebook"), funding models, and local and regional control.

   Note that I put the responsibility for "safe, reliable, equitable, and affordable" here because that is where the responsibility is--on the design and operation of the street infrastructure and transportation services. In the original vision statement, the choices people can make are described as "safe, reliable, and affordable." But people can't make good choices when design, land use, or operations are poor. It may involve a shift in thinking, and the Department of Public Works can place greater emphasis on the spatial management of streets and the flow of multimodal traffic (using advanced algorithms and street signals), as well as on its traditional work in infrastructure construction and maintenance.

   Some goals that support this multimodal approach are already part of our city's existing work: Vision Zero, the climate & equity plan, and complete streets. Further goals include continuing to refine complete-street designs, incorporating best practices for all modes (walking, assistive, bicycles, and people), and using intelligent traffic signals, market-based parking reform, swift traffic and parking enforcement, smart curb management, and street grid re-establishment. The goal is to define what is sometimes called a complete neighborhood (for reference, see my comments on Moreno's (2024) ideas about the 15-minute city as I relate them to my use of the Hop Streetcar: https://johndecember.com/places/people/moreno2024.html).

   Strategies include defining transportation mode roles. We should establish a Streetcar Strategy to identify The Hop Streetcar's role to make the most of its unique advantages (https://johndecember.com/places/mke/streetcar/advantages.html) in our urban transportation plan (Litman, "Rail Transit In America A Comprehensive Evaluation of Benefits"). We need a Transit Cooperative Strategy to connect and collaborate with our county (MCTS) and regional transportation, as well as a Regional Transportation Strategy. The Parking Reform Network offers strategies for parking management to promote affordability, accessibility, and the most productive use of urban land, and Mepham (2024) describes a detailed planning methodology to rethink parking in cities.

   Strategies also include a peer-city inventory of transportation modes serving human needs within neighborhood clusters. An inventory and understanding of cities and their transportation system successes and failures, and how they apply to us, should be conducted (Spieler, 2018; Berman, 2023). Then, use this analysis to drive specific transportation projects that bridge gaps between active and public transportation, and between private and commercial transportation. Create a spatial management strategy that ties together everything from smart technologies to provide managed parking, curb space, traffic signals, traffic flow, traffic enforcement, parking enforcement, and street safety and security, as well as disaster and contingency planning for traffic flows in unusual or daily cycle conditions. Include regular walk and transportation audits with a focus on nondrivers as a design element for transportation (Zivarts, 2024).

   Remove I-794 in downtown Milwaukee to restore a street grid and create an accessible urban landscape that benefits the people who live and work in Milwaukee, not those who want to bypass the city quickly. On this land, allow a life-serving neighborhood to grow, and develop multimodal traffic patterns using advanced signaling and computer algorithms, but avoid overbuilding the road network. Tearing down I794 could restore the street grid in the downtown and Third Ward neighborhoods and, most importantly, recover the land underneath so it can be used for residential and business purposes (rather than supporting suburban travel).

4. My fourth vision sentence: "Our neighborhoods support health, equality, livability, and prosperity for all people because our land and the ways people can inhabit and travel on it allow for a wide spectrum of transportation and living options working together" ties the previous three sentences to show the purpose and human aims of transportation--to improve the lives of people by connecting people to sites and activities for Health, Equality, Livability, Prosperity (an abbreviation, HELP, that I learned in my transportation studies).

   The emphasis on mobility and transportation must be on people, their needs, and access to resources. Vehicles and street infrastructure ultimately support people and their needs, and traffic engineering should re-orient itself around this purpose (Marshall, 2024; Marohn, 2021).

   Goals to support this include existing neighborhood plans and goals from the previous three vision sentences.

   A strategy would be to inventory and audit specific transportation elements and map how they support HELP goals. Identify existing enterprises that already support life-supporting goals and how they can be connected with active and public transportation. These include public libraries, commercial grocery stores with pharmacies, urgent care centers, medical office buildings, schools, public service centers, universities, or job centers.

   Transportation isn't an end in itself. The purpose of transportation is not to move vehicles around streets but to enable people to achieve their health, equality, livability, and prosperity goals. The use of proximity in land use, multimodal transportation advantages, smart spatial management, the advantages of urban land density, and neighborhood life-serving sites can help inform our goals and strategies.

References at https://johndecember.com/places/mke/streetcar/references.html