MKE Transit: Personal Blog

Transportation and Mobility--Forming a Plan

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

Posted 2025-08-19

I am honored to serve as a member of the Community Advisory Group (CAG) for the City of Milwaukee's first Transportation & Mobility Plan. Working together, we can develop a plan for transportation and mobility that is responsive to the needs of our residents.

I am a life-long transit rider, resident of Milwaukee for over 25 years, and a regular rider of Milwaukee's streetcar, The Hop. Having lived car-free for decades, I rely on transit to meet my mobility needs, and I have made a special study of urban and transportation issues through my reading, writing, and advocacy for many years. I salute the City of Milwaukee for undertaking this plan, and I look forward to participating to strengthen our community.

In this essay, I have gathered my thoughts about mobility, transit, planning, and shifts in thinking about transportation.

Disclosure: All my comments and remarks are advisory only, reflect my own opinion, and don't necessarily reflect the views of the City, nor do I act as a representative of the City. I will be paid $110 per quarterly meeting, and I anticipate there will be five meetings throughout the project, concluding by Spring 2027. I serve as a citizen advocate to share my views on the City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's first Transportation and Mobility Plan. My duties include promoting this project to my network, attending meetings, and reviewing and commenting on materials. I am excited to participate in the group.

I. Planning Can Help Communities Thrive

Planning for mobility and transportation starts with understanding the experiences of people as they seek options to meet their mobility needs. By integrating knowledge from fields such as transportation engineering, urban planning, land use studies, case histories, and transportation research, we can identify the potential benefits and possible pitfalls that the future may hold. We can build strength into the fabric of our city by having a deep understanding of our mobility needs and offering a wide range of options to meet those needs.

The purpose of planning is not to create a top-down directive. According to the American Planning Association, we plan by creating guidelines (much like a map) to effectively utilize our resources and address problems that may lie ahead. It is this thoughtful process of planning, grounded and validated by the needs of people, that can serve as a map for our community to thrive. Agile planning may be more critical now than ever, particularly in the face of difficulties in funding transit and the loss of local control over decisions about how we address our mobility and transit needs.

We know that poor planning, or planning from a top-down perspective, can result in very real and expensive consequences and problems that can endure for decades. In the book Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit, the engineer and planner Christof Spieler surveys 47 US metropolitan transit systems, including Milwaukee, and identifies where many transit systems fall short of their potential due to poor planning and design. Cartographer Jake Berman maps 23 North American transit systems in his book, The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been, and he explains the unique aspects of geography, political will, development, and how these played a role in transit system losses, successes, and lessons learned. Researcher David Mepham surveys ten case studies of cities worldwide to demonstrate how inadequate transportation planning and neglect of what he calls "the most significant and disruptive land uses in urban areas" (p. 1) can hinder the potential of cities, as outlined in his book, Rethinking Parking. Lack of planning for transportation can lead to expensive problems, and even more expensive solutions or retrofits, entrench areas in an endless cycle of automobile dependence and public subsidy, and result in unequal access, reduced livability and health, and wasted valuable city space.

In contrast, we can see the benefits of planning. In the book Roadways for People: Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering (2022), Lynn Peterson describes how a community solutions-based approach to transportation can work. Planners and engineers, working collaboratively with communities, can address problems by providing people with transportation choices (Peterson & Doerr, 2022). In the book, Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking about Transportation, Susan Handy shows how planning itself can be more effective by re-examining core ideas about transportation: speed, vehicles, capacity, hierarchy, separation, control, and technology. She traces decades of work to align planning more toward a bottom-up understanding of individual needs and community values. These accounts show that planning can map out better transportation for everyone.

II. We Can Learn From the Definitions of Mobility and Transportation

The word "mobility" refers to the ability to change one's location. A person needs to acquire resources or gain experiences to thrive, and thus mobility is a fundamental need for survival. More subtle shades of the meaning characterize mobility as the ability to flow freely and encounter different environments. In a sociological sense, mobility refers to the process of mixing in social groups, avoiding segregation, and moving within social classes. The ability to change spatial location is key to living, and considerable community resources help people of all abilities gain access to the movement they need to live. In many ways, the need for mobility is so intrinsic to an individual's ability to thrive that it should be considered a fundamental right. The key aspect of mobility is keeping its purpose in mind: to access resources. In transit planning and engineering, a conflict between a focus on mobility or a focus on access might seem to be a problem, but it need not be a conflict at all if we acknowledge that mobility is not an end in itself, but its aim is to allow people to access resources. As a community, we can recognize that we have a responsibility to one another to help all people gain the basic right to mobility and access to resources to meet human needs.

Transportation consists of the services, support, infrastructure, and/or vehicles or conveyances that people can use to achieve mobility. Transportation encompasses not only vehicles and mass transit, but also non-motorized modes and privately funded services. People use walking or human-powered devices, ranging from wheelchairs to walkers, bicycles, and scooters, to get around. The choices for transportation, as old as human history, have shown a wide variety of means, including animal-drawn carts, bicycles, electric streetcars, steam locomotives, and electric and gasoline-powered vehicles. The street is a key part of the urban infrastructure, but so are bike paths, sidewalks, riverwalks, waterways, airports, and multi-use trails. Transit has never consisted of just one mode or even a constrained set of methods, as human ingenuity continually invents or assembles means to achieve mobility using all kinds of conveyances.

Not everyone uses all transportation modes, of course. For example, the Wisconsin DOT estimates that 31% of Wisconsin residents are not automobile drivers, and so the notion that "everyone drives a car" is not true. More importantly, Anna Zivarts, in When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (2024), makes a compelling case for considering the needs of non-drivers as starting approach to planning transit. We can recognize the experiences of people and their mode choices to utilize various transit modes (Schneider 2013) that have existed throughout history. The key is to avoid the pitfall of technological determinism, which holds that technology itself — or some future fantasy technology — should drive our choices (Norton 2021).

History shows the durability of some transportation modes. While hype or policy may promote some technologies over others, the durability of certain modes should be recognized: human beings have demonstrated an ability to walk or use bicycles for individual transportation across centuries and worldwide. Mass transit modes such as urban rail (streetcars, subways), and later buses have also stood the test of time over centuries of urban use in cultures and locations throughout the world. Milwaukee used electric streetcars from 1890 until 1958, and the extent of the streetcar system grew to approximately 289 km (180 miles) of track and reached a peak (around 1930) of over 400 streetcar vehicles (Canfield 1972; The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee). These streetcars carved out the transit fabric and strengthened the walking fabric of the city during Milwaukee's historic growth while they operated, creating a legacy of density and walkability that forms downtown today. In 2018, Milwaukee restarted streetcar use with a fleet of five streetcars and approximately 4 km (2.5 miles) of routing, after considerable debate, delays, and eventual compromise (Bauman 2022) with The Hop.

Changes in the use of mass transit modes correspond to changes in urban design policies that remove or discourage walking and transit options to favor automobile use (Kay, 1997; Kenworthy, 2017; Newman & Kenworthy, 2021; Walker, Tapp, & Davis, 2022) and favor the perpetual construction of highways (Kimble 2024), which have devastated urban neighborhoods in Milwaukee (Niemuth 2014). Walking and transit modes continue to work well within the geometry of city streets and have proven to support goals, with updated vehicles, for human mobility, health, and the livability of cities to this day (American Public Transportation Association, "Benefits of Public Transportation"; Litman, Todd., "Responding to Public Transit Criticism"; Litman, Todd., "Evaluating public transit benefits and costs"; American Public Transportation Association, "Economic Impact Of Public Transportation Investment").

The online textbook, The Geography of Transport Systems, provides a good definition tying mobility and transportation together:

"The mobility of passengers and freight is fundamental to economic and social activities such as commuting, manufacturing, distributing goods, or supplying energy. Each movement has a purpose, an origin, a potential set of intermediate locations, and a destination. Mobility is supported and driven by transport systems composed of infrastructures, modes, and terminals. They enable individuals, institutions, corporations, regions, and nations to interact and undertake economic, social, cultural, or political activities. Understanding how mobility is linked with the geography of transportation is the primary purpose of this textbook."

While this textbook definition of transport systems serves as a starting point, a bigger picture has emerged that has challenged assumptions. This bigger picture critiques the viewpoint that transportation is simply "going from A to B." What transportation entails is much more--it involves the context of land use at A and B (Marshall 2001), the urban fabrics at A and B (Kenworthy, 2017; Newman & Kenworthy, 1999, 2015, 2021; Newman et al., 2016 ), the choices in urban design that separated A and B in the first place (Moreno 2024), and the experiences of people leaving their home or origin, getting to A, riding or using transit, alighting at B, and then departing to B to travel to their final destination. This reconception of transportation gives us an opportunity to plan better by looking at the bigger picture of transportation in the urban context.

III. A Review of Literature Shows Changes in Ideas About Urban Planning, Land Use, and Transportation

We can examine emerging ideas in traffic engineering and transportation that have challenged over a century of assumptions and practices. Susan Handy summarizes these changes comprehensively in her book, Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking about Transportation (2023). She describes a shift in core ideas about transportation engineering and the prevailing superficial understanding of speed, vehicles, capacity, hierarchy, separation, control, and technology. She asks, "Could we be at a tipping point toward a new way of thinking?" (Handy, p. 227). These dramatic shifts have emerged from a gradual recognition of the folly of "improving efficiency narrowly defined" to a rethinking of the relationship among people, destinations, and transportation modes. Handy claims that "focusing on accessibility--in place of rather than in conjunction with mobility--is a way to solve our congestion problem" (Handy, p. 229).

Charles Marohn, in his book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (2021), made a stunning admission as a professional engineer: "I designed and built dangerous stroads [an unproductive amalgam of streets and roads], all while convincing myself that I was making things safer... I joined with others in my profession to ridicule and marginalize those who disagreed with the standard industry approach" (Marohn, pp. 231-232). He presents his account as a professional engineer and city planner, calling for a reevaluation of the orthodoxy of traffic volume and speeds as the ultimate standard in transportation engineering. Marohn suggests that traffic engineers must get input from the public and elected officials on design decisions and priorities so that engineers, using "value-free" descriptions, can perform their technical work (Marohn, pp. 13-14). By cooperating and collaborating with communities, traffic engineers can contribute to the broader examination of transportation assumptions and practices.

Chapter nine of Marohn's book covers public transit challenges in detail. Marohn states unequivocally: "The proper role of transit is as a wealth accelerator for local communities." (p. 156). More specifically, transit overcomes the geometry of streets by alleviating the need to store cars at destinations and augments the "success of human congestion" (p. 158). Additionally, building productive places is crucial to the success of transit (p. 157). Marohn's conclusion on pages 162-163 is an insightful summary of public transit's role as a wealth multiplier and how it can be funded and succeed. Marohn recognizes the value of the pre-automobile days of train stations and river docks: "Within a city, transit was not about connecting places across distances but in building wealth within a place. It was designed to make being in the city more convenient and comfortable. The wealthier and more successful the place became, the more the demand for street-based transit and the greater the intensity of the transit that could be provided." Streetcar systems provided "dense webs of transit" in large cities and even in smaller towns. (pp. 151-152).

Marohn questions why "Enormous sums are spent on transportation infrastructure, yet next to nothing is spent connecting transit stops to the community." (p. 147). He observes this around the train station in Springfield, Massachusetts. He states: "Instead of marrying people and place, it is as if designers of the transit system focus only on the actual transportation device, not the experience of the rider and not the quality of the place being served." (p. 147).

The most eye-opening book I have read recently is Wes Marshall's book, Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System (2024). I have written an extensive Book Notes file on Marshall's book to summarize its main points. In this book, Marshall, a Professional Engineer, examines the field of transportation engineering and finds many areas of unfounded assumptions, faulty logic, poor research methods, and spurious reasoning. He describes how our current transportation system has inherent flaws that harm and kill people, and limit transportation and mobility choices. To go forward, Marshall makes a plea for traffic engineers to reform their work based on a foundation of better assumptions, empirical evidence, self-correcting methodologies, sound guidelines, quality standards, and their professional judgment to reframe the purpose of transportation: to serve people.

As part of a class exercise, Marshall asked his students to define the term "transportation" (p. 358). He first hears the students repeat a definition of transit as "getting from A to B," a surface-level understanding. Marshall presses the students with questions about mobility and how it relates to gaining access to resources--and how this relates to the whole purpose of transportation, and then "the discussion shifts from questioning how we can improve mobility to questioning how we can improve access. The answers shift from things that we hope could maybe, possibly fix traffic congestion to issues like active transportation, transit, land use, and community design" (p. 358). Marshall's teaching point is that "... if we stop focusing on getting from A to B as quickly as possible and think more about ways to bring A and B closer together, we might get there faster as well" (p. 357). The assumption that "transportation is about moving people and goods from point A to point B" implies that traffic congestion is the problem in cities and other areas (p. 106). However, Marshall seeks a subtler, finer understanding: "at its core, transport is about connecting people, goods, services, and activities. We want to make it easy and safe for people to access schools, jobs, shops, restaurants, hospitals, health care, concerts, social gatherings, parks, nature trails, and so on." Solutions then can involve improved transit, land use, and the location of resources around and at points A and B. We can ask, "Do you need to be in a car to get there, or did we provide a range of safe and reliable options?" (p. 106).

The idea of proximity as a key aspect of urban design is the heart of the book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet (2024). Author Carlos Moreno describes the millennia-old concept of living close to your essential needs to gain more useful time for living your life, having more personal freedom, and enjoying meaningful interactions with your family, friends, and others. Moreno draws on ideas from the field of time geography to study the "geographical, spatial, and temporal links in human behavior" (Moreno, p. 48). The recognition of distance as a factor in the simple Physics 101 equation of distance = rate × time could dramatically shift the emphasis from high speeds to proximity of access. Former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist described a similar role for proximity in cities in his 1998 book, The Wealth of Cities: Revitalizing the Centers of American Life.

Anna Zivarts, in her book When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (2024), makes a strong case for understanding the experiences of non-drivers so that we can transform our transit planning, land use, mobility choices, and transportation systems to serve all people and move away from dependency on automobiles. Non-drivers also suffer from transit infrastructure shortcomings more than most people realize. Angie Schmitt describes what non-drivers face in her book, Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America (2020). Veronica O. Davis describes the dislocations in communities arising from transportation inequities in Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities (2023).

Urbanists and cultural critics have long examined how people use cities, providing insight into understanding the context of urban transportation (Reader 2004). Public transportation matters (Marshall 2001; American Public Transportation Association, "Benefits of Public Transportation"; Litman, Todd, "Responding to Public Transit Criticism"; Litman, Todd, "Evaluating public transit benefits and costs"; American Public Transportation Association, "Economic Impact Of Public Transportation Investment"). Parking and land use play a role (Shoup 2005, 2011; Shoup 2018; Mepham 2024; Willson 2013; Knowles 2023; Grabar 2023). Zoning plays a role (Gray 2022; Ross 2014; Leinberger 2008). Economics plays a role (Florida 2004; Glaeser 2011; Florida 2017). Understanding transit history (Norton 2008) and the role of technology (Norton 2021) matters. Architecture, urban planning, and people play a role (Talen 2013, Norquist 1998, Kunstler 1993, 2002; Leinberger 2008; Langdon 1994; and more).

It is crucial in our planning for mobility and transit to recognize these changes in understanding urbanism and urban transportation.

IV. Our Planning Can Reveal a Map of Choices

The challenge of planning for mobility and transportation involves first grounding our work in the needs of people — a "bottom-up" emphasis, as described by the Strong Towns movement (Marohn 2020). Close observation of people and the patterns of their experiences can show a picture of mobility and transit in urban life. Combined with the insights of Marshall (2024), Handy (2024), and others who have re-examined assumptions about transportation, we can create a map to help us make the most of the potential benefits and avoid possible problems going forward.

I believe that mobility needs can be understood and transportation options can be planned so that we can have a good chance to help our community thrive.

1. We must gain an understanding of the mobility needs of a very wide range of people throughout the city. We must elicit comments about their needs that go beyond the surface level of just destinations and modes, but include the real problems and barriers they face in moving throughout the city.

2. I believe we must acknowledge that transportation is more than just "going from A to B" but involves understanding the specific needs of people, the land use and context of places, the usability of modes offered, and the ability of all modes and choices to work in concert.

3. I identify with Anna Zivarts' book, When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (2024), as a starting point for rethinking mobility, access, and transit because she describes transit experiences in a way that can inform planning. In the last section of my Book Notes file, which summarizes her book, I reflect on how my experiences relate. I believe many people who are car-dependent are unaware of how people use transit to meet mobility needs. I would like to see a broader understanding of the pedestrian and transit rider experience. I would like to see an unraveling of car bias, so that decisions to favor cars do not ignore the health, environmental, or economic harm such decisions cause (Walker, Tapp, & Davis, 2022; Miner, et al, 2024). I would like to see the voices and perspectives of non-drivers respected and included in planning, administration, and decision-making.

4. The administration, planning, funding, and leadership of transportation should have a reliability that can bring us forward through very uncertain times. Planning does not mean we have all the answers — the point of planning is to create a thoughtful map of who we are, what options we have, and the opportunities and problems that may lie ahead. I believe we can develop a conceptual model for funding public transit based on evidence of public transit's dynamic, interactive, and interdependent role in proximate land values and development (See also Newman, Davies-Slate, & Jones, 2018). We can formulate roles for public (government) action and market forces--a Public Market model--that not just creates a sound basis for a durable public interest but gains from the dynamism of market forces.

5. We must acknowledge and understand that transit modes cover a broad spectrum of needs, and that we can use the unique qualities each mode can offer, but keep in mind the total system of all modes in concert.

   I have outlined the advantages of streetcars, and Milwaukee's streetcar, The Hop, in a blog entry. The Hop streetcar has a role in the transit modes the city should offer. The Hop's continued operation and expansion can serve the city well by providing the unique advantages that streetcars offer for mobility, and, in particular, the relationship between land use, mobility, access, and development in the denser, mixed-use areas of the city. The Hop remains the only all-electric mass transit system in the city, with large doors for level-boarding, that easily serves people using assistive means such as wheelchairs, scooters, or walkers, to gain mobility.

   We need to acknowledge the city-county cooperation for The Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) and the multimodal mobility and transit needs of our region. The mix of transit modes used in the city and metropolitan area should follow the concept of not just choosing the right mode for the right job, but the right mix of modes for the city and region. Examples such as Helsinki, Finland may serve as a point of study for this mix.

6. We must have studies, analyses, projects, and partnerships that specifically address the challenges of urbanism and transportation:

   1. Spatial competition is the crux of street space issues, from parking conflicts, scooters blocking sidewalks or transit boarding areas, to crashes that kill pedestrians and others. Illegally parked cars block transit vehicle progress, and tolerated illegal parking at key intersections, such as at Milwaukee Public Market, obscures intersection and visibility, and endangers pedestrian lives. Even legal parking can obscure building access, the visibility of transit stops, and block pedestrian access. Excessive free parking pushes out better and more productive use of space in high-density areas (Shoup 2005, 2011; Shoup 2018; Mepham 2024; Parking Reform Network).

      Simply put, street space competition has played a significant role in shaping cities for over a century, and yielding street space to cars only has led to the hollowing out of cities and the dominance of automobiles (Norton 2008). In contrast, we can continue to build complete streets, bicycle pathways, and multi-use trails, including the riverwalk. We can plan street space to accommodate curbside pickup and deliveries, bicycle and scooter parking, pedestrian access, business use for outdoor dining, parklets, access for transit vehicles, and visibility for businesses and pedestrians.

   2. Transit enhancements such as transit signal priority (TSP) can be the basis of being able to make the most of street space for effective transit and other modes. We need to develop infrastructure, sensors, and technologies to the level of digital twins of our transit system and to use this system to deploy TSP methods and simulate and research methodologies.

      We need to develop a model for assessing transit user satisfaction. We need to develop transit policies for the effective use of stops, shelters, and vehicles, including a security plan and a clear, common-sense behavior policy that can be easily understood and enforced.

   3. Parking, as "the most significant and disruptive land uses in urban areas" (Mepham 2024), must be part of mobility and transit planning. Milwaukee must update its parking policies to embrace current reform. I urge the City of Milwaukee to join as a partner in the Parking Reform Network (ParkingReform.org) to more fully leverage current knowledge. As researcher Mepham states, "we have tended to ignore parking as a planning and urban design issue, and as a consequence, we have typically degraded the places that provide it."

      Affordable parking is what the Parking Reform Network (PRN) is all about. Their goal is to use the decades of close study and research (Shoup 2005, 2011; Shoup 2018; Grabar 2023; Mepham 2024) and their vibrant current organization, The Parking Reform Network to help people gain just the right parking when they need it, but not let parking push out other better uses of the land or push out other modes of transit. Most importantly, the goal is not to let parking degrade the features and places of the city that the driver visits.

      Milwaukee must avoid problems similar to Chicago's loss of billions of dollars in 2008 due to a poor understanding of its parking economics (Mepham 2024, pp. 223-225).

   4. The use of proximity is a powerful way to meet the needs of people for transit and housing. Transit and mixed-use, including housing, can be part of transit-oriented development (TOD). There are examples, such as The Hop's Public Market and Third Ward stops, where a concentration of mixed-use activity supports transit, and transit supports this activity. Housing and activity centers at transit stops are key to transit ridership--a concept well-accepted by transit textbooks and principles of transit (Rodrigue et al., 2020; Woldeamanuel, 2016; Spieler, 2018) and historic living patterns (Moreno 2024).

As we work through these issues, we can create a plan that helps our community thrive through understanding mobility needs and planning transit. An agile, strong plan acknowledges that people have very diverse needs for mobility. A close understanding of evolving ideas, practices, and thoughtful insights in transportation and urbanism can guide us in creating a map to move forward and plan a wide spectrum of transit options to meet those needs.

Next: I added an essay about my viewpoint about a vision statement for a mobility plan