As I’m sure those of you who live in/near the city of Milwaukee are aware, downtown Milwaukee is “gang infested,” at least according to Nathan Sass, who wrote the following in reference to news that a high speed train would be built between Milwaukee and Madison:
With stops like:
Scenic slum land, oops, I mean Downtown Milwaukee (Come visit the post office! Come see the dirty river!!!! Walk 30 minutes or more through gang infested city to get to something worth seeing)
I’m pretty sure Nathan Sass is a resident of Milwaukee (or at the very least the Milwaukee metro area), so it’s disappointing to note he believes downtown Milwaukee is “gang infested,” and there’s certainly plenty “worth seeing” well within 30 minutes walking distance of the Milwaukee Intermodal Station.
- At less than six tenths of a mile (an 11 minute walk, according to Google Maps) from the Milwaukee Intermodal Station is the Harley Davidson Museum, which I’m sure a lot of folks would agree is “something worth seeing.”
- At one mile (a 20 minute walk, according to Google Maps) from the Milwaukee Intermodal Station is Potowatomi Bingo, which certainly seems like “something worth seeing.”
- At 1.2 miles (a 24 minute walk, according to Google Maps) from the Milwaukee Intermodal Station is the Milwaukee Art Museum featuring the widely acclaimed Calatrava addition, which I know is “something worth seeing.”
Those are just a few of the sights worth seeing that happen to be within 30 minutes walking distance of the Milwaukee Intermodal Station, which itself is worth seeing, after its spiffy renovation. Perhaps Nathan Sass should spend some time in downtown Milwaukee….if he did, I’m sure he’d find it’s not nearly as rotten as he wants his readers to believe it is.
@Zach I can’t make up my mind if responding to ill informed shots at Milwaukee like Nathan’s are worth responding to or not. Those of us who live downtown know, we live in a great part of a great city.
Yeah, I love downtown Milwaukee, and I think the city as a whole is a great place. Sure, there’s some parts of Milwaukee that leave something to be desired, but I think Milwaukee’s come a long way since the beginning of the millennium.
Zach:
How many visits do you think the average Milwaukee or Madison resident will make to the Art Museum and Harley Museum? 1 per year, maybe? Likely far less than that on average.
And the casino? Are you seriously saying that you advocate walking through a dark city to and from a casino? Oh, that’s REALLY safe. I’m sure that such people wouldn’t be walking targets for muggers. Nothing like walking through a dark city with lots of cash in your pocket to make you feel alive.
And I hate to break it to you, but most Milwaukee or Madison residents will be unable to use the train to go to the casino, museums or what have you because the train doesn’t run 24/7. There will be 10 round trips per day, ending near the end of the work day, even on weekends.
So unless you are talking about unemployed people going to gamble, there probably won’t be many customers of the Pot on the train.
The same holds true for the rest of the destinations. Want to grab dinner downtown? Better be done eating and back at the station by 7 PM or you’re walking home. No after dinner drinks for you!
But at least those people will get a chance at the early bird specials with the senior crowd.
Rail makes no sense, especially in light of the existing bus system, which is infinitely more flexible, cost effective and reliable.
The US is not Europe. We aren’t living in 500 year old cities with narrow streets. Milwaukee is very car friendly, even to downtown at busy times. And from metro area to metro area is just as easy.
Milwaukee to Madison is a nice 60 – 75 minute drive, and you have all the options on timing and destinations you could ask for.
Fixed transit between the two “solves problems” that don’t even exist.
And you can even mass transit your way to Madison today on a Badger bus, get off at or near your destination, and spend less money doing it.
Why are we trying to replace that with something less efficient, more expensive and far more inconvenient?
I am not anti mass transit. I’m just not in favor of projects that make no fiscal or opperational sense.
Thanks for missing my point, Nathan. While I’m sure you and yours won’t be visiting gang infested downtown Milwaukee anytime soon, I won’t let your expert assessment of the danger level of downtown Milwaukee deter me from spending time there.
Suprisingly in recent police reports, downtown Milwaukee has been one of the safest places to be in the entire city. I live 4 miles from downtown and have worked in an office at 4th and Wisconsin since 1993. I usually park my car in the company lot and walk to nearly all venues west of the river: Riverside, Midwest Airline Center, Bradley Center, or my fave downtown restaurants. There are tons of people walking around downtown enjoying the amenities.
And yes, the US isn’t Europe. Or Japan for that matter. But we can learn a lesson from them. Their trains don’t cover great distances (they don’t need to, they aren’t that big). Instead they cover distances between cities that would be several hours to drive and 2 or so hours to fly. For those distances their high speed trains (as opposed to our sorta faster speed trains) are more efficient that either cars or planes. No reason we shouldn’t have that same convenience.
And guess what? The US isn’t Mexico, Europe or even Thailand. But I’ve ridden their busses. You think Badger or Wisc Coach Lines or Greyhound are bus lines? Our intercity bus systems are third world compared to the bus systems in the rest of the world. So much for private enterprise being the end all and be all of providing good service in the US.
And whether one takes a train or bus to Madison or from Madison, the same issue rears it’s ugly head. There is not practical, efficient, affordable public transportation in Milwaukee and it is little better in Madison. Providing end of line efficient local public trans is a key issue for the near future as well.
And at this point, I am wholly opposed to demolishing one more home, uprooting one more business, or paving one more acre of farm land for the interstate system. The local cost to quality of life and lost property tax revenue is too high.
Well written, Ed. Hopefully I’ll be working in downtown Milwaukee soon. What I’m most worried about is not “gangs” — I’ve worked downtown before and never had a problem. I’m actually more concerned with being able to find a decent lunch. Culver’s and Subway can only go so far. One can make all kinds of irrational arguments about the efficiency and affordability of fast food and how taxpayer money shouldn’t be funding this sort of problem, but it’s something I soon will be directly facing. (How many of us bloggers write about things that rarely, if ever, directly effect us? It bears some thought.)
And if I am working downtown, that means I will soon (hopefully) be able to hop a train to Madison. I have a genuine need to do that. If the train’s running 10 times a day, that most likely means I can get a train when I would need it — in the late afternoon and mid-evening. Sounds perfect to me.
On the other end of the line, there’s all kinds of stuff to see & do on that side of Madison. I mean you could visit the airport – I mean what a huge boon to people that want to take the train to Dane County Airport & fly to…well…hmm. Or you could fork over cab fare to get to where you’d actually be headed. Of course the train itself is already almost certainly going to cost more than gas & parking to make the trip in your car, so tacking cab fare on is really going to blow the budget. Maybe they’ll have red bikes to ride to & from the train station.
Can they even get jets into the madison airport? Every time i’ve used it I flew on prop planes.
I am not quite sure where exactly the gang infested neighborhood is that you have to walk through to get from the train station to downtown. Just because you see black people on the street doesn’t mean they are gang members or criminals.
The Riverwalk is beautiful and I kind of remember some little thing call Summer Fest that runs for two weeks around here in the SUMMER, with a different ethnic fests every weekend after that! They do have shuttle buses to the event from downtown.
The Museum downtown is wonderful and while my children were small I had an annual membership. Stop in at one of the little bars or pubs along the way, or maybe you would like to just look up at the buildings with their extraordinary architecture.
I almost forgot one of my favorite annual visits to downtown Milwaukee includes Bastille Days. This is one of the last street festivals in town that hasn’t been destroyed by ‘white fright’.
If you are terrified of “the gangs” or as we here in Milwaukee call them, our black citizens, rest assured most of the people you will see at the museum, festivals, bars and restaurants downtown are WHITE non gang people!
My daughter currently attends the University of Wisconsin and I would welcome the high speed train right now, so she could travel back and forth without the almost every Friday traffic jam on I94.
I may not be as smart as this wonderful Nathan or as well traveled, but I will use this High Speed train, especially if it goes to Minneapolis. I will also welcome people to come to my beautiful City on Lake Michigan.
Alright I am not sure how this conversation turned into a discussion regarding race but it is what it is. I have to input my own two cents here as I am a product of the city of Milwaukee. Mary, you indicate that if a person is terrified of “the gangs” or as you call them the black citizens. I have a significant concern about your position here! What you are alleging here is that all black citizens in the city of Milwaukee are gang members. Now I know for sure that this is not the case but you are doing nothing but promoting this idea or thought. Maybe you and others who feel this way should consider the fact that the city of Milwaukee is in fact one of the most segregated city in the country and possibly work harder to mend the differences between all involved to address this problem. I am not ashamed to say that I am from Milwaukee but with the ideas you have shared here in this post, I am ashamed to be in the same category as people who think like this. As for the high speed train that is being proposed, lets be honest this is a waste of resources that we don’t have and until we can prove that this will be a self sufficient entity we shouldn’t be adding any additional expenditures for us the tax payer to be responsible for.
America has become experiential. It is all about how we feel and nothing else.
Why is this train being built? Because we want it and we think we are wealthy enough to have it.
Seriously, who benefits from this train?
‘If you build it, they will come’ is not a valid reason for a government project.
Hi Locke…actually the recent discussions on the Milwaukee – Madison route have addressed moving the Madison terminus to somewhere on Washington nearer the Capitol. If not, I have dibs on the rental car and jitney bus service from the train station to State Street…LOL! And there actually are some places you can fly to from Madison that you can’t from Milwaukee. Of course YOU wouldn’t want to go to those places.
Partially Blue, “if you build it they will come” worked great for the interstate. All those precious McMansions, strip malls, etc, wouldn’t exist in Waukesha, Ozaukee, Racine, Jefferson, or Washington counties. They weren’t built because there was a need to commute from Pewaukee to downtown Milwaukee en masse (actually we had a train to do that in those days, the Milwaukee Road ran a commuter from Watertown to Downtown and there was an interurban along much of the I-94 corridor as well).
Instead President Eisenhower saw the need to build an infrastructure to insure the mass movement of military resources in the Cold War Era like the autobahnen that facilitated the movement of weapons across Germany in WWII. The minimum height defined for the overpasses had to allow the movement of minuteman missiles on transporters.
So I guess we can blame suburban sprawl, destruction of desirable farmlands, growth of mass culture and cheap products directly on the military industrial complex!
“So I guess we can blame suburban sprawl, destruction of desirable farmlands, growth of mass culture and cheap products directly on the military industrial complex!”
Good point, not to mention the deterioration of urban areas.
Downtown Milwaukee is awesome. Especially in summer. And having to wait for summer makes it even more enjoyable. Go down to South Shore Dr. any day, except foggy ones;-)and behold the view.
Now a train to Madison, awesome, except it’s not going downtown. This makes it a boondoggle and will go down in history as a yet another massive government waste of money. Want a lesson from Europe? Every train in every city eventually goes to the city center.
The rail line planned for the Milwaukee Madison link would use an existing passenger rail corridor. The current alternative going to Washington detour would use an existing freight rail corridor. Building an entirely new road bed to downtown Madison would probably triple the price and it would never get done.
OTOH, I would like to see true high speed rail, 200+ mph and get to Madison in 35 minutes and Minneapolis in 3 hours…but…
Of course we haven’t addressed the gangs infesting downtown Madison, like coeds, frats, sororities and the State Legislature!