Brady Street on Milwaukee’s east side is one of the most unsafe streets in the city for people walking, biking and driving.
That’s why the city’s Department of Public Works and the Brady Street Business Improvement District (BID) have started traffic safety improvements.
Milwaukee City Engineer Kevin Muhs says the years-long conversations around safety on Brady Street intensified following recent high-profile fatalities and injuries.
WUWM’s Eddie Morales met with Muhs on Brady Street to learn about the changes in the works.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Eddie Morales: What traffic calming measures have already been taken?
Kevin Muhs: Starting around Dec. 1...at Brady and Humboldt, we did switch the intersection to what's called all-red flash, which is essentially an all-way stop condition. So drivers are expected to come to a complete stop as they would at any all-way stop sign, and then whoever has the right of way should go first — obviously deferring to pedestrians so that they can cross the street.
That was done largely in an effort to do some speed management on the street because the BID was telling us that folks were accelerating to hit a green or accelerating at a yellow to get through the intersection before they got the red light. So, that's kind of the first step in the process of what we're experimenting on right now.
What type of safety features can be implemented and how is the success of those measured over time?
So on Brady Street, it's an arterial in the city. It carries bus traffic, it's got emergency services responses. There's specific things we can and can't do on a street that's that busy compared to a residential side street. As an example, we wouldn't look at a speed hump on Brady Street, primarily because we would want to make sure that we're not disrupting that bus traffic or other large vehicle traffic too much.
So the things we are thinking about and talking with the Business Improvement District is more bump-outs or curb extensions, where you move the curb out into the parking lane at the corners so that it's a shorter crossing distance for people crossing the street. It also encourages folks who are making right turns to take slower turns. Right turns are actually one of the most dangerous interactions for pedestrians.
The other things are things that will cause, in engineering speak, vertical deflection. So a speed table or a raised crosswalk — essentially some sort of piece of concrete that's a little bit higher than the rest of the street and drivers have to go up and down that. That encourages people to maintain a reasonable speed on the street.
What is the timeline for these changes?
We have the flashing red light pilot at Brady and Humboldt. We're doing that for roughly a month. So in early January our staff will internally look at the data we've collected. We'll look, we'll talk with the Business Improvement District, kind of see how everybody's feeling, look at the public feedback we've gotten so far, and then consider perhaps extending that maybe for another 60 days or a little longer. For the physical improvements, that'll involve doing some construction on the street to add a raised crosswalk, a speed table, those types of things.
We're working right now with the BID on how we're going to discuss that with the public, what the improvements might look like. We don't have a complete set of improvements yet, so we're working on exactly what that's going to look like. We'll share that with the public and then we'll hope to construct it as quickly as we can. So perhaps 2026 construction season, if not '26, then 2027.
What has the city learned from other traffic calming projects, and how has that contributed so far to the goal of eliminating traffic deaths by 2037 with the Vision Zero action plan?
[Vision Zero] is our citywide goal of no fatalities, no life-changing injuries by 2037. Brady Street is on what we call our high injury network, which is the worst and most unsafe streets for transportation travel in the city. Many of those streets are actually state jurisdiction streets or shared jurisdiction with the state or in some cases with the county. But Brady Street is 100% the city's, so we can do what we would like to in coordination and cooperation with the residents and the Business Improvements District.
We've done a lot of stuff across the city in many locations and we're using that to learn and evaluate what the best elements are to include in specific circumstances to manage speed. People who are going over the speed limit, especially substantially over the speed limit, if there is a crash it's more dangerous for them, it's more dangerous for anyone else they might hit. Our main goal is if we can do speed management, [that] doesn't mean there aren't any crashes, but the crashes that happen are just less dangerous for everyone.
