Milwaukee Steers Toward Platinum Rating As Bike-Friendly Community

Milwaukee is aiming to join Madison in being the only Wisconsin cities with top rankings as bicycle-friendly communities.

Last year, the League of American Bicyclists named Madison as just one of five U.S. cities with the group’s platinum rating. Milwaukee is currently three levels back at bronze. But Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett says his city will now aim for platinum.

“It’s our belief we have a core of individuals in this city that are so committed to this and dedicated to this that by shooting for the stars, or shooting for the platinum, we’ll engender even more enthusiasm for what we’re going to try to do,” Barrett said Monday.

To get there, though, Milwaukee has some work to do. Currently about 2,500 local residents bike to work each day, according to the city. The League of American Bicyclists says a city Milwaukee’s size needs 10 times that number, or 25,000, to achieve platinum.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Bob Schneider, part of the “Platinum Team” working on the effort, said Milwaukee also needs more bicycle education efforts and enforcement of traffic laws. As well as, Schneider said, “engineering the streets so that we have more bike lanes, better connections to trails, even things called neighborhood greenways through residential neighborhoods that are really oriented towards biking and walking use instead of high speed traffic through neighborhoods.”

Barrett said there’s no price tag yet for the improvements the city would have to make.