WisDOT I-794 Public Meeting at Saint Thomas More High School Curbs Concerns About the Future of the Interstate

MILWAUKEE – The Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) cleared up misconceptions surrounding the Interstate 794 Lake Interchange restoration project in downtown Milwaukee at an open public involvement meeting on the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 4, at Saint Thomas More High School, as they revealed four alternatives to the current design aimed at increasing safety measures and decreasing travel times.

“The primary objective of this project is to replace these bridges that are in desperate need of repair,” WisDOT Consultant Lauren Zideck said.

Zideck also noted that the bridges across the I-794 interchange are all considered substandard by modern standards because they were constructed back in the 1970s and haven’t been majorly modified since their construction.

Dozens of attendees from the surrounding community showed up at the meeting to learn more about the upcoming project as they slowly circled the rooms, pausing at stations staffed by WisDOT consultants, engineers, and planners who explained modeling data, potential neighborhood impacts, and early cost comparisons for each of the proposed alternatives.

The meeting took place in the school’s learning commons and cafeteria, where poster boards and digital screens surrounded the rooms to illustrate the four alternatives under consideration: a “replace-in-kind” reconstruction to modernize the existing infrastructure, a boulevard conversion that would remove the freeway entirely, and two freeway improvement options that focus on redesigning the on ramps and off ramps between Plankinton Avenue and the Hoan Bridge.

Attendees were also encouraged to fill out feedback forms and turn them into drop boxes so that WisDOT consultants could better gauge which alternatives the attendees preferred among the ones presented at the meeting.

David Fitzpatrick, a resident of St. Francis, was relieved to find out that some of his assumptions about the project were immediately proven wrong at this meeting.

“I was afraid they were taking out the Hoan Bridge, and I was wrong,” Fitzpatrick said.

Fitzpatrick, a frequent commuter on I-794 who works on the north side of Milwaukee, expressed a preference for the “replace in kind alternative” due to his skepticism about how the “boulevard conversion” alternative would work in practice.

“That seems like that would block up traffic more,” Fitzpatrick said. “You’re never going to move as efficiently, and it just made me suspicious of why you’d want to do that.”

Under the proposed “boulevard conversion” alternative, a motorist traveling from Howard Avenue to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) would see an average of 10 minutes added to their commute time during both the morning rush hour and evening rush hour, according to the WisDOT’s I-794 Interchange Study.

“Personally, I think improvement to the freeway that’s there is probably better,” Fitzpatrick said.

Mary Zeise, a resident of Bay View, was another event attendee who came to the meeting as a result of the rumors that WisDOT was removing I-794 all the way down to her neighborhood.

“I had heard rumors about everything just totally being removed, and I was worried about traffic getting worse to both places and impacting the neighborhoods in Bay View, where there are a lot of kids,” Zeise said.

Zeise was satisfied with the alternatives at the meeting, but could not quite figure out which alternative she preferred the most.

“Well, lazily, I like the replace in kind, but that may be more expensive because then we wouldn’t lose anything,” Zeise said. “I also like the freeway improvement, which would do even more and stop the possibility of neighborhoods being impacted.”

I-794 is a major transportation artery of Milwaukee County, as according to a WisDOT study of the I-794 corridor between the Milwaukee River and the Hoan Bridge conducted in 2022, 73,9000 vehicles traveled from the Milwaukee River direction daily on I-794, with 42,500 vehicles traveling from the Hoan Bridge direction. An estimated 26,600 vehicles traveled daily through the Lake Interchange itself, with ~3% of all those vehicles mentioned being trucks, according to the same WisDOT study.

The substandard bridge design may also be to blame for the high crash rates along the I-794 corridor too, as between 2016 and 2020, there was a mainline crash rate of roughly 96 crashes per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, which is higher than the statewide average crash rate for similar roadways, according to the WisDOT website.

The next open public meeting on the I-794 Lake Interchange Study isn’t scheduled until spring of 2026. A final decision on which alternative the WisDOT will go with in their reconstruction of I-794 is still more than a year away, with construction not scheduled to start until around 2030, according to the WisDOT website.

You can view the information presented at the open public involvement meeting here.

You can also view more information about the WisDOT’s I-794 Lake Interchange Study findings here.