MILWAUKEE — The City of Milwaukee is looking outside its boundaries for help on improving pedestrian safety.
Mayor Cavalier Johnson is joining the Mayors Institute on Pedestrian Safety, a cohort of nine mayors from across the country collaborating to share the successes they’ve had while also learning from top experts in the field to make immediate safety improvements on their most dangerous streets.
“My hope is the mayors across the country, from California to Connecticut, to here in the Midwest, that we’ll be able to get together and talk about some of the successes and challenges we’ve had around improving pedestrian safety in our communities,” Johnson said. “Making roads safer for all users of the roadway.”
Pedestrian safety is a top priority for cities across America. According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, 7,485 pedestrians were killed in 2021; the highest number in 40 years and one of the biggest single-year jumps in decades. In Milwaukee, it has followed a similar trend, doubling pedestrian deaths from 2019 to 2022.
The group of participating mayors will also receive support to develop implementation plans for longer-term systemic changes.
The other mayors in this group are in California, Connecticut, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin. Mayor Johnson and Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway are both part of the group.
However, Milwaukee is the city with by far the largest population. Mayor Johnson says Milwaukee could learn a lot from cities of any size.
“Just because you’re big doesn’t mean you can’t learn,” Johnson said. “While they’re not as large as Milwaukee, some of the things they’ve done may be applicable to some of our neighborhoods on the ground in Milwaukee.”
“We call ourselves the small but mighty city,” said Mayor John Bauters.
Bauters is the leader from Emeryville, Calif. It’s a city that is nestled between two much larger cities in Oakland and Berkley. According to the most recent census data, Emeryville is home to 12,870 people over 1.28 square miles. Emeryville has a total population roughly 1/50th the size of Milwaukee’s.
“Even though we’re small, it just provides us kind of a different opportunity in terms of nimbleness to implement things more quickly than perhaps some of our neighbors,” Bauters said. “There are a lot of things we’ve done in other spaces that we find larger cities doing from building design to green materials to housing to eliminating pieces of legislation that have been used to over police communities. There are a lot of things that we’ve done that have caught the attention of bigger, neighboring cities.”
Thanks #BikeNYC @TransAlt @anna_ms84 @IrakCehonski @Streetfilms and many others for joining me on a ride around Brooklyn & Manhattan to talk about how what lessons other cities can learn from NYC related to infrastructure. My first chance to bike the Brooklyn Bridge! 🚲😍 pic.twitter.com/ObLnBDkah3
— Mayor John J. Bauters 🏳️🌈 (@JohnBauters) June 30, 2022
Bauters says he’s known as America’s Biking Mayor, a moniker he’s earned through the work he’s done to make his city better for people on two wheels.
“We’ve got about 28 percent of our community commuting by something other than a car,” Bauters said. “Whether that’s walking, biking or transit. There are lessons that we’ve learned here in Emeryville that are transferable and could be shared back with cities in the Midwest.”
“That’s the purpose of this,” Johnson said. “To work with these other mayors to see what they have done. Just because you’re the big city, as Milwaukee is in this group, doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can learn from these other communities. That’s what we intend to do.”
Mayor Johnson says he’s unsure of the specific start date for this cohort, but plans to implement strategies he learns at these meetings on a rolling basis to supplement the work already being done to make the streets safer for pedestrians.
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