MILWAUKEE — A dangerous stretch of road in Milwaukee is getting a new crosswalk designed to force people to slow down. This project on South Howell Ave. has been years in the making.
If you stand along South Howell it is easy to see the issues neighbors deal with every day.
“It does tend to err on the side of very fast,” said Derek Devinney, who lives along Howell.
It doesn't matter that there is a park on one side of the street and an elementary school on the other side. Devinney says all day he sees and hears the cars.
“You'll hear people speeding by at like 40 or 50 miles per hour,” said Devinney.
South Howell has been a dangerous stretch of road in Milwaukee for years. According to the Wisconsin Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory, on just a quarter mile stretch of Howell leading to the park, there were 37 crashes between 2013 and 2022, 10 involved injury and one was fatal.
A woman was killed while walking her dog on Christmas Eve in 2019, when police say a car drove onto the sidewalk and hit her. And last year, on October 30th, a woman drove off Howell Ave into Humboldt Park, hitting a mother and her baby along with multiple cars. Fortunately, they survived.
For the last few years, Alderwoman Marina Dimitrijevic has been fighting for a raised crosswalk between the school and the park. She showed us that it was needed because drivers don’t always stop.
“The law is that once you are actively present in the crosswalk they should respect you,” said Dimitrijevic.
The newly installed crosswalk is not just a marked crossing, it is raised to include a speed hump with it. While we were at the crosswalk we saw people drive over it without slowing down, sometimes nearly bottoming out their cars.
"One way or the other you are going to slow down, but we hope that people get used to it. That was a really big need in this neighborhood,” said Dimitrijevic.
Neighbors say despite city efforts that include the Department of Public Works lowering the speed limit to 25 miles per hour and adding striped bike lanes, drivers still go too fast. So they feel this speed hump was necessary.
"I don't know what else you can do to slow traffic down. It doesn't feel like there is a perfect incentive, a one size fits all approach to it. So I think it is a good choice,” said Devinney.
The new crosswalk came from money from the American Rescue Plan Act and a Safe Routes to School grant. This is one of 20 crosswalks that Milwaukee plans to install throughout the city by schools.
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