To justify $1.1 billion boondoggle, WisDOT cooks the books

While local Wisconsin roads deteriorate and the state plans to defund popular transit systems, WisDOT is using outdated traffic data to roll over local opposition, community health and common sense to shove a costly eight-lane I-94 expansion into and over Milwaukee's west side, this report shows:

• Data That Don’t Support Project: A September 2014 USPIRG report, “Highway Boondoggles: Wasteful Spending and America’s Future,” notes that the I-94 expansion is based on the presumption that traffic volumes are expected to grow by 2030.  In fact, traffic dropped in this corridor between 2009 and 2012, the latest year for which data are available.  Inexplicably, a 2014 WISDOT statement describing current traffic count numbers uses 2010 figures rather than the more recent 2012 figures, which are lower than the 2010 counts.  A 2014 1000 Friends of Wisconsin report found that traffic counts on this stretch of highway decreased 8 percent from 2000-2012.  
• Community Opposition: The City of Milwaukee has passed four resolutions opposing the highway expansion; Milwaukee County has also passed a resolution opposing expansion.  In addition, hundreds of community members have expressed public opposition to these options put forward by WISDOT.  
• Wasting Taxpayer Money: In addition to squandering resources on a project that data don’t support, unneeded highway expansion will divert billions of dollars away from the repair of existing local roads and other critical local transportation infrastructure all over Wisconsin.  For example, with limited resources dedicated to repair, Wisconsin has 1,157 bridges that engineers have deemed “structurally deficient,” according to the most recent (2013) National Bridge Inventory tabulated by the Federal Highway Administration.