Westmoreland: “Bad. I mean it’s a domino effect. One business leaves, other businesses could leave. That’s the last thing we want.”
He’s hoping policy changes and the new 2% sales tax increase, set to take effect in January, can help combat the destruction.
It’s not only businesses leaving the area, which makes people want to leave the area, but also increased costs for the entire community. There’s more costs for putting in extra “traffic calming measures”. There’s extra costs for repairs to damage caused by reckless drivers. There’s loss of life. There’s increased insurance rates if you own a car in Milwaukee.
He hopes the sales tax increase can also help add more police to the force to help hold people accountable.
Hopefully!
I don’t think more police is the answer to reckless driving. I am much more interested in physical infrastructure deterrents to reckless driving - traffic circles are an obvious choice.
My husband was driving our car when the car nearly got totaled in a hit-and-run late at night in downtown Milwaukee a few years ago. The police showed up well after the fact and couldn’t really do anything about it. But if the intersection he had been driving through had been a traffic circle instead, that would have prevented the incident entirely or reduced it to a fender-bender.
You’re spot on. Police don’t stop bad stuff from u happening, they just show up after the fact and issue tickets. And no, tickets are not a deterrent for events that people don’t think through logically, they’re just a revenue scheme.
Narrowing the road, narrowing the intersection, street parking, trees, and so on are are small things you can do to make drivers slow down naturally and increase the safety and pleasantness of an area. Honestly I have no idea what this area looks like, but even if extra police fixed the problem, they’re an ongoing cost, while infrastructure changes are a one-time cost.
If people keep damaging the infrastructure (for example 29 times knocking down metal signs on the bump outs) then yes, it’s an ongoing cost.
If people keep damaging the infrastructure, the infrastructure is designed wrong. Either it needs to be strengthened to withstand multiple impacts or a different change needs to happen so people stop hitting things they’re not supposed to.
A traffic circle has aesthetic and financial benefits to the city beyond what a stop light can provide:
- The center is a nice green space where flowers and/or grass can be planted.
- The traffic circle doesn’t use electricity which is a cost savings.
But what do the bump outs do other than provide a detrimental effect? They cost more and were put in specifically to react to criminal behavior.
More police means more patrols and faster response time. The police are never going to know in advance when a crime is going to happen, this is reality. The goal is to catch more people and hopefully those people will not commit the crimes again. If they do, they’re taken off the street so that there’s one less criminal the public has to put up with.
