Reader question: We would all be better off if the Mason Street bridge was posted at 50 (mph) like everyone drives. Why don’t they raise the speed limit if everyone goes that fast?
Answer: Ron Hamilton, traffic engineer at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, acknowledged that the architecture of the Mason Street bridge lends itself to feeling like an interstate highway. Its speed limit, though, is posted at 35 mph for the foreseeable future largely to correct the natural drive to go fast on what feels like an expressway.
“In short, the limit counters the bridge’s highway-like appearance by enforcing speeds appropriate for a busy downtown connector with merges, exits, and urban activity,” Hamilton said.
The Mason Street bridge, formally known as the Donald A. Tilleman Bridge, was ready to handle the area’s growing traffic demand when it opened Dec. 21, 1973. The old bridge it replaced “huddles in insignificance beneath the grandeur of its $21 million successor,” Green Bay Press-Gazette staff writer Dave Otto wrote earlier that month.
The new bridge’s six lanes were high enough above the Fox River to avoid always opening for leisurely boats, the Press-Gazette reported at the time.
It has had a speed limit of 35 mph since at least June 1994, when police caught 13 speeding cars on the bridge in a half-hour speed trap. Most were going between 52 and 57 mph, Lt. Gary Smith said at the time. The bridge was still a hotspot for speeding two years later with police giving out the most speeding tickets there of any place in the city, the Press-Gazette reported.
To this day, in a city where traffic complaints are the most common grievance heard by the Green Bay Police Department, the bridge remains one of the city’s speeding hotspots, according to police traffic reports. The issue of safety, especially crashes, is partially responsible for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s plans to redo the bridge entirely.
Raising the speed limit on the bridge could increase the risk of crashes while merging onto, exiting, or stopping on the bridge in the middle of a busy urban setting, Hamilton told the Press-Gazette.
He pointed to the bridge’s interconnectedness to downtown streets with their many intersections, sidewalks and crosswalks. The ramp onto the bridge from South Ashland Avenue is within several hundred feet of the one coming from South Broadway.
Considering that the bridge carries around 34,200 vehicles a day, there are already many possibilities for crashes whose consequences are exacerbated at higher speeds. The plurality of crashes on the bridge between 2018 and 2022 happened on the on ramp from Ashland Avenue.
Changing the speed limit would rest in the hands of Green Bay, which has speed limit authority over the bridge, not the DOT, according to Hamilton.
Theoretically, state law would allow the city to raise the speed limit of the bridge up as high as 55 mph or drop it as low as 15 mph. Any change, however, would require an engineering and traffic study.
Hamilton said he did not expect the speed limit to change dramatically in the future.
Do you have a question about Green Bay? Send them to Jesse Lin at 920-834-4250 or jlin@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Reader asks why Mason Street bridge speed limit is only 35 mph
Reporting by Jesse Lin, Green Bay Press-Gazette / Green Bay Press-Gazette
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