• Milwaukee County will receive nearly $25 million in federal funding for traffic safety projects.
• The 67 projects will target 10 of the county’s most hazardous roadways in several municipalities.
• Upgrades will include improved pedestrian infrastructure, intersection updates, and traffic calming measures.
• Officials estimate the projects could reduce fatal and serious injury crashes by 26%–50%.

Milwaukee County will receive nearly $25 million in federal funding for 67 traffic safety projects along 10 of the county’s most hazardous roadways, according to a Jan. 12 announcement from County Executive David Crowley’s office.

That funding will support upgrades for pedestrian infrastructure, intersections and high-speed corridors in Milwaukee, West Allis, Glendale, Brown Deer, Shorewood and on multiple county highways.

Collectively, these projects could reduce fatal and serious injury crashes in hazardous areas by 26%–50% and save an estimated $1.2 billion in car crash costs over 20 years, according to the announcement.

Preliminary designs are anticipated to begin in 2027, with all projects completed by 2031.

The funding comes through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Safe Streets and Roads for All Grant, which the county’s Department of Transportation applied for in 2025 as part of its Complete Communities Transportation Planning Project, an initiative to increase safety and reduce reckless driving across its roadways. 

Already, the county has analyzed crash data, identified 25 “Corridors of Concern,” and reviewed potential project opportunities.

Milwaukee County’s award amounts to the third-largest grant in the federal program’s 2025 funding cycle. It will be managed by the county and distributed to the five municipal recipients.

The municipalities will lead the projects and provide a 20% local match to support costs.

More details about the projects’ locations will be posted on the transportation department’s website, according to the announcement.

The 65 infrastructure projects and two studies enabled by the grant aim to improve safety along 10 hazardous roadways the county has identified. 

Pedestrian infrastructure upgrades will include high-visibility crosswalks, upgraded pedestrian walk signals, restricting right-turn-on-red options, and sidewalk network expansion.

Intersection upgrades will include traffic signal upgrades, better visibility for pedestrians, bump-outs, and select geometric realignments. High-speed corridor upgrades will entail traffic calming improvements that help drivers stay in their lanes.

One of the projects will also seek to reduce reckless driving on the 16th Street viaduct, the 27th Street viaduct and the 35th Street viaduct. 

The grant will also fund a safety analysis study on West Lincoln Avenue between South 124th Street and South 52nd Street, which will issue recommendations for future projects. The grant will also fund a county Department of Transportation report assessing the county’s progress toward the Vision Zero goal.

Contact Claudia Levens at clevens@usatodayco.com. Follow her on X at @levensc13.

Thousands of people protested in Minneapolis, Minnesota over the weekend to decry the fatal shooting of 37‑year‑old Renee Good by a US immigration agent, one of more than 1,000 rallies planned nationwide against the federal government’s deportation drive. Demonstrators marched towards the residential street where Good was shot in her car and mourned at a makeshift memorial

BILLY TRINGALI’S OFFICE at IU Indianapolis feels more like a Comic-Con booth than an academic’s hidey hole. Posters of saucer-eyed anime and manga heroes cover every vertical surface, and memorabilia line every horizontal one. “It’s like an open-air museum,” Tringali says. “There’s not an inch of wall that’s not covered.”

Tringali is IU’s instruction librarian for undergraduate health sciences, which sounds pretty buttoned up. Until he starts talking about what it entails. “I teach students to hunt things down,” he says. “I do basic AI literacy training. Essentially explaining that you don’t just trust what a chatbot says, because it’s probably lying to you.”

But that’s only part of the story. In addition to his day job, Tringali is also founder and editor of the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, which makes him arguably one of the world’s leading voices in the scholarly study of the subject.Anime has exploded in the U.S., fueled in part by its omnipresence on streaming services such as Netflix. And manga with titles like My Hero Academia and One Piece are wildly popular among younger readers. Well, not just younger readers. Plenty of grown-ups read them too.

Tringali says people are attracted to anime and manga for simple reasons: accessibility and variety. There’s decades’ worth of materials to read and watch, with subject matter ranging from horror, to adventure, to esoteric philosophic ramblings—sometimes all three in the same work. “Whatever interests you, it exists in anime, and there is a massive backlog for you to explore,” Tringali says. “Anime and manga can be powerful teaching tools for enhancing cultural understanding and improving language skills.”

In addition to reading and watching pretty much everything in the anime/manga world, he’s also analyzed this corner of the pop culture universe in great detail. His journal is the only open access academic periodical that exclusively publishes works discussing the worlds of anime, manga, cosplay, and their fans. What began as a graduate school project now attracts scholars and aficionados from around the world. Every year, Tringali helps run a standing-room-only academic conference at Anime Expo in Los Angeles. “We pack the house,” he says. “Fans are really, really hungry for academic analysis of popular culture.”

His influence is such that within the community he’s known as the anime apostle. He got hooked on the genre early, spending his childhood sitting on his grandmother’s “horrendously purple” living room rug watching endless episodes of Pokémon. When he realized his local library didn’t offer manga, he established a substantial collection simply by donating books from his own trove. “I watched them all being cataloged and thought, Oh, this is going to be a huge problem for me,” Tringali recalls.

Today, his enthusiasm burns just as hot as it did during his Jigglypuff-besotted youth. He channels his devotion by helping students see not only the academic value in his favorite pop culture genre but also the importance of other subcultures. For instance, he’s developing a student sewing circle for cosplay fans who dress up as characters to learn how to sew their own costumes. For the anime apostle, it’s all about spreading the word.