They lift your spirits, prompt you to think, make you feel grateful and inspire you to do more. They connect you to our community, shining a spotlight on what's good about our city. They're stories that are Uniquely Milwaukee.
Colors do more than just catch our eyes. They can influence our moods and our actions. In Milwaukee's Lincoln Village neighborhood, some hope that colors will make a positive impact on our driving — and our safety.
"People just be reckless driving everywhere,” Malik Hughes observed, echoing how a lot of people in the city feel. “All through the North Side, going through bike lanes, speeding through school zones — they’re just always speeding. That's what our city is really known for: reckless driving."
That unofficial title frustrates the 17-year-old senior at Shalom High School. So he and about a dozen other young people recently headed outside to paint a raised crosswalk and street poles near 8th Street and Lincoln Avenue.
"We gonna do this so they slow down or try to make them,” Hughes said. “We don't know if it'll work, but we try to do stuff every day and try to help the community."
Your Move MKE leads the initiative to paint raised crosswalks, which is a first in the city of Milwaukee. With help from a mix of funding sources, the youth-focused nonprofit based on the south side partnered with Milwaukee's Department of Public Works for the project.
"Color tones can really affect people,” Your Move co-founder and executive director Raquel Aleman noted. “The green is calming. The blue is calming. The whole mural is really painting peace. … We have peace signs in it, and we wanted to put people in the mindset of a peaceful place."
Lincoln Avenue is part of Milwaukee's High-Injury Network — a designation for the streets and corridors where higher rates of fatal and serious injury crashes occur now and are predicted to happen in the future. City data for the avenue between South 1st Street and Miller Parkway show 226 crashes in 2024 and 219 in 2025 for a total of 445 (2026 numbers are not yet available).
Iveliz Hope, an 18-year-old senior at Wisconsin Lutheran High School, recently earned her license but isn’t always eager to use it because driving around her south side neighborhood can feel unsafe.
“It's not the best,” she said. “People speed over here all the time … car crashes over here all the time. And I feel like, as a community, we need to get better with that.”
According to data from the Traffic Safety Unit, Milwaukee police have issued more than 1,700 speeding citations this year and more than 9,500 tickets since 2024. Plus, over that time period, drivers have averaged between 20-24 miles per hour above the posted speed limit.
“Where the city has installed traffic calming, we've seen a 21% reduction in speeding in those areas and 30% reduction in severe crashes,” said Danya Littlefield, senior transportation planner at the Department of Public Works. “So we know that traffic calming works, but we also know it doesn't get us to zero. So other ways to address it are important.”
The department’s traffic-calming efforts are part of the city's Vision Zero plan to have no traffic deaths or serious injuries by 2037. This year, the city has slated 43 traffic-safety projects across the city.
"A lot of folks at the Department of Public Works are really centering our work around how we can make our streets safer for everyone,” Littlefield added. “We know that's a priority for Milwaukeeans. It's certainly a priority for us."
It’s also top of mind for Your Move MKE as the organization ensures our city’s young people are being heard and able to make change.
“It's so important to keep these kids busy,” Aleman said. “I always tell the kids: ‘I don't care what you're doing. If it’s painting, breakdancing, rapping, just find something productive to do, master your craft.’
“We're just trying to keep them active, and it’s really important to develop these principles and characteristics within them now — the values of investing in your community.”
