Interurban / 54 metros / Milwaukee
Milwaukee
Dense, old and tightly bounded by the lake. One of the most segregated metros in the country, which the coverage maps make plain.
- Residents
- 1,346,467Census 2020, observed
- Census tracts
- 399TIGERweb, 2020 vintage
- Counties
- Milwaukee, WaukeshaWhat the pack covers
- Existing rail
- NoneNo published rail feed
- Difficulty
- ModerateMidwest
What you are given
Every one of Milwaukee's 399 census tracts arrives with its real numbers attached: resident population, population 18 and over, occupied households, jobs by sector at the workplace, resident workers, and median household income — each one hoverable, each one carrying its GEOID so you can go and check it against the Census yourself.
Work trips are not guessed. They are seeded from the observed LEHD LODES home-to-work flows between those tracts, so the real spatial structure of the region — a century of geography, zoning and history that no gravity model reproduces — is preserved, and the model predicts only the change your network causes.
Milwaukee has no rail transit in the pack, because its agency publishes no rail feed. You are starting from nothing but bus, and the map will tell you honestly that there is nothing there.
What makes Milwaukee hard
Moderate. A real city with real structure, and enough density in the middle to reward a trunk line. There is no network to inherit and no habit of using one, which the mode choice model expresses as a constant working against you before you have drawn anything.
And the decade changes the problem, not the vehicle list. Milwaukee in 1960 is a different city from Milwaukee in 2025: smaller, denser, fewer cars per household, no federal transit money at all, and an expectation that you cover your own operating cost. The population distribution is back-cast by pivoting the real 2020 distribution rather than invented, so the rivers and the rail yards and the university stay where they are.
Milwaukee unlocks with any expansion. The free game ships thirteen metros so you can check the model on a city you know before taking anyone's word about the other forty-one. Either $5 expansion opens all fifty-four, or the full game is $20. What it costs · Start free.
Where these numbers come from
- Population, households, population 18+ — Census 2020 PL94-171, tables P1, P3 and H1. Observed.
- Median household income — ACS 2018–2022 5-year, table B19013. Where the Census suppresses a tract, the pack records it as unknown and never estimates one.
- Jobs and commute flows — LEHD LODES8 2022, WAC, RAC and OD (JT00, S000). Observed.
- Tract geometry, water, roads — Census TIGERweb, 2020 tract vintage.
- Traffic counts — FHWA HPMS, functional class 1–4, as reported by the state DOT; each pack's own source string names the vintage its state publishes.
The full model specification, with every coefficient and its source →