The Bottom-Up Revolution
After repeated crashes into a beloved coffee shop, residents in Madison, Wisconsin, pushed for a fast, inexpensive lane change instead of another long, consultant‑driven process. Josh Olson explains how neighbors gathered speed data, won a two‑month trial, and helped make the change permanent. Along the way, he shares how that work fed into broader safety goals, housing reforms, and a shift from “why don’t we” to “how can we.”
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hey there, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and this week is all about the Strongest Town Contest. This episode is all about Madison, Wisconsin. With me today is Josh Olson from Strong Towns Madison, a local conversation group. They're doing great work to rally interest and support for the types of changes that we know we need in order to make our places more prosperous, more fruitful, safer, and more enjoyable to be in — really creating the conditions for everyone to be able to live a good life in a prospering place.
Josh, welcome to Bottom Up Shorts.
Thanks for having me.
Can you talk as we start about what it is about Madison that has put it on your radar — that the Strongest Town Contest fits Madison just as much as Madison fits the criteria for being in it?
Last year, I was approached by Strong Towns about nominating Madison based on some of the work that we have been doing. Our local conversation has been active for a couple of years now. I was thinking, I don't know if we did enough to make that nomination. But I promised we would commit to doing some things, and once we got them done, I wanted to feel proud about our
application for this year's contest. So we made a couple of commitments that we wanted to do. We got them done, and I was super excited to submit for this year. Part of that was having a Parking Day. There was also a great opportunity for increasing incremental housing, and then a nice, random, spontaneous opportunity to really limit one of our key business district streets. It was really cool.
Was that a community-led effort, or was that something that the city has been pioneering and you're working with them? Can you share a little bit more about how some of these changes are being affected in the community?
Sure. So the lane closure experiment that we did on Willy Street was driven purely by the community. Madison is a Vision Zero city, but there's a lot of question about how we can actually implement this and see it on the ground. We had a car crash into a building for the third time in less than two decades, and we said, this isn't appropriate — we need change.
When we had meetings with the transportation commission and city staff, they were talking about things we could do. They suggested spending $600,000 on bollards to cover every intersection — something we can't just do right now. You plan for it, you budget for it. We could bring in consultants to talk through road changes, probably on a two- or three-year timeline. There's also a big road next to Willy Street that's going to be under construction, so there were proposals to do a survey, make sure everything is okay, budget for it, and then push until that construction is done.
One of my co-coordinators and the local neighborhood association said, we know we can do this now. Let's put bags over the signs and designate peak-hour lanes. It cost $24,000 rather than $200,000,
and we were able to implement it in a month rather than three years. The really cool thing is they did the experiment, it lasted two months, and then they said, "This is permanent — we like what the results are. 90% of pedestrians and bikers feel safer, so let's not only do it here, we'll consider it for other streets in Madison." That was community-driven.
I love even the asking of the question — do you feel safe in this place? — and then, are there things we can do to continue to help with that? The other side is, if people are using a space, that's often an indication of a relative amount of safety. Looking for those indicator species of a great space — children using it, seniors feeling more comfortable, non-typical users finding their way in. I love that.
Madison is a city I've heard often referred to because it's right on the lake. You've got water on both sides of your downtown. It has some great natural features. Can you share a little bit about the story of Madison — it's got good bones — and that vitality that emerges from that?
It's very interesting. Willy Street in particular is on the part of the isthmus that is the premier characteristic of Madison. We're surrounded by two lakes, Lake Mendota and Lake Monona. There's a small stretch — I think it's about half a mile long — with around six streets you can go through. These were heavily populated in the late 1800s
and early 1900s, before zoning really existed. So there are many different forms of housing, and a lot of it is walkable. At one point, they even tried to introduce a highway system into it. Technically there is a highway there, but it's six lanes rather than an actual highway — people can go whatever speed. A lot of us look at it and say, if that plan had actually happened in the highway-expansion era, the city would have felt completely different.
Willy Street is a huge business district with lots of acclaimed restaurants and really cool places, like Mother Fools, which is the coffee shop that was crashed into multiple times. That place is probably disconnected from half of the isthmus if the highway had been built. Instead, you have duplexes, single-family homes, and apartments all within that people-centric zone that a lot of people crave — you can just walk down and interact. There are parks everywhere. One of the fun facts I always share — I need a source for it, but everyone says Madison has the highest parks per capita in the country. You can find green space everywhere, and I think a lot of that comes from being close-knit. The lakes force you together.
Without that, we might have seen a little bit more sprawl, and we kind of see that near the edges of the city. We haven't figured everything out. There are problems we're solving, but we do have a good model to base it off of on the isthmus.
Has policy around housing kept up with that? You mentioned this diverse housing stock right within the heart of the community. Has that positive example re-emerged in housing policy to allow that to be the case in the rest of the city as well?
In the '60s and '70s, a lot of housing was built with the large-single-family-lot suburban-sprawl model. With more recent plans, the city has been looking at a little more density. There's a great visual comparison of property taxes per acre that we've copied from Urban3 within our own local conversation. It shows high amounts of property taxes per acre in the central core — especially on the isthmus and right outside of it — and then it goes into yellow, the lower property-tax-per-acre areas. As we get to these newer plats, it's actually come back to some of the oranges, which indicates a decent, better-than-large-lots amount.
We actually had some Housing Forward proposals pass Common Council this year as well, making duplexes by-right anywhere you can build a single-family home. That was a huge win, especially because four months before, there was an alder saying, "I don't know if this is possible." It went from "we can't vote on this" to being unanimously approved. That was a great step for us and a realization that we've got a real housing need. We're always dealing with a structural deficit. Can we introduce more of this missing-middle housing? At least from the city side, can we lower the barriers and hopefully see financing and construction aspects come in, whether this year or in the years to come?
As part of the Strongest Town Contest, I want to recognize what you're already doing. I think that's part of the validation that comes from people voting for what Strong Towns Madison is doing, and what Madison as a community is doing to become a stronger community over time — building up resilience, building up capacity within the community. To help people affirm you, what are some of the things you feel are the most affirmation-worthy about Madison in general? If you're able to make your big pitch — why vote for Madison this time around?
There are so many great contenders, and yet Madison has been so strong through the contest. I want to highlight that, affirm that other people are noticing, and ask: what more is there to notice?
From my perspective, I am most proud of the fact that we went from "I don't feel like we can submit something" in the previous contest to this year having at least three big wins progressing forward — ranging from city involvement, to action on the ground, to things that were really spurred on by our group. I'm really proud of that.
The Housing Forward proposals have put us closer to being a housing-ready city. We still have some checkboxes to go, and I think our group is going to be pushing for changes to minimum lot sizes and minimum lot widths. But outside of the city-perspective items, there's stuff we did as a group that I'm really proud of — we got through Parking Day, we actually hosted a session even though we had some major snafus. The Willy Street lane closure
is my personal favorite, even though I wasn't super involved in it myself.
A lot of our members spoke up and said, "We can do this right now. This is way more inexpensive than hiring a consultant in three years. Let's get results. Let's experiment. Let's see if this works. If it doesn't, great — we learned, and we know we don't have to do this across the rest of the city." We felt confident it would work, and now it's having knock-on effects — we're looking at new street proposals in other core business areas, and peak-hour lanes aren't even being offered as a preferred option anymore.
We're introducing new proposals that are the preferred option, and they're not just a checkbox that says, "Let's make this safer for pedestrians."
That's awesome. That comes from you all, and that's a shifting of a permission structure — a shifting of that paradigm of what is perceived to be normal versus what is abnormal or a threat. That shift in the permission structure is so powerful.
I love that description of the contention — we need to design our cities for the peak versus we need to design for everyday life. Strong Towns has its parking campaigns around Black Friday parking, trying to say, you're even missing it when you come to your peak modeling. A lot of our communities wrestle with that where they close a street once a year, do a big street party, have bouncy castles, and then I always ask, "What happens the next morning?" There's a sheepish, "Yeah, then it just goes back to what it was." That's not a place that's suitable for people.
Trying to instill that sense of what you described — your coffee shop that's beloved in the community shouldn't be closed because it got hit by another vehicle. That's higher insurance costs too. There are real impacts that may be unseen in the traffic-engineering world if you're only thinking about throughput. It's higher insurance costs, it's loss of revenue for the city — and from a human side of things, there are serious injuries or even fatalities. That's kind of what got me driven into Strong Towns as well.
A high school friend — it's weird for me to think I won't see them at a reunion. That's something I've been grappling with, and it got me really involved. What are the little steps I can take? I know I can sit in my car for two hours taking speed data and show it to people who can actually make some change.
I love to ask too, because you're in the trenches. Even the posture between last year — being like, "Oh, we're still quite far away" — to this year, feeling like you've got some really good things in the hopper, as well as a few things that have come to fruition.
What is a suggestion or a tip that you have for people who probably feel the same way as you did last year about their community — who are thinking, "I kind of want to get to where Josh is at this year"?
From my perspective, it's very easy to say
things are out of your control. But if you're thinking about it from that perspective, take a step back and ask, "What can I control?"
Initially, when I reached out — I think it was to Tony Harris — I said, "Someone I know was hit by a car and passed away. I want to do this crash analysis studio I've seen done for a place." Tony said, "This happened in another state. It's going to be really hard to do that. If you ever see an opportunity in Madison, please let us know." I looked at our fatality map and saw someone had died two blocks from my apartment building a month earlier — I wasn't even aware of that. From there, it was, "I can measure the streets. I can take photos. I can sit there with a radar gun and take measurements."
For some of my members in the local conversation, they said we could do a speed study of Willy Street, go to the transportation commission, and say, "Here's an idea — let's put covers on the signs that say this is a peak-hour lane from 4:30 to 6 PM
on weekdays.
Can we get engineering to tell us this is not a good idea?" But they got to a yes, and that was really awesome. Take little steps seriously. I'll even go down my block and pick up trash. I've met people who really appreciate those steps. They think, "This is someone who's investing in my community," and that gives a permission structure for others to continue to invest as well. Be that champion, even if it's a small thing. People will notice, and then you can see bigger and bigger effects.
Moving from "why don't we" to "how can we"
is a really powerful shift. Sometimes that recognition starts small — knowing how to make your community a little bit more livable and dignified by removing litter, keeping up with it over time. And then also that conviction: no one should be the second person to die at that location.
It gives you experience too. I actually noticed that as I was picking up litter on a street — that's when I noticed a memorial on a street post, and I asked, "What happened here?" I looked at the map and thought, "Wow, this is recent." Experiencing your community and humbly observing — just being out there — can give you ideas for what you can do and what those little steps are.
Josh, this has been so powerful. I've already plotted with Josh — we're going to record another episode of Bottom Up Shorts that'll air in a little while, talking specifically about the Crash Analysis Studio project that Josh and his collaborators in the community worked on.
I'm not allowed to put my thumb on the scale for voting, but — vote Madison. Along with that, I would definitely encourage you to come learn about Madison. Go to StrongestTown.com, where we've got a profile of the city so it can inform your voting. I'd also recommend checking out the Strong Towns Madison group site, which I believe is StrongestTownsMadison.com. Josh's blog, where he keeps up a written commentary on things that are happening in the community, is CountingCranes.com — cranes like the bird,
or the kind that's up in the sky — well, in the sky, that would be the bird. So, CountingCranes.com is where he's got some fantastic articles. But yeah — closing words. What's your word of appreciation for those that are voting for Madison?
Well, thank you for considering us. I know that there are a lot of great cities out there. I'm just glad to be in this competition in the first place. We're hoping that people will continue to vote for Madison — that's what we're trying to do, and we're hoping to do that through March.
That is fantastic. Vote Madison Monday — we'll have to make that a permanent thing. I love it. Investing in our places and having great confidence in them. With that, thanks for listening to this Bottom Up Short. Take care, and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at StrongTowns.org/membership.