A car had crashed into the same Madison coffee shop three times. That was enough for Josh Olson and Strong Towns Madison to push for a change on Willie Street — a dense, locally-owned corridor that doubles as a commuter shortcut during rush hour. The intervention they proposed cost a fraction of what the city had budgeted, took two weeks to implement, and ran as a two-month trial. Josh breaks down what made the argument land with city staff and commissioners, and what happened after the results came in.
Hi there, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and part of my work is connecting with Strong Towns members all over and hearing their stories. Frankly, I get very excited about what I hear other people doing and learning, and I discover that so many of them really have their roots in my own experience — being rather ordinary, not trained in particular fields of study, and yet being able to dive in and pick up tools in our community, together with connecting with other people in our community, in order to bring about change.
Josh Olson is one of the leaders of Strong Towns Madison, a local conversation group in Madison, Wisconsin. He was also one of the key people behind the effort to nominate Madison and have it move forward in the Strongest Town contest. He has the unique distinction of being a first-time, second-time guest, because I was so excited by the conversation we were having that I said I've got to have an extended version of this — a second episode — to talk specifically about the efforts that the Strong Towns Madison group made, together with city staff and other advocates within the community, to improve Willie Street.
Josh, can you set the scene for us? Describe the community and the catalyzing event that gave rise to the recognition that change needed to happen here.
Thanks, Norm, for having me. Willie Street is the eclectic area of Madison. It's located on the Isthmus, which is a little strip of land surrounded by two big lakes, so it's a very condensed area. It was one of the earlier-maturing areas of the city, and because of that, it has a very unique infrastructure. Part of that eclectic nature is that there are a lot of local businesses — there's an ordinance, I believe, that has banned chains from being on the street, so it is very community driven.
Earlier this year — or actually it was last year, in May of 2025 — a vehicle crashed into Mother Fools, a coffee shop. This was the third time that a vehicle had crashed into it, so there were a bunch of us who said this is crazy. How can you have a building that's been crashed into not only once but several times, and how can we prevent this from happening again? We started that conversation. It was really spearheaded by co-coordinator of Strong Towns Madison, Mike Tarbee, as well as his neighborhood association on Willie Street. They did a speed study, presented an incremental step idea for how to resolve it, and really pushed our transportation commission and city staff to consider it.
Part of addressing this is starting with having a lot of conversations about it. I think you wrote about what you do — you go in, talk to the commission, you talk to the people who have responsibility for this. What were some of the core messages that really resonated or broke through?
It started with getting it on the agenda, which basically means either you have to know someone who is interested in this stuff. Thankfully, we do have a great transportation commission director — the person who sets the agenda is very open to these ideas. She brought this in. There was an initial conversation in June, along with the attached speed study results showing the peak hour lanes we have on Willie Street.
Willie Street is technically four lanes. They convert the parking lanes on the outsides to be commute lanes — I think it's from 7:30 to 9:00 in the morning and 4:30 to 6:00 in the afternoons on weekdays. The idea is that people who need to commute across this thin stretch of land from the outskirts of Madison need to get through the downtown, so let's make it easier to move those vehicles through.
From there, we said we're seeing cars traveling faster in those outside lanes, traveling closer to the businesses at higher speeds, and also closer to pedestrians. That's probably not very safe. Can we look at reducing this? Because this is truly a Strong Towns street. I think I did an analysis in my article — I believe we generate about $1.7 million in tax revenue from property taxes from this one small stretch, and that's not even considering all of the properties next to it that have higher values than most in the city, because this is an area people want to be in. We should be focusing on making this a community-driven area: building wealth, building opportunity, building places that people want to be, rather than a commuter zone for an hour and a half that may or may not push more vehicles through. That was a fun result we found from the trial we conducted.
We started that conversation in June, and then when the commission was like, I don't know if there's anything we can really do here, there was a secondary push from a lot of our members and the neighborhood association that said no — we need a yes or no on this. We have an idea. Let's cover the signs that say this is a peak hour lane for these specific hours. Instead, we'll make it parking all the time. Yes or no, can we do this? We had that conversation in August.
What I appreciated in the article that you wrote on your site, CountingCranes.com — where you have an article titled "Trials Are Good and We Should Do More" — is that you framed this really powerfully. You said it's a fair question to ask: we've got a lot of dangerous streets in our community, so should we focus on making this street — where traffic speeds are actually slightly slower than some other areas — a priority? Is it a misplacement of priorities to focus effort here?
Your answer was that the key thing is this is supposed to function as a street, not as a commuter road. Yes, there are more dangerous streets or roads in the city that could use attention, but this area is such a valuable generator of revenue — it uses land so efficiently — that any low-cost intervention, like covering signs to remove a travel lane, could pay for itself immediately in greater revenue opportunities.
That really stood out to me, because it shifted the argument from "people are being hurt" to a bigger version: communities are being hurt, and we're hurting ourselves by removing the ability to generate revenue. It almost feels cold to go to the numbers when there are humans at stake, but I feel like you were able to be persuasive in part because you could say this is an area that so quickly recovers investment. If you try a different intervention — like a bridge over a highway, which might be necessary from a pedestrian connection perspective — that bridge is rarely going to earn its keep back. Here you're talking about things we can do at low cost that make a big difference.
How did you come to that way of framing it? How did it land and take hold? It seems like that was a key part that really captured people's imagination of what was needed and why they should take action.
It comes down to a nice triangulation of a couple of good incentives. One, we had identified a low-cost solution. Two, we were seeing that people — or in this case, a business — was being hurt. Three, there was an easy way to do this, which is separate from low-cost. You could have bollards. We talked about bollards in the August meetings — bollards are easy to put in place, you just bring a rock or whatever and put it in front of the business. But we were being quoted $600,000 to protect all 10 intersections on Willie Street. That wasn't feasible with the budget we had.
We said just cover the signs. This is a parking lane for 90% of the day — why can't we just continue that for 100%? How much is it going to cost? Can we experiment? This doesn't have to be citywide. We can just focus on this one area, and if you get immediate feedback that it's not working — they put up cameras, they were watching intersections, they were doing speed studies — if it's not working, you just take the covers off the signs.
What actually happened is they had to physically remove the signs. They didn't want to just put a plastic bag on top — that could have been cheaper — but we did go from the initial proposed solution of hiring a consultant quoted between $100,000 and $200,000, with a planning timeline of two to three years, down to $24,000 of staff time to get the signs removed and make the lane permanently parking. Plus the two weeks we needed to actually implement it. We ran that trial for two months.
Once the two months were over, we had another conversation with the Transportation Commission. What we saw — and I think this surprised city staff — was that Willie Street was already kind of saturated. Getting into the real nitty-gritty, they're talking about platoons: vehicle platoons are now larger blocks, but the same number of vehicles are going through. So the commuter lanes were not actually allowing more vehicles to get through downtown. What they were allowing for was a separation of vehicles, because some were going faster than others. On this 25-mile-per-hour street — where we actually held our Parking Day event, and I had my radar gun and caught someone going 47 miles per hour — the goal is to make it safer at more times of the day and prevent serious things like a crash into a building or a crash into a person.
Even though I'm not a fan of excessive parking, in this instance parked vehicles are great bollards — several thousand pounds of metal and steel protecting people walking on the sidewalk and visiting local businesses. Especially since, as I understand it, that right lane — that edge lane — is the one where people are racing. If you're going to do 47 miles per hour, at least do it in the middle of the street, but the conditions get created where it's more likely to happen out at the edge.
This touches on something I sometimes say to be a bit provocative: people care more for their mirrors than for people on foot. It's not because people are bad, but instinctively you are much more likely to know and understand the geometry of your vehicle while driving, and to do things that prevent you from losing your mirrors. You will slow down if you might clip a parked vehicle or a light post. It's why people drive much slower in a Trader Joe's parking lot than in a Walmart parking lot — the conditions create the behavior.
If you asked anyone behind the wheel whether they care about pedestrians, they would say absolutely — but they don't have the ability to constantly be hyper-alert and just instinctively stop if someone is approaching. So we can work with that: remove the sense that everything is fine and you can go whatever speed you need, and instead create the conditions for awareness. That's a really powerful part of it.
The last thing I wanted to ask: how did you develop a coalition of interested participants? How did you and others create the critical mass or general consensus on this?
It definitely helps when you have people speaking who live on the street — they have the lived experience. Mike, the co-coordinator of Strong Towns Madison, sees this from his apartment every day and crosses those streets every day. It helps when the people with lived experience step up and say this is a problem.
Separately, we do have a very friendly transportation commission, which I know doesn't apply everywhere. But having that feedback mechanism — where they say yes, Madison wants to be a Vision Zero city, we have the Complete Green Streets policy that says we should put pedestrians at the top, then transit, biking, vehicles, and then parking — was valuable. We don't always live up to those standards, but in this case we had pedestrians speaking up saying this is not prioritizing us, we have cars running into buildings. Let's fix this.
There are also city staff who, when we present an incremental idea that doesn't cost a lot, can say we can fit this into our budget right now. It would be a different story if we went the bollard route. A lot of our coalition was also willing to make a compromise: even though we have the end-parking-mandates mission going on and we would love to see Willie Street try a parking benefit district or meters, this was a compromise worth making at this point because we believed we could make a significant — a small but significant — improvement that would then give us credence to do more in the future.
That's the biggest win I see from this. The trial — even if it had turned out not to make people feel safer, which it did, with 90% of pedestrians and bikers saying they feel much safer without the peak hour lanes — gave the permission structure to tell city staff: you can try different ideas on different streets. Two other core small-business areas I think of are Regent Street and Monroe Street in Madison. Regent Street is up for reconstruction, and as a function of this successful trial, city staff was initially bringing up the possibility of removing peak hour lanes on Regent Street. I don't think they would have suggested that if we hadn't done this. When they gave us three proposed street remodel options, the preferred option eliminated the peak lanes. I don't think that would have happened if we hadn't pushed for this.
Monroe Street is not up for reconstruction anytime soon, but I was just there recently — I was helping a friend drive to a vet appointment — and I was just walking around. It took me several dozen seconds to get cars to recognize I was trying to cross four lanes. As I was halfway across the street, there was a biker trying to cross too, off their bike, walking it. A car waiting for me to pass didn't see them, started moving forward, and I had to stop and signal — do you not see this person trying to cross? You're not going to have those situations if you go to two lanes. We're giving ourselves successful trials to say let's do something new, and with Regent Street getting the preferred option to reduce peak lanes, we're seeing incremental progress. That makes me really happy.
That's fantastic. It strikes me as something Josh Stewart, who's in Littleton, Colorado and has been working on safe streets there, touched on too. He said back in the day when the suburbs were initially designed, wider streets were seen as places where you play hockey, kids kick a ball, and vehicles also go. Over time, because those areas weren't closely defined, the vehicle took over. Peak travel lanes have had the same effect — at some point the decision was made to remove parking in favor of additional travel lanes, and then it's so hard to get that back.
Yet we're just talking about the allocation of public space and how to maximize the value that we all get to experience from it. As Chuck has pointed out, we have to ask what our values are: it's got to start with safety, it's got to include beauty, it has to include productivity. Speed is a much lower value in that context, and even throughput — we want our cities to function, but as you've pointed out on Willie Street, a functional street is one that's highly productive, has lots of different participants, and allows for many small businesses. To me that stands out, and you can take a look at what is now even more likely to flourish on that street and really be thrilled with that. I do have one more thing I want to ask.
If I can add something — this was very interesting. I was listening to the Regent Street discussion when they were talking about the preferred options. Even though we got our peak hour lane removal, at least based on where they're leaning — and of course they haven't decided yet — it was interesting listening to the representative from what I think is UW Hospital. They have a hospital building and one of the largest remaining surface parking lots in our core downtown, which is not doing much. There's a Qdoba across the street that is producing more in property taxes than that parking lot, despite taking up a sixth of the space.
The hospital representative was saying: our first priority is safety — we want our patients and staff to feel safe. We are not going to be able to get rid of cars because we have patients traveling from around Dane County to get procedures. But we've also heard from our staff that they want a street with businesses and places where they can go get lunch and relax after work. What I'm thinking is — listen to what your staff are saying. These are the people here constantly, day after day, wanting a more flourishing area. Does it cost that much for your patients to have to drive a little bit slower? We're not saying they can't access your building. We're saying drive 20 miles per hour rather than 30 or 35.
This is the core of a city. We only have so much space. It should be focused on the people who are using it all the time, rather than one-off cases like Black Friday parking. I'm glad the conversation has moved from safety is our number one priority — which everyone agrees on, whether or not you would have fought against us — to now looking at productivity. We can win on productivity too. We've got the property tax argument, we've got that people want to be in places and not on roads.
It's been interesting to see that this one little suggestion from our Discord group chat — just put a bag over the sign — is real and having real impacts.
That's awesome. Josh, where can people follow along and learn from what you're doing?
I write about these issues on my website, CountingCranes.com. You can also find us at StrongTownsMadison.com — that's our local conversation. If there are any Madisonians listening, you can meet with us. It's the first Saturday of every month at Central Library, and you can find more information on our website.
Excellent. This is sparking conversations and driving change. I really appreciate the time, Josh. I hope that as you're listening, you're as excited about this conversation as I've been — understanding that a good idea can really begin to take hold and help people see its benefit, and that can really drive lasting change. With that, 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.