I moved to Madison 50 years ago. This year and for most of those years, for reasons still rather cosmically mysterious to me, I had an unusually advantageous spot on the historical parade route.
Madison has a curious mix of hopeful naivety and irritating tendency to take itself too seriously. Consequently, we often find ourselves with a variety of big ideas that inevitably encounter assumptions of certainty, for and against. I’m a fan of big ideas and I think their potential benefits are worth taking some risks. While decidedly risk-averse — as cities go when it comes to big ideas, or even just regular ideas — Madison is at least willing to try. And we’ve come up with some doozies.
It’s really the debate over Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT, that has put me in this particular reflective frame of mind. Some predictions of the destruction of the city are reminiscent of Monona Terrace opponents who claimed its construction would be the ruin of Lake Monona, if not the entire city. Of course Monona Terrace is one of Madison’s many great success stories. But I often think of those big ideas that did not fare so well. There’s a lot to be learned from the unintended consequences of those well-intentioned, ambitious goals that might help our city as it navigates the next quarter of the 21st Century.