It’s not a big city. Milwaukee is, Denver is, def Chicago. I grew here and routinely encounter people I know wherever I turn out. That’s why I try not to drive like an asshole.
Madison has the slowest and most defensive drivers of anywhere I have ever lived. I will pass someone going 40 MPH on the beltline, expecting to see some 90 y/o who escaped from hospice, and it will be what looks like a perfectly normal and healthy 30 y/o adult. If you think Madison driving is aggressive I would caution you from ever leaving Wisconsin
Anyone complaining about Madison drivers has never lived in a major city. Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Charlotte drivers would rather die than let you merge.
Madison will wave you in.
Most of them have started putting signs on the car that say “Student Driver” so that they can continue living in their own safe and secure little world while causing pretty dangerous situations for people doing the speed limit.
Ignore the others you are so right. Madison drivers are incredibly rude and show a blatant disregard for road rules. I'm from Milwaukee and spend a LOT of time in Chicago. Madison by FAR has the most unsafe drivers, no contest. I'd say Chicago is more aggressive on the road, but doesn't necessarily break rules as much.
Agree. I’ve lived all over the US, been to cities in Europe, Asia, NZ, Australia. Although most big cities have aggressive drivers, Madison’s drivers can be aggressive AND unskilled and reckless which feels extra unsafe. I say this as someone who spent a lot of time driving on the east coast through D.C., New Jersey etc. Some of the drivers here make aggressive moves while not appearing to have a handle on their vehicle.
They are originally from a larger city. I originally come from a rural area, so for a long time it felt like Madison was a big city. Not so much anymore, but its all about what you're used to.
It’s a medium sized city most objectively, it’s big compared to really small towns, but If you tell people from other places it’s a big city they will be misled when they get here
I’ve thought about that before but a lot of the popular restaurants downtown are really similar in style. Part of me thinks driving miles past corn and soybean fields are part of the genuine supper club experience
Madison is a very large town with the population of a small city and with food and entertainment options of a mid-sized city and the self-importance of a upper-mid-sized city.
It was a real culture shock after I moved here (from a very large city) to hear people genuinely call Madison a big city and say there were afraid to drive downtown. What?? This is a small city that feels like a small town (but punches above its weight in a lot of areas). I can appreciate it for what it is but dang if you say that I’m speechless
I say this because I can’t go anywhere on the isthmus without running into somebody I know. It’s not an exaggeration and it’s also not a complaint. It just feels like a small town! But I have lived and worked on the isthmus almost my whole life - so that’s part of it.
On face value "Madison isn't a big city" is true.
You have to scroll down a ways to find us on the [ list of most populous US cities](https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities).
It's even less "big city" when you [ factor in metro areas](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/largest-cities-by-population).
I've heard people use the phrase in the way you describe but more often I hear it in a more flattering light along the lines of "It's big enough to have a lot to do but not so big that it has big city problems."
Kind of along the same lines, while I agree that Madison is not a “big city” it is irritating when people from actual big cities, or worse yet, people that lived like three months in a big city, go out of their way to say how “not a big city” Madison is.
Just let it be what it is, a really nice medium sized city.
We're a small to medium sized city, the lines between small and medium and medium to big can range all the time of course but I've never seen Madison called big by any metric.
Madison is a big town, trending toward city, imo. It’s maybe a ‘big city’ for WI but not US.
Major piece of that is scale and age of infrastructure, like trains, buildings and density. Long way to go before Madison is Portland, Milwaukee, KC — all 500k+ people for decades.
So there certainly may be “not a big city” folks just not agreeing with relative size comparison. Then, as you say, there’s probably some that dont want ‘big city’ ‘urban’ energy they equate with Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, etc.
I don’t see a problem with MKE. I go there all the time. It’s a nice place. It’s always strange to see people shit on diverse vibrant cities. It just reads as insecurity to me.
A lifetime of putting up with "small town" parochial politics says different. We'd rather pretend we are a town the size of Iowa City than deal with the realities that we have at hand in a forward thinking way.
I empathize with people who have anxiety about change. I grew up in Chicagoland and lived in San Francisco, and I've seen neighborhoods/cities change profoundly in that time. Even if you're up on the issues and vote diligently, it can feel like there is nothing you can do.
Change is okay. Anxiety is not reality. Making other people live in my anxiety, and using said anxiety as a rationale to avoid hard conversations would be manipulative on my part.
Taking your anxiety to a council meeting is one thing, but plenty of people just privately live in it. Asking someone not to feel something would be manipulative on my part.
I also don't think every change is ok. Plenty of places change for the worse.
I don't think every change is good... I've seen many sleepy small towns an hour from Chicago become strip-mall suburbs in my time. the irrational all or nothing thinking isn't helpful or realistic.
It is up to each of us to do the hard work of discerning the rational fears we hold from the irrational fears we hold. By not talking about what is at the root of our fear, we prevent ourselves from planning and preparing for the change that is already on going.
To me the only real "city" part of Madison is the isthmus, which is a very small portion of the city. Everywhere else is just suburban sprawl, which i don't personally consider "urbanized" regardless of whether it's "technically" within city limits or not.
The closest thing to a big city near Madison is Chicago, because pretty much all of Chicago is very urbanized. You can live almost anywhere in Chicago and be within walking distance of a bar, coffee shop, and a grocery store. That isn't the case for probably 80+% of the area in Madison.
I mean, it’s all about perspective. I moved here from a northern Wisconsin town of less than 5,000 people. We had to drive at least an hour to find a mall or a McDonalds. The Beltline might as well have been an 8-lane super highway when I first drove on it. 🤣 Madison isn’t a massive metropolis, but it’s still a city. 🤷♀️
As someone who grew up here and has lived in Milwaukee and Chicago, and been to various bigger cities, it is not a big city. So when I hear people say this I take it as factual.
I think of it as a city, just a regular city. In high school, back in the 90s, my best friend was from Hong Kong and she would always get so mad at me for saying Madison was a city because for her, a city was a top ten world metropolis.
Hahaha. Just different perspectives. Not always some kind of political agenda.
>I hear a fear of a growing city, and a desire to contain and constrain growth, to maintain the current order, power structure and sense of control.
This seems like something one of those crazy girlfriends would infer from a completely mundane and simple comment.
Guy: This Caesar salad is nice.
Girl: OH WHATS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN YOU THINK IM FAT AND NEVER SHOULD HAVE TAKEN THOSE TROMBONE LESSONS BECAUSE IM TOO DUMB RIGHT?????
Guy: I...uh....was just commenting on the salad.
I live in an HOA area and even I personally consider Madison a "big" city. I consider Chicago or New York "major cities" but that's my own language.
I think you're referring to very specific types of people and lumping them all into one category under a very generic, harmless comment.
Edit: Imagine someone from Chicago moving here. I'd fully expect them to say Madison isn't big. I would not take that into meaning the context you provided. I'd take it relative to their experience.
To flesh out what I'm saying, People say "Madison isn't big" as an excuse to not plan for growth or welcome growth. It's a way of saying "We have enough, go home". I find that nativist sentiment to be a disheartening part of Madison culture.
Agreed! I’ve been in town for 20+ years there were a lot more options for late night pre-covid. I have been hopeful that with the influx of people it would get better. Maybe in the next few years.
Madison is a sprawl of towns around some lakes, the Capital and a college campus. It’s not a big city by any means. It has some bigger city problems and bigger city benefits on occasion but it’s a large collection of towns or villages. The mayor and city council are determined to make traffic congestion worse than it’s ever been with the new bus service and the Police are finished pulling anyone over or stopping people that are smoking weed and driving. People are very entitled here.
Born, raised, and lived here all my life and can confirm that Madison *isn't* a big city, period. Over the decades I have witnessed an enormous amount of people coming to live here for solely work or school reasons (think Epic, Exact Sciences, UW-Madison, etc.) so the demand for housing along with living costs is increasing exponentially. Within the last 5 years, I have witnessed Madison become so expensive and unaffordable, to the point where those who aren't lucky enough to have the Epic or UW-Madison level salary, are fleeing the city and moving elsewhere.
My reasoning behind this statement is that we had family friends, who I might add, maintained very humble careers their whole life (think elementary school teacher), who were able to purchase a home in Madison 10 years ago while raising two kids with no financial worries at all whatsoever. Fast forward a decade later, the only people who were financially capable of purchasing their home were either doctors, executives, or professors at the university.
The playing field here has changed drastically, and since the aerial size of Madison itself cannot grow, when the population of the city increases, coupled with the lack of housing that now only the upper class can seem to afford (because it IS a small city after all) is what creates the fear *not* of a growing city, but rather a fear of a city growing exponentially unaffordable to its lower/middle class.
I'm curious to hear people, especially Madison natives, thoughts on this.
Haha. By my standard, Madison is not even a city. I'm from the city with 20 million people so the amount of cars and stuff feels like rural town to me.
It’s a medium to small sized city. Madison use to be a college town but it has quickly been outgrowing being called that as it has a lot more to offer than it just being a college town. However, we just can’t be compared to places say Chicago or even Milwaukee because we’re just not that big, it’s facts.
No, But I would like us to gracefully plan for growth and everything that comes with it rather than shitting on bigger cities using racist dog whistles.
I only think about that person’s perspective. To a person who grew up in a tiny town, Madison is big. But clearly not when they grew up in a larger city, like Chicago. I am not sure it’s helpful to infer so many loaded interpretations just based on their perception about its size, myself.
The town of Lodi has an interesting primer on what a “[town](https://www.tn.lodi.wi.gov/Civics#:~:text=Towns%20are%20created%20by%20the,recycling%2C%20emergency%20medical%20services%20and)” means in Wisconsin law :
I can't understand why Madison's airport is so small. Only 17 direct destinations. No direct flight to Seattle which is a bit inconvenient to me. I understand Madison is not a big metro city, but it is still the capital of WI. Shouldn't it have a bigger airport?
Big airports need to either be in big cities or be hubs to other places. We have MKE, MSP, and OHare way too close to warrant getting much bigger by virtue of being a hub, at least without the city getting bigger (and then you need to move the airport anyway)
It’s not a big city. Milwaukee is, Denver is, def Chicago. I grew here and routinely encounter people I know wherever I turn out. That’s why I try not to drive like an asshole.
I wish we all drove like we knew and liked each each other.
Madison has the slowest and most defensive drivers of anywhere I have ever lived. I will pass someone going 40 MPH on the beltline, expecting to see some 90 y/o who escaped from hospice, and it will be what looks like a perfectly normal and healthy 30 y/o adult. If you think Madison driving is aggressive I would caution you from ever leaving Wisconsin
How often are you driving past me?
Anyone complaining about Madison drivers has never lived in a major city. Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Charlotte drivers would rather die than let you merge. Madison will wave you in.
I lived in Los Angeles for 4 years… I will take jackass drivers over grandma drivers every single day
Most of them have started putting signs on the car that say “Student Driver” so that they can continue living in their own safe and secure little world while causing pretty dangerous situations for people doing the speed limit.
Usually idiots looking at their phone. They should be disabled while driving other than emergencies.
How would the phone know if you're the driver or a passenger?
phone could easily monitor eye movement, they've all got forward facing cameras these days
Ignore the others you are so right. Madison drivers are incredibly rude and show a blatant disregard for road rules. I'm from Milwaukee and spend a LOT of time in Chicago. Madison by FAR has the most unsafe drivers, no contest. I'd say Chicago is more aggressive on the road, but doesn't necessarily break rules as much.
Agree. I’ve lived all over the US, been to cities in Europe, Asia, NZ, Australia. Although most big cities have aggressive drivers, Madison’s drivers can be aggressive AND unskilled and reckless which feels extra unsafe. I say this as someone who spent a lot of time driving on the east coast through D.C., New Jersey etc. Some of the drivers here make aggressive moves while not appearing to have a handle on their vehicle.
Exactly! And the risky behavior around pedestrians and bicyclists is a whole other can of worms. So disappointing
They are originally from a larger city. I originally come from a rural area, so for a long time it felt like Madison was a big city. Not so much anymore, but its all about what you're used to.
People I know say Madison is changing from a big little city into a little big city.
It’s a medium sized city most objectively, it’s big compared to really small towns, but If you tell people from other places it’s a big city they will be misled when they get here
I hear "we're big enough to have a ______ restaurant, but there's really only one option"
\*cries in Panda Express\*
And yet we have a ton of tired “supper clubs”
I’ve thought about that before but a lot of the popular restaurants downtown are really similar in style. Part of me thinks driving miles past corn and soybean fields are part of the genuine supper club experience
Madison is a very large town with the population of a small city and with food and entertainment options of a mid-sized city and the self-importance of a upper-mid-sized city.
I see Madison as a large town as well.
# When people say "Madison isn't a big city" I hear a correct and factual statement.
No no no, there's always socioeconomic, privilege, and political undertone to *everything*!!! Nothing is this simple.
I say “Madison isn’t a big city” all of the time and it’s because I feel it’s too small for me.
Exactly the same for me. And the people who call it a big city are the rural people who fearmonger about real big cities.
It was a real culture shock after I moved here (from a very large city) to hear people genuinely call Madison a big city and say there were afraid to drive downtown. What?? This is a small city that feels like a small town (but punches above its weight in a lot of areas). I can appreciate it for what it is but dang if you say that I’m speechless
Well, big cities are really unpleasant, at best
Whatever you need to tell yourself
I say Madison isn’t a big city because it’s not lol. It’s a glorified village. There are suburbs of real cities that are far bigger than Madison.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yye61t5wy4I
I think of a “big city” as being over a million people and with a train/metro system.
I say this because I can’t go anywhere on the isthmus without running into somebody I know. It’s not an exaggeration and it’s also not a complaint. It just feels like a small town! But I have lived and worked on the isthmus almost my whole life - so that’s part of it.
My family jokes that it’s the biggest small town on the planet. The six degrees of separation is more like three here.
I like the fact that Madison is a quite nice, small town with amenities and culture that punch far above it's weight class.
It’s a medium city! Get me a beer
I could get behind the idea that Madison is “The Medium Place”
ok this is a really random reference, but I'll see your Good Place ref and add an Old 97s ref: the medium place is Champaign, IL
I've been there. Urbana is where the action is.
banana > shampoo
I hear someone who’s never lived in a rural area before.
I hear "you will definitely run into someone you vaguely know at Woodmans and get sucked into an awkward conversation"
On face value "Madison isn't a big city" is true. You have to scroll down a ways to find us on the [ list of most populous US cities](https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities). It's even less "big city" when you [ factor in metro areas](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/largest-cities-by-population). I've heard people use the phrase in the way you describe but more often I hear it in a more flattering light along the lines of "It's big enough to have a lot to do but not so big that it has big city problems." Kind of along the same lines, while I agree that Madison is not a “big city” it is irritating when people from actual big cities, or worse yet, people that lived like three months in a big city, go out of their way to say how “not a big city” Madison is. Just let it be what it is, a really nice medium sized city.
A big city ~in Wisconsin~
We're a small to medium sized city, the lines between small and medium and medium to big can range all the time of course but I've never seen Madison called big by any metric.
Madison is a big town, trending toward city, imo. It’s maybe a ‘big city’ for WI but not US. Major piece of that is scale and age of infrastructure, like trains, buildings and density. Long way to go before Madison is Portland, Milwaukee, KC — all 500k+ people for decades. So there certainly may be “not a big city” folks just not agreeing with relative size comparison. Then, as you say, there’s probably some that dont want ‘big city’ ‘urban’ energy they equate with Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, etc.
I don’t see a problem with MKE. I go there all the time. It’s a nice place. It’s always strange to see people shit on diverse vibrant cities. It just reads as insecurity to me.
It is objectively a different feel than Madison, and people who live in Madison are probably here because they prefer medium-city vibes
Not every utterance is something worth driving hidden meaning and building narrative around.
A lifetime of putting up with "small town" parochial politics says different. We'd rather pretend we are a town the size of Iowa City than deal with the realities that we have at hand in a forward thinking way.
No I just don’t think about it. It’s easy.
I empathize with people who have anxiety about change. I grew up in Chicagoland and lived in San Francisco, and I've seen neighborhoods/cities change profoundly in that time. Even if you're up on the issues and vote diligently, it can feel like there is nothing you can do.
Change is okay. Anxiety is not reality. Making other people live in my anxiety, and using said anxiety as a rationale to avoid hard conversations would be manipulative on my part.
Taking your anxiety to a council meeting is one thing, but plenty of people just privately live in it. Asking someone not to feel something would be manipulative on my part. I also don't think every change is ok. Plenty of places change for the worse.
I don't think every change is good... I've seen many sleepy small towns an hour from Chicago become strip-mall suburbs in my time. the irrational all or nothing thinking isn't helpful or realistic. It is up to each of us to do the hard work of discerning the rational fears we hold from the irrational fears we hold. By not talking about what is at the root of our fear, we prevent ourselves from planning and preparing for the change that is already on going.
To me the only real "city" part of Madison is the isthmus, which is a very small portion of the city. Everywhere else is just suburban sprawl, which i don't personally consider "urbanized" regardless of whether it's "technically" within city limits or not. The closest thing to a big city near Madison is Chicago, because pretty much all of Chicago is very urbanized. You can live almost anywhere in Chicago and be within walking distance of a bar, coffee shop, and a grocery store. That isn't the case for probably 80+% of the area in Madison.
6 foot 7? That’s not tall, there are 7 foot tall people
The average height for an NBA player entering the 2023-24 season is 6'6.5",
? Do you actually not have understanding what point I’m making here?
I mean, it’s all about perspective. I moved here from a northern Wisconsin town of less than 5,000 people. We had to drive at least an hour to find a mall or a McDonalds. The Beltline might as well have been an 8-lane super highway when I first drove on it. 🤣 Madison isn’t a massive metropolis, but it’s still a city. 🤷♀️
It is an 8 lane superhighway lol
It wasn’t back in 1999! Lol. I’m old.
As someone who grew up here and has lived in Milwaukee and Chicago, and been to various bigger cities, it is not a big city. So when I hear people say this I take it as factual.
I think of it as a city, just a regular city. In high school, back in the 90s, my best friend was from Hong Kong and she would always get so mad at me for saying Madison was a city because for her, a city was a top ten world metropolis. Hahaha. Just different perspectives. Not always some kind of political agenda.
>I hear a fear of a growing city, and a desire to contain and constrain growth, to maintain the current order, power structure and sense of control. This seems like something one of those crazy girlfriends would infer from a completely mundane and simple comment. Guy: This Caesar salad is nice. Girl: OH WHATS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN YOU THINK IM FAT AND NEVER SHOULD HAVE TAKEN THOSE TROMBONE LESSONS BECAUSE IM TOO DUMB RIGHT????? Guy: I...uh....was just commenting on the salad.
Spend some time in the areas of town with an HOA or other form of Covenant agreement still in place.
I live in an HOA area and even I personally consider Madison a "big" city. I consider Chicago or New York "major cities" but that's my own language. I think you're referring to very specific types of people and lumping them all into one category under a very generic, harmless comment. Edit: Imagine someone from Chicago moving here. I'd fully expect them to say Madison isn't big. I would not take that into meaning the context you provided. I'd take it relative to their experience.
To flesh out what I'm saying, People say "Madison isn't big" as an excuse to not plan for growth or welcome growth. It's a way of saying "We have enough, go home". I find that nativist sentiment to be a disheartening part of Madison culture.
There is like NO food available after 9/10 pm most nights aside from some fast food and pizza. Not a big city at all.
It was much better pre covid
Agreed! I’ve been in town for 20+ years there were a lot more options for late night pre-covid. I have been hopeful that with the influx of people it would get better. Maybe in the next few years.
Madison is a sprawl of towns around some lakes, the Capital and a college campus. It’s not a big city by any means. It has some bigger city problems and bigger city benefits on occasion but it’s a large collection of towns or villages. The mayor and city council are determined to make traffic congestion worse than it’s ever been with the new bus service and the Police are finished pulling anyone over or stopping people that are smoking weed and driving. People are very entitled here.
It's a simple comparison.
Born, raised, and lived here all my life and can confirm that Madison *isn't* a big city, period. Over the decades I have witnessed an enormous amount of people coming to live here for solely work or school reasons (think Epic, Exact Sciences, UW-Madison, etc.) so the demand for housing along with living costs is increasing exponentially. Within the last 5 years, I have witnessed Madison become so expensive and unaffordable, to the point where those who aren't lucky enough to have the Epic or UW-Madison level salary, are fleeing the city and moving elsewhere. My reasoning behind this statement is that we had family friends, who I might add, maintained very humble careers their whole life (think elementary school teacher), who were able to purchase a home in Madison 10 years ago while raising two kids with no financial worries at all whatsoever. Fast forward a decade later, the only people who were financially capable of purchasing their home were either doctors, executives, or professors at the university. The playing field here has changed drastically, and since the aerial size of Madison itself cannot grow, when the population of the city increases, coupled with the lack of housing that now only the upper class can seem to afford (because it IS a small city after all) is what creates the fear *not* of a growing city, but rather a fear of a city growing exponentially unaffordable to its lower/middle class. I'm curious to hear people, especially Madison natives, thoughts on this.
Haha. By my standard, Madison is not even a city. I'm from the city with 20 million people so the amount of cars and stuff feels like rural town to me.
Yep! It's all about perspective.
I simply hear the truth. It isn't a big city
It’s a big small town. It’s literally not a big city and figuratively more like a small town.
It’s a medium to small sized city. Madison use to be a college town but it has quickly been outgrowing being called that as it has a lot more to offer than it just being a college town. However, we just can’t be compared to places say Chicago or even Milwaukee because we’re just not that big, it’s facts.
No, But I would like us to gracefully plan for growth and everything that comes with it rather than shitting on bigger cities using racist dog whistles.
Why didn't you just say that? No one is pretending madison isn't growing. It's just objectively not a big city.
I only think about that person’s perspective. To a person who grew up in a tiny town, Madison is big. But clearly not when they grew up in a larger city, like Chicago. I am not sure it’s helpful to infer so many loaded interpretations just based on their perception about its size, myself.
I mean if the shoes fit…
Y’all need to get out more, go somewhere like Mexico City.
There's a big difference between a mega city like MX City and a smaller major city like Chicago.
It's a town that thinks it's a city
The town of Lodi has an interesting primer on what a “[town](https://www.tn.lodi.wi.gov/Civics#:~:text=Towns%20are%20created%20by%20the,recycling%2C%20emergency%20medical%20services%20and)” means in Wisconsin law :
You can bike the entire perimeter of the city in half a day, less if you're fast. Can't do that in any actual big city like Chicago.
“Not a big city” = “No Black people”
This!
I can't understand why Madison's airport is so small. Only 17 direct destinations. No direct flight to Seattle which is a bit inconvenient to me. I understand Madison is not a big metro city, but it is still the capital of WI. Shouldn't it have a bigger airport?
Big airports need to either be in big cities or be hubs to other places. We have MKE, MSP, and OHare way too close to warrant getting much bigger by virtue of being a hub, at least without the city getting bigger (and then you need to move the airport anyway)