By Miquéla V. Thornton
Note: This article was a collaboration between 1000 Friends of Wisconsin and the Feature Storytelling Workshop taught by Stacy Forster at UW Madison. Miquéla V. Thornton is an M.A. Candidate at the UW Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Elizabeth Brewer likes to jaywalk.
“Some people think this is just terrible,” she said, with a shrug. “But I feel safer crossing in the middle of the block if I can see in both directions than waiting to get to the intersection, because I’ve been almost hit too many times.”
Brewer is 73 years old. She’s lived around the world from New York and Slovakia to Boston and Germany. But she’s lived in Beloit for the last 20 years. She’s always liked the pedestrian life. Aside from the environmental benefits of being carless, she appreciates how being a pedestrian allows her to get to know her community while doing daily activities like walking to the grocery store, library or post office.
But she’s noticed a shift in recent years.
“I think it’s universal, (but) in the United States drivers have gotten more aggressive,” Brewer said. “The reality that being a pedestrian can be a very dangerous thing.”
The day she spoke with 1K Friends for this story, she walked her neighbor’s dog. While crossing a busy street, she was so worried she’d be hit that she stuck her arm out to indicate she was crossing — a norm in England.
“And a car actually stopped,” she said, surprised, noting that she learned in the Academy that many drivers can’t see directly in front of the hood of their large cars.
That’s why she enrolled in 1000 Friends of Wisconsin’s Community Transportation Academy in Beloit: to learn how streets could be safer for pedestrians like herself.

That was one of the chief motivations for Susan Gaeddert, the community programs director at 1000 Friends, when she started the Academy: a nine- to 10-week program teaching the fundamentals of transportation planning, showcasing guest speakers with local and national expertise, and allowing participants to propose a solution to a local transportation problem.
When residents become champions of a specific issue, “…especially in small communities where one person can make a really big difference, it really can have an impact on how policy plays out,” she said.
Roads are dangerous by design
According to the Dangerous by Design report from Smart Growth America, a nonprofit 1000 Friends works with that strategizes for safe neighborhoods, 7,522 people across the U.S. were struck and killed while walking in 2022. That’s an average of more than 20 per day. While Wisconsin is not home to the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, Milwaukee clocked in at No. 81 of the report’s most dangerous metro areas, and Madison just made the list at No. 100.
In November, a pedestrian in northeastern Wisconsin’s Village of Denmark was struck by two cars while trying to cross a state highway, and another pedestrian was struck and killed while crossing a rural road in central Jefferson County. In October, another pedestrian died in a crash on U.S. 151 in the Madison suburb of Sun Prairie. No one in any of the cars was hurt.
While Wisconsin pedestrian deaths declined by 18% last year after reaching a five-year high in 2022, the Center for Disease Control maintains that all pedestrian deaths are preventable.
According to the Dangerous by Design report, these types of fatalities disproportionately affect older adults, low-income residents (as they are less likely to own cars), Black and Native Americans, and those with disabilities.
When Rebecca Roberts, a land use specialist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, first saw that 1000 Friends was offering a Community Transportation Academy in La Crosse, “I was a little bit jealous,” she said with a laugh.
Based on the UW-Stevens Point campus in the Center for Land Use Education, Roberts assists communities with planning and facilitates workshops for plan commissions, zoning boards and other local land use officials. So when Gaeddert reached out to her to co-facilitate an Academy in Stevens Point, “I was quite excited,” she said.

At the time, Roberts’ daughter experienced a serious sports knee injury that left her restricted for months.
“To me, it was a reflection point where you think about how, even if you’re a healthy person, at some point you’re going to age,” Roberts said. “At some point, you’re going to have an injury. Everyone at some point in time is going to have some form of mobility challenge.”
Thus, one part of the Academy that stuck with her the most was the transportation audit — being able to experience the public space of sidewalks as a pedestrian walking or rolling. As a co-facilitator of the class, she tapped into the local physical therapy program and borrowed some wheelchairs.
“We also had a community disability advocate who was a participant as well,” she said. “So it was a little bit about stepping into someone else’s shoes.”

In addition to the audit, the 2023 Stevens Point Transportation Academy also included a presentation from Smart Growth America, which empowers communities to advocate for livable spaces.
After the presentation, “Everyone can name the roads they live near that have those design features that make them dangerous,” said Gaeddert. “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.”
How the Community Transportation Academy began
Gaeddert saw it when she went back to school to pursue a master’s in urban planning, and then again while listening to a podcast in 2021 about a Citizens Traffic Academy of Portland, Oregon. Operating since the 1990s, the academy educated residents on land use and transportation.
“I heard them talking about what they’re doing and I just thought, ‘We’ve got to do that here because I work for an organization that does this work statewide,’” she said. “So I took that idea and ran with it.”
She reached out to learn more about Portland’s program, which took an academic route to transportation education. However, Gaeddert was interested in going down a different road.
While many of the speakers are in academia, she said they aim to be community-oriented, tailor the academy to the Wisconsin city or town it’s being taught, and reach the audience at their level.
“The speakers in particular are really good at finding ways to take this information and make it very relatable to think about how your own experience is reflected in what they’re talking about,” she said.
Some of her favorites include speakers on topics such as city limits and state highways, the connection between livable communities and safe streets, gender equity and the role of caregiving in transportation planning, and transit planning in small cities. The latter also includes a tour of the transit system and bus stop upgrades.

Equipped with information from the speakers, Gaeddert hopes that participants, who came for professional development reasons, round out their knowledge, and that others who don’t work in the land use and transportation spaces gain the tools to be advocates.
The power of public input
Christopher Lyons is a junior at Carthage College in Kenosha. He is majoring in urban and regional studies because he’s always been interested in transportation. Especially in a car-dependent place like Kenosha, he wanted to know what other people think about the issue.
He enrolled in the Transportation Academy to further his knowledge, and what has stuck with him most is “the power of public input,” he said.
He regularly engages with local urban planning leaders and the academy served as a reminder of how much say the public can have in infrastructure.

As a community development specialist for the city of Kenosha, the academy gives Tayler Jones insight into the positions of residents concerning their public spaces. The walk and transit audits were especially impactful for her, she said, because she could see how much community members cared about accessible sidewalks and a more convenient bus system — especially considering the buses in car-centric Kenosha only come every hour.
“So that’s been on the top of my brain for when we plan things: that sidewalks are a priority, and ADA accessibility is a priority,” she said.
For Roberts, both as a co-facilitator and as a participant, the academy was also a space for professional development and learning.
When she initially saw the academy offered in La Crosse, she was excited for two reasons.
“I’ve always wanted to learn a little bit more about transportation in general and how that relates to the planning field,” she said. Secondly, “I could see how that [the academy] would really impact a local community where it can raise the capacity of local officials, of community advocates, and of anyone else who’s wanting to learn more about transportation and how it impacts the community.”
“This provides that jumping-off point where communities gain capacity, they gain terminology, and they gain connections so that they can then take action within their own communities,” Roberts said.
In Stevens Point, community members are already using tools from the Transportation Academy to replace a sidewalk segment in front of a local school, make recommendations to clear a riverfront path and make it more accessible, and have a say in improving the safety of Division Street, which was once a highway.

“Those are things that the academy is going to have a real tangible impact on, actually helping to inform and make some of those changes in the physical design of our community, which is fantastic,” Roberts said.
Currently, Gaeddert is planning the 2025 Academy locations. People in various communities have approached her, so she’s excited to expand the program across Wisconsin.
Brewer thinks communities that get to experience the program will gain the most from being in a room full of people who care about the accessibility and safety of public spaces. It creates “momentum and rationale for moving forward on good ideas,” she said.
“I don’t know how many public meetings you’ve been to,” she said. “It’s usually three people. It’s hard to get the public to come out. But how else do the cities get information from? How does anybody get information that’s going to be helpful to them for improving the community?”
To her, the answer could be a Community Transportation Academy.
For more information, visit the Community Transportation Academy page on our website.