From MKE to RC
Earlier today I read Chuck Marohn’s essay from a few weeks ago entitled The Gutenberg Moment. It’s a great piece and well worth your time, as it places us in a long story arc articulating that which we can pretty much sense - connection with our neighbors and communities makes us happier and the town/city/village that much more resilient. Isolation from each other does the opposite. From the essay:
After Gutenberg, new institutions emerged -- universities, newspapers, parliaments, schools -- because ordinary people acted locally on new information. The same thing is happening now. Beneath the noise of national politics and social media outrage, a quiet reformation is taking shape in America’s towns and cities, built not on ideology but on action.
In Nebraska, that reformation began with a bench. Two men -- a med student and an IT professional -- loaded a homemade, baby-blue bench into a pickup truck and placed it beside a barren Omaha bus stop. They didn’t file paperwork or wait for approval. They just saw a problem and fixed it. That single act of “tactical urbanism” was not defiance; it was citizenship. It said, we still have agency here.
On its face, building a bus bench doesn’t feel like much. How does making a few minutes of a transit rider’s life slightly more pleasant stack up against the daunting tasks of scraping together funding for a bus system or fighting for safer pedestrian crossings of six-lane collector roads near a school or finding a solution to the escalating cost of having a roof over your head?
Well, the bench is achievable…today. But it’s also that it represents something a bit more abstract, and that something is awareness - awareness of the need, which is often followed by a willingness, sometimes that of just one person, to get involved. To DO something. And maybe tell a friend. One thing leads to another.
As such, it was quite the happy coincidence that within minutes of finishing Chuck’s article, I opened an email in the ST Metro MKE inbox from Tim Rangitsch. Tim heads up Acme Bicycles in Rapid City, SD, and had contacted us some time ago for the Bill’s Bus Bench recipe, which I was happy to pass along to him (with a nod to our team who work their butts off building, monitoring, and fixing them).
Turns out, Tim wasted no time.
Tim Rangitsch <acmebicycles@rushmore.com>
Dec 5, 2025, 9:50 PM (19 hours ago)
to hello
Hey thanks! I’m off to the races now. I’ve got about 6 bus stops to add seating. I’m going to ride the bus routes and ride my bicycle around town to identify the set up!
A bench awaits deployment nowhere near metro Milwaukee
…and it looks like he may have his first location scouted out.
Jackson Blvd bus stop
Thanks, Tim, for the reminder that we’re a growing group of willing hands.
-story by Joe Wiesner