Dylan Brogan
UW-Madison Parking ramp sign
The pro-garage camp seems to be waging a lonely campaign in the city.
Isthmus recently approached one of Madison’s fine parking attendants while she was on duty in one of those booths where they take your ticket and make change: “What do you call this structure?”
She thought about it for a minute and gave a look like she was being tested.
“A parking garage. Why do you ask?” she replied, holding back a smirk.
“I’ve always called them ramps,” said this reporter, a Madison native.
“Don’t tell anyone,” said the parking attendant in a hushed voice. “But among the employees, we call them ramps, too.”
Most in Madison also call multi-level parking structures parking ramps. But that’s not their name, according to the Madison Parking Utility, which runs six city-owned parking garages.
“The standard terminology in most areas is parking garages, rather than ramps. Calling it a parking ramp is a colloquialism unique to Wisconsin and other parts of the Midwest. So we made the switch to calling them garages,” says Sabrina Tolley, Madison’s assistant parking utility manager. “Ramps are something you drive on in a parking garage.”
It wasn’t always so. Isthmus used the Madison Public Library’s online newspaper archive to find references to parking ramps in Madison that go back to 1947. But starting in 2010, the Madison Parking Utility stopped using the term ramp in favor of garages. Downtown Ald. Mike Verveer recalls that the name change was spearheaded by former parking utility manager Bill Knobeloch, who retired in 2015, moved out of state, and could not be reached for comment.
“Knobeloch informed me that visitors to Madison found the term ‘parking ramp’ confusing. I understand because when I first moved to Madison as an undergrad, I didn’t know what a ramp was,” says Verveer. “[The parking utility] decided to make the switch to ‘parking garage’ so I try at public meetings to use their terminology. But I’ll admit, in casual conversation I still call them ramps.”
Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway says before she was elected to public office, she called the structures parking ramps.
“I have since been trained to call them parking garages. I don’t quite understand what’s so confusing about parking ramps but I trust city staff,” the mayor tells Isthmus. “To me, this feels like the soda versus pop debate.”
In Madison, it’s soda by the way. Except for those who call it pop.
Former Mayor Paul Soglin, without prompting, referred to a parking structure as a ramp during a recent interview. Soglin had nothing further to add on the matter.
The parking utility’s decade-long effort to get city staff and Madison residents on board with the new nomenclature has had limited success. Resolutions, contracts and ordinances to this day still refer to parking ramps on official city paperwork. UW-Madison operates several parking facilities, nearly all of which are called ramps. The Dane County Airport still refers to its multi-level parking structure as a ramp. Urban Land Interests operates five private parking facilities, all of which are called ramps. Even the Monona Terrace convention center, which is owned by the city but whose parking is not operated by the Madison Parking Utility, calls its parking facility a ramp.
The switch to garage happened under the tenure of former Mayor Dave Cieslewicz. He says he had “to jog his memory by contemplating it at a nearby bubbler.”
“I have no recollection of this change. I still call them ramps,” says Cieslewicz. “This was done without the consent of the mayor or the city council. I for one believe it should be reversed.”
