Waukesha Unlocked Tour Guide Suggests Studying Downtown Grid Before Arriving

WAUKESHA — By 11:40 a.m. Saturday, downtown tour guide Marcus Finley had personally redirected nine separate groups of Waukesha Unlocked attendees who had exited a factory floor, turned the wrong way, and begun walking confidently against traffic on a one-way stretch of St. Paul Avenue.

The two-day factory tour event, which opened Friday and runs through Saturday, is drawing hundreds of visitors downtown to see the inside workings of local manufacturers. It is also, according to Finley, exposing those visitors to a piece of infrastructure longtime residents have learned mostly through trial and error: a downtown street grid that reverses direction block to block without, in Finley's words, "any kind of warning system a normal human would notice."

By noon Saturday, Finley's tally stood at 47 tours requiring what organizers are calling a "mid-route correction," a term Finley said he invented Friday evening specifically so he would not have to keep saying "we got lost again" into his radio.

A note has been added

Waukesha Unlocked is organized through the city, and a spokesperson for the event, listed only as the Waukesha Unlocked visitor services desk, confirmed that registration materials for next year's tour will include what is being internally referred to as the grid disclosure. For this year, Finley said, the fix was lower-tech.

"We've added a note to the registration form. It just says, in bold, 'the street you parked on may not let you leave the way you came.' That's all we had time for."

— Marcus Finley, downtown tour guide

Finley, 34, has guided the downtown walking segment of Waukesha Unlocked for three years and said this is the worst grid confusion he has documented, surpassing a 2024 incident in which a single tour group circled the same parking structure four times before a volunteer physically walked them to their car.

He attributed this year's spike to the event's size. Waukesha Unlocked drew roughly 340 more registrants than last year, meaning more first-time visitors encountering the grid cold, with no local passenger in the car to say "no, not that way" at the correct moment.

The exits themselves are part of the problem

Several of the factories on this year's tour route have multiple public-facing doors, and Finley said at least three buildings have an exit that looks identical to the entrance from the inside, with no signage distinguishing which door lets a visitor out onto a northbound-only block versus a southbound-only one.

Dale Renn, 58, a Pewaukee resident who took the Friday afternoon tour, said he left one building, turned left out of habit, and walked four blocks before realizing he was now two blocks past his own car and facing a one-way sign pointing the opposite direction from the one he needed.

"I've lived forty minutes from here my whole life and I had no idea the streets just flip on you like that. I thought I'd made a wrong turn. I had made eleven wrong turns."

— Dale Renn, tour attendee

Renn eventually asked a tour volunteer for directions and was told, accurately, that the only way to avoid the grid entirely on the south side is the underpass at Newhall Avenue between West Avenue and Grand Avenue, a fact Renn said he appreciated but could not use, since his car was parked four blocks in the opposite direction.

Volunteers now carry printed maps

By Saturday morning, Finley said the event had deployed six additional volunteers along the route specifically to intercept visitors walking the wrong direction before they got more than a block off course. Each volunteer carries a laminated map with the one-way directions marked in red arrows, a document Finley said took one staffer most of Friday night to produce by hand after the printer at the visitor services desk ran out of color ink.

Finley said the laminated maps have cut correction time per incident from an average of six minutes to under two, though he noted the 47 figure through Saturday noon does not include an unknown number of visitors who self-corrected without flagging a volunteer, a group he estimated, without data, at "probably also around 47, just a guess."

Organizers said the event's Saturday afternoon sessions remain on schedule, and that no tours have been canceled as a result of the grid issue. Finley said he intends to spend Sunday, the one day without tours, driving the entire route backward just to confirm he has it memorized for next year.