Hiking the (parking) crater

Many people have asked me, "Given the oversupply of parking near downtown Cedar Rapids, is it possible to walk from Coe College to the New Bo City Market entirely via parking lots?" All right, no one has ever asked me this, but I have always wondered myself. One day during a recent very cold snap, I was stir crazy enough to try it. I've been back over it a couple times to perfect the efficiency of the route. The online maps have the distance as 1.7 miles, but with all the angles we might cut it as short as 1.3.

Our hike begins at the parking lot near Dows Fine Arts Center. By no means is this the largest parking lot at Coe, but it is in the direction we're going, so here we start.

Getting across to Casey's General Store is tricky with 1st Avenue's average daily traffic count of 16,600, so the judges (me) are allowing the theoretical possibility of crossing here while in fact crossing at the corner where there's a walk light.

From Casey's we cross 12th Street to the parking lots behind Via Sofia's and Daisy's Garage...

...which serve as bridges to the Physicians Clinic of Iowa. PCI is in many ways the catalyst for the MedQuarter idea. In 2012 they planned a move out of a smaller facility on 8th Street; threatening to decamp to suburban Hiawatha got the city's attention, and they wound up with this larger space which apparently required closing two blocks of 2nd Avenue. We approach from the northeast.

Across 10th Street is their parking garage. We're going to have to go around it, but can pretend we're walking through it. In on the 10th Street side...

...and out onto 2nd Avenue!

Across 2nd Avenue:

From 3rd Avenue to 4th Avenue we walk through two adjacent parking lots, both serving medical facilities.

We continue across 4th Avenue at a slight angle--the judges hesitate but allow this--to make this connection:

Angling across this lot gets us to 8th Street. This lot gets us to 7th Street, within sight of the Post Office.

Cutting across 6th Avenue, the Post Office parking area and 6th Street gets us to the Post Office's vehicles which lot is fenced off.

So, once again, our hike will require imagining that we can pass through barriers like ghosts. Scoffers may well object to these technicalities.

But if you're still with me, we are ready to cross 7th Avenue.

A couple more parking lots get us to 8th Avenue, another thoroughfare with imposing traffic (ADC=13,700). So we'll look across the street to where we'd like to go...

...and take the way of discretion.

Angling across this block, used mostly by Horizon Family Services, gets us to the corner of 9th Avenue and 5th Street.

Two small adjacent lots get us to 10th Avenue. Stepping over the railroad tracks gets us close to the historic Cherry Building.... almost there! For the last block, though, I'll admit to pushing the envelope and trying the patience of the judges. We have to cross 10th Avenue (or the construction site) at quite an angle to get to the Cherry Building's parking area, which to my mind looks more like an alley than a true parking lot.

Nevertheless, if you're willing to accept that compromise, we made it!

(And, if your young and exuberant self is not tired yet, you can continue across The Depot parking lot to the Geonetric building.)

Now, if you're through checking your FitBit, can we reflect on what all these parking spaces mean?  Between our urban downtown and some traditional walkable neighborhoods is some severely suburban development, exemplified by PCI's shopping mall-like layout. The city street of the future (Davidson 2018) will look nothing like what's there now, nor what the MedQuarter contemplates building. While some of our hike's success relied on technical rulings by me a.k.a. the judges, or by crossing lots that were individually so small that no one could object to them, we've just trekked through a huge parking crater that creates a tangible boundary between downtown and the nearest core neighborhoods. This much empty space makes it difficult either to sustain a 24-hour downtown or to make connections between the neighborhoods and the burgeoning commercial areas in downtown and New Bo. At the same time, most of the crater is in private hands, and anyway is too far from downtown attractions to support for the nearby urban development with parking capacity.

At the same time, our hike shows the limits to how the MedQuarter can develop. If the success of these medical enterprises depends on the choices of people with cars they're going to need a great deal of surface parking, maybe more than this area can supply (Castleman 2018). At the same time, if medical "tourists" from the region matter more than people on foot from the immediate neighborhood, maybe the medical development should be and would be happier somewhere on the edge of town where real estate is cheap and expandable, the car can be king, and acres of surface parking don't put a crater in the urban fabric. Meanwhile, residential and commercial development along the route we just walked could support a larger walkable area than we currently have, room for families in the city center, affordable housing and--dare I say it?--a school or two. Maybe the solution to PCI's parking needs is not to subsidize their tearing down houses but to help them find a better location.