Black Friday Parking 2019

It's that time of year again! when Strong Towns members near and far prowl shopping areas on the biggest shopping day of the year to find unnecessary parking spaces. It's time for... #BlackFridayParking!

Black Friday may be only a shadow of its former self. Indications are businesses weren't getting the returns they had anticipated on the big discounts, and more bargain-hungry customers are satiating their appetites online (Selyukh 2019). The driver on the #20 bus reported scant crowds at the big box stores before 8 or 8:30 Friday morning.

Nevertheless, after a year's hiatus, your humble blogger is back on the case! This year the trail led east, out to the edge of Marion, Iowa, where sits our area's newest Wal-Mart store. At 10:00 a.m., there were a lot of cars in the lot, but a lot of unclaimed spaces as well. I'd say it was 50 percent full.

The view from the southwest corner:

From the northwest corner:

 From the northeast corner:

The (small) parking lot at the adjacent McDonald's restaurant was well-filled, although when I went inside there weren't that many people--customers or staff--inside.

The strip mall across the stroad (10th Street a.k.a. Business Route 151):

Doing a brisk business at the convenience store:

Not so much at the Culver's up Route 13. Too early?

Unlike other Cedar Rapids area big box stores, there's not a lot of development around this Wal-Mart. B.R. 151 goes southwest-northeast through Cedar Rapids and Marion, a stroad with mostly serious auto-oriented commercial development. Unlike other stroads in the area, this one doesn't even try to be walkable... there are no sidewalks, and bicycling would be dangerous. There's no safe way to access these stores without a car, unless you take (as I did) the #20 bus which winds its way there once an hour. This is true even for the residents of Eagle Ridge, the prefab home park across 10th Avenue from Wal-Mart.

In contrast to outer Marion, things seemed pretty hot along Collins Road in Cedar Rapids. The Collins Road Square lot was nearly full.

The lots at Lindale Mall were maybe 80 percent full...

...which meant there were still a lot of empty spaces...

The lot at the Town and Country Mall, which dates from the first wave of sprawl, was nearly empty.

... as was the Walgreen's on 1st Avenue.

Bottom line is there's a lot of acreage out there devoted to surface parking, way more than we can use even on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Is this due to city ordinances requiring parking minima, the particular bete noire of Strong Towns? Cedar Rapids planner Seth Gunnerson told Strong Towns: "City of CR has a couple of policies aimed at reducing parking," including parking maxima, credits for things like nearby on-street parking and bicycle parking. Parking minima have been eliminated in downtown, and in those areas covered by the form-based code (Strong Towns 2019, cited below). Maybe businesses are assuming that they're going to need all this space, either to assure every customer on the busiest day that there will be a space for them, or because they hope some day to need them all?

Whether government or businesses themselves are causing this situation doesn't matter to me, because either way, the amount of land devoted to parking cars in a typical city like Cedar Rapids is several degrees beyond excessive. As Daniel Herriges (cited below) points out, parking "has eaten our cities" with negative effects on the environment, city finances, and walkability (not to mention any alternative form of transportation). All those parking lots add to the distance between our destinations, which makes more driving more necessary, which requires more parking lots--not to mention worsening traffic congestion, and so probably contributing to the perceived need to widen the interstate.

Being a spectator on Black Friday--even today's diminished version--means being a spectator of spectacular consumption (not to mention that the increasing proportion of consumption done online is done out of sight of parking scolds like me). Maybe the root problem is not how we choose to design our places, or how we choose to get around them, but how we choose to live. Buy Nothing Day has been around since the 1990s, but is getting increased attention this year (Cain 2019). Would changing our perceptions of how much stuff we need improve the places we live?

SEE ALSO
Daniel Herriges, "Parking Dominates Our Cities. But Do We Really See It?" Strong Towns, 27 November 2019
Strong Towns, "Every City Should Abolish Its Minimum Parking Requirements. Has Yours?" Strong Towns, 25 November 2019
"Black Friday Parking 2017: After the Ball is Over," 24 November 2017
"Black Friday Parking 2016," 25 November 2016
"Black Friday Parking," 27 November 2015

The Case for Widening (Futility III)

I-380 (six lanes' worth) crosses 15th Street SW in Cedar Rapids

Drums continue to beat for the widening of Interstate 380 in eastern Iowa--specifically to add one lane each way in the 12 mile stretch of four-lane highway between US 30 and North Liberty, to match the six lanes that exist in Cedar Rapids and close to Interstate 80. The Iowa Department of Transportation has held public forums, and at least one local government (Iowa City) has taken a position (against).

The Cedar Rapids Gazette has published a number of opinion pieces (cited below), including one opposed to widening by Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan, and a strong statement of support by former Cedar Rapids mayor Ron Corbett. Corbett's administration oversaw not only recovery from the devastating 2008 flood, but adoption of complete streets policies including bike lanes, sidewalk construction, and one-way-to-two-way conversions throughout Cedar Rapids. His record of public service as well as time in private industry makes his position particularly worthy of note.

Ron Corbett (Source: Radio Iowa)

In his guest editorial, Corbett offers three main sets of premises:

1. We need to accommodate future growth. Linn and Johnson counties form the core of the economic region. (Corbett counts seven counties; the U.S. Census Bureau defines a five-county "combined statistical area." However defined, a huge proportion of the population lives in these two counties.) Their estimated combined population in 2016 was 442,000, which will surely prove larger once 2020 census figures are published. As the counties continue to grow--unlike most of Iowa--intercity commuting will increase, until it can't anymore. "Without an efficient transportation system," Corbett writes, "We risk losing our competitive edge." In other words, if car travel times increase beyond, say, 37 minutes, people won't switch to public transit, they will move to a more car-accommodating region, and our economy will strangle.
2. Our region is designed such that private cars are the only way to get around. The combined population of the two counties is roughly equal to that of the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, but spread over 1,332 square miles instead of 57 (not to mention that Minneapolis is part of a larger metropolitan area of almost 4 million people). Other than where downtown Iowa City abuts the main campus of the University of Iowa, employment even in the cities is spread over a wide area. Downtown Cedar Rapids has come back gloriously since the flood, but as a center is still a shadow of its pre-sprawl self. People live and work all over the place. This is the "last mile problem" with a vengeance: Even if auto addicts were somehow induced to take an intercity bus or light rail, they would face additional challenges getting to their final destinations once they got to downtown Cedar Rapids or Iowa City. [For example: Someone commuting from near Cherokee Park in northwest Cedar Rapids to North Liberty's Commercial Park faces a two hour commute by buses, with two connections, opposed to 30-45 minutes by highway.] There is no incremental way to promote other forms of transportation. We live by our cars, and our cars must be served by wider highways.
3. Induced demand won't have bad effects. It will have good effects! Both Nicholas Johnson and Ben K. reference the Katy Freeway debacle in Houston, but given our relatively low population that nightmare will not be replicated here. (That's a nice way of admitting that the "congestion" on I-380 is pretty much a matter of perception, in a sparsely populated area where people often seem shocked to find someone else in front of them.) Corbett points out that if traffic increases enough, we will become eligible for more federal government spending: Right now, the ICR region is viewed as two different areas by the federal government due to the commuter activity between our two major cities – Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. Expanding our current commuting options by widening I-380 will allow for additional commuters. Being recognized as one metropolitan statistical area (MSA) would bring millions of additional federal economic and community development dollars to our region. Remember, local governments and taxpayers are not footing the bill for construction of the Highway 100 extension and all the work on 80 and 380; these are funded by state and national governments. Besides, Des Moines got money for their interstates, and look what it's done for them.

Four lanes of I-380 north of Swisher in July 2018 (Google Earth screen capture)

On one level it's hard to disagree with Mayor Corbett: As our community journeys through time, the next step is most likely going to resemble the steps we've taken so far. It's the easiest decision to make, the easiest plan to implement, and requires only temporary adjustments by our residents. Switching public investment to different transportation modes might--might--catch on in time, but in the short run is unlikely to mitigate the congestion such as it is. We've been building highways for decades, for better or worse, and we know how to build more, expand the ones we've got, where to find the money, and how to drive on them once we've got them. Adding bike lanes to city streets was freaky.

But we can't be restricted to short-run responses to problems. Someone has to be thinking about long-term outcomes. What will this region look like a generation or two from now? Will there be a small number of densely-populated employment centers, or will population be spread thinly around? There are attractions to both, but only the former accommodates the environment, is resilient to changes in energy supply, affords alternatives to a car-dependent lifestyle, is resilient to changes in federal spending habits, supports local businesses, and is financially sustainable. Building and widening highways without taking into account the future we're building is committing future generations to the choices of the past--as well as all the consequences.

Video promoting St. Paul's A line

Maybe slapping a light rail line between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City tomorrow, in hopes someone will use it, is not the solution right now. But we certainly should be taking steps towards conditions that will enable us to adapt to whatever the future brings. That means committing resources to something other than doubling down on what we've got. Ben in his guest column suggests bus rapid transit (BRT), which would be a huge step forward in Cedar Rapids's transit system, and which could spur transit-oriented development. We could expand the area covered by form-based codes, which done right help spur compact, affordable development. City development resources should focus on ways to improve our resilience. Is a development likely to position the city for a walkable design that works with intracity and intercity public transit? Good. Does it provide a short-term infusion of cash while making us more vulnerable in the future? Resist! Does it insulate from financial risk some big developer with even bigger promises? Definitely resist!

A couple more considerations:

The need to "accommodate future growth" through vast expansions of infrastructure assumes that growth is inevitable and will be substantial, or at least will not occur at all unless there is a great deal of improved space readied for it. This is a relatively recent assumption. As Charles Marohn has pointed out, pre-World War II growth was done incrementally, so that when failures occurred they were of small not spectacular scale:

We sometimes mistakenly view this approach as primitive, lacking the sophistication that today’s auto-based cities have. In that, we are disastrously wrong. Modern development represents not just a step backward in sophistication but an abandonment of complexity in favor of systems that are efficient, orderly, and dumb.

Traditional development patterns, based around people who walked, emerged through trial and error over thousands of years. Societies learned to build this way by innovating incrementally—expanding on what worked while abandoning what didn’t. The result is a resilient building form finely adapted to people, a pattern that repeats with eerie similarity across continents and cultures.

We need to approach development of our cities and regions in an entirely new, which is actually the old, way:

The central task of the Millennial generation is not going to be expanding the boundaries of our cities but managing their contraction. We must find a way to unwind all of these widely dispersed and unproductive investments while providing opportunities for a good life—a modernized American Dream—in strong cities, towns, and neighborhoods. And we have to do all of this with the drag of large debts and a failed national system for growth, development, and economic management that largely associates auto-based development with progress. (Marohn 2015)

Secondly, we need to stop treating the federal government like Dad-with-the-bottomless-wallet. When federal money is the answer to everything, the federal government winds up making a lot of our decisions for us (Gladney 2019). Admittedly I'd like it more if the federal government put more money into mass transit and less into highway construction, or if the Iowa government put more money into school maintenance and less into constructing new buildings. But the principle remains: When we choose what to do based on what we can get federal money for, that's a problem. If Cedar Rapids needs money for highways, because Des Moines (and Correctionville) got money for theirs, where does it end? Sioux City and Waterloo have had rougher decades than Cedar Rapids. And the Iowa Rural Development Council wants you to know that our state has 900-plus small towns which they believe have not received their share of funding (Menner 2018). Doesn't every town in Iowa, every hamlet in the United States, deserve a new highway or airport or attraction? Remember, we're paying taxes to the state and federal governments, too. When federal money for I-380 seems too good to pass up, remember that it's only possible because we're paying taxes towards every other project in America at the same time.

City Lab recently quoted mobility consultant Rasheq Zarif:

It’s a matter of distributing the demand. It should not be expected that we should build more roads and it’s free. It’s a utility, a resource for us, and we need to respect that the same way as we respect energy, water, housing and so forth.... When you’re wearing big pants, loosening your belt will not help remind you about weight loss.

Loosening your belt after too much turkey solves your immediate problem, but not your long-term issue. Same goes for widening highways.

SEE ALSO
Ron Corbett, "Local Economy Depends on Infrastructure, Including Wider I-380," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 25 November 2019
Calvin Gladney, "The Feds Are Driving a National Policy of Sprawl," The Fifty, 22 March 2019
Nicholas Johnson, "Asking the Right Questions About Interstate 380 Expansion," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 26 November 2019
Ben Kaplan, "More Capacity on I-380 Won't Lead to Less Congestion," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 25 November 2019
Charles L. Marohn Jr., "Cities for People--Or Cars?" The American Conservative May-June 2015: 6-8
"P.S. on I-380," 24 February 2018

Desire lines?

17th Street SE, looking north across 3rd Avenue

In a recent post, I celebrated the completed conversion of 3rd Avenue back to two-way. Readers with remarkable retention will recall that, at the same time, 17th Street was turned into a cul-de-sac south of 3rd. (The stated reason was to prevent traffic from approaching the intersection from too many directions at once.)

The plan (as of March; note the right turn spur off Blake was not built)

Here is the cul-de-sac when it was just finished:

Here's what it used to look like:

As I've passed the intersection lately, however, I've noticed increasing numbers of tire tracks across the newly-closed part. (See top picture.) It could be construction vehicles... but there doesn't seem to be much construction going on anymore. Apparently, not everybody is down with the new alignment, at least as regards 17th Street.

Philanthropy vs. the racial wealth gap in Chicago

Can philanthropic giving be focused to combat the racial wealth gap? The Chicago Community Trust, at 104 years old the 4th oldest community foundation around, is going to try. Jennifer Axelrod of the Trust's new learning and impact division presented a sneak preview last week at Loyola University's Center for Urban Research and Learning.

Source: Lumen Learning

The Trust recently adopted a new vision statement pointing towards "a thriving, equitable and connected Chicago region where people of all races, places and identities have the opportunity to reach their potential." While they work with a variety of donors and causes, Axelrod says they hope to "draw them towards" addressing the racial wealth gap, because it is at the root of so many of the social ills they combat.

Race by census tract, Chicago

 (Source; Folded Map Project)

Axelrod cited a 2017 study by the Metropolitan Planning Council concluding that Chicago's economic growth would be 2.5 percentage points higher if the metropolitan area were less segregated. Nationally, median family wealth for whites is ten times that of blacks, eight times that of Latinx; according to the Federal Reserve Board whites held 89 percent of the $87 trillion of wealth in the United States, compared to 3 percent each for blacks and Latinx. [I know it's greater than that in Washington, D.C., and probably is less here in Iowa, where we have lower incidence of great wealth.] There were a lot of data to show the connection between the racial wealth gap and myriad social problems:

• liquid asset poverty: 65 percent of black and Latinx Chicagoans are "living on the financial edge" i.e. would be below the poverty line if they lost three months' income, compared to 28 percent of whites
• Chicago people of color live in communities where more than 50 percent of debt is delinquent, 40 percent of loans are subprime, and 20 percent are unbanked. They are thus at the mercy of payday lenders, who charge average annual interest rates of 404 percent.
• people of color lag far behind whites on all kinds of assets, particularly homeownership, which is the most common source of individual wealth. 35 percent of black and 43 percent of Latinx Chicagoans own their own homes, compared to 54 percent of whites. Much of this is due to the legacy of contract buying in Chicago decades ago, which disproportionately affected blacks; because contract borrowers lose their entire equity when they miss a payment, this arrangement cost blacks as much as $4 billion in assets.
• people of color have differential health outcomes, too, particularly infant and breast cancer mortality

Audience members added different parent-teacher interactions, food deserts (even comparing different stores in the same chain), school quality, access to public transit, and greater police presence. One community member plugged the Folded Map Project, where residents try to meet those with similar coordinates--in his case, 4900 N/S 9000 W--on opposite sides of the city.

Jennifer Axelrod and Dan Tollefson talk to audience members after the presentation

The racial wealth gap originated in slavery, of course, but as horrible as that was, it has been exacerbated over the years by Jim Crow laws, redlining and exclusion from housing programs, and the decline of labor wages. Today, an American child's life prospects are heavily determined by the circumstances into which they are born, and to the extent that people of color are identified in the public mind with poverty and crime, the racial wealth gap gets replicated for each new generation. The case for reparations may rest on the history of slavery (Myers 2019), but the urgency rests in injustices since then, and the inequalities they have perpetuated.

The CCT plans "to engage donors more thoughtfully," with the intent of addressing critical needs (services as well as long-term systemic change), building coalitions and networks, and promoting community driven investment. Those are ambitious goals, as much at the engagement stage as at the more outcomes-based stages. (Are donors ready to be talked into this?) There is the ever-present danger of unintended consequences, such as when better transportation services facilitates displacement by gentrification. But if ten years from now they have helped achieve "real integration," however incrementally, they'll have made yeomanlike contribution towards our common life.