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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
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