Confessions of a sidewalk vigilante

Downtown Cedar Rapids: 300 block of 1st St SE, 1/17/2022

My city's new sidewalk snow removal policy has gotten some negative attention this year, and justifiably so, but its potential as a weapon against a perennial menace should not be overlooked. Where property owners used to have 48 hours after a snowfall to clear their sidewalks of snow, they now have a mere 24 hours. I imagine my next-door neighbor rushing out with a stopwatch as soon as they see the last flake descend. One of my work colleagues has already gotten the dreaded pink notice on her front door stating a complaint has been filed and she must clear her walks or the city will do it for an inflated price. 

This property (NOT my coworker's) has the pink notice AND one for water shutoff

I will never file such a complaint against a residence, even though I walk to work, and plan to continue walking when I'm elderly and frail. It's not just because I fear her wrath; I have serious reservations about the "narc on your neighbor" approach to code violations. It's a micro-version of an ugly national trend. As Frank Bruni points out in his latest New York Times newsletter about Virginia's e-mail system for reporting schoolteachers, Texas's law encouraging lawsuits against anyone involved with abortion, and West Virginia's call for tips on election suspcions:

Is the way to address Americans’ disagreements to transform citizens into snoops and have them turn on one another? Our leaders should point us toward common ground, not add whole new weapons to our battlegrounds. In Virginia and Texas, they added weapons. (Bruni 2022)

There are all sorts of good reasons one might not get their walks clear within 24 hours: frailty, injury, travel, preoccupation with child care, and so on. If there's a problem sidewalk in the neighborhood, neighbors could check in and help out. Call in the law only as a last resort, and maybe not even then.

Our neighborhoods have bigger problems than homes where the snow doesn't get shoveled in a timely fashion. The part of town where I live, work, and go to church has a problem with land speculation. "In a market like D.C.," explain the writers on Greater Greater Washington, "it's not uncommon for the land underneath a building to be more valuable than the structure itself... [A]ll forms of property management and land use have costs, and depending on the condition of the building and the land the costs of putting it to work might be greater than the potential rental income" (Loh and Rodriguez 2018). 

Land speculation exists even in Cedar Rapids, though we're certainly not a hot market like Washington, D.C. or Seattle or Boston. The owner might be a bank waiting for housing values to increase, an out-of-town investor hoping to cash in on the next big thing, or heirs of a homeowner who's died. And someone looking for a place to build a house or start a business will be glad to find a vacancy. The problem is that, as years pass, and then more years pass, and despite obvious needs houses aren't built and businesses aren't started, land speculation becomes a drag on the surrounding area (see Holland 2018). And it's these properties, more than two weeks after the last measurable snowfall, that still have impassable sidewalks.

13th St SE, 1/31/2022: The city might clear it more effectively if I reported it sooner

Until we get a land value tax, or someone willing to meet the speculators' asking prices, I think the best I can do is to annoy the property owners and bring the city's attention to the problems by filing snow removal complaints. The first one I filed, on the block across the street from the college where I teach, got results, in that what snow could be was removed, though I don't know if they'll be able to assess the Nevada-based trust that owns it. 

Last week I flagged a vacant property on 2nd Avenue SE (pictured above, on 1/31/2022)--listing an owner in nearby Marion--though it was complicated because I couldn't get the address from the (non-existent) building and had to look it up on the assessor's website. I plan to report these properties every time it snows. Maybe the owners will get so annoyed they'll do something with the properties--or at least take care of them. I admit I haven't yet brought about a revolution in land use, but it is vaguely satisfying to my sense of moral outrage.

Let it snow!

SEE ALSO

"We Need to Talk. About Snow," 3 February 2021 [piles of plowed snow block crosswalks]

"Where Are the Metro's Destinations Heading?" 28 July 2021 [tax bills for developed and undeveloped blocks] 

 

MyCR reporting tool: https://www.cedar-rapids.org/mycr/index.php

Credit for the phrase "narc on your neighbor" goes to Dennis Evans, who was my neighbor years ago. We did not narc on each other.

Rethinking public transit in Marion

 

By day, Uptown's only coffee shop; by night, host to the Corridor Urbanists' next meeting

Marion's City Council has approved a shift away from participation in the Cedar Rapids bus system, in favor of an all-day neighborhood ride-sharing service in partnership with Horizons (Miskimen 2022). The city would use $225,000 in federal money from the American Rescue Plan Act to purchase three 16-passenger buses. I hope it costs out for them: The switch promises a more efficient and even a more compassionate way to approach transit services.

Every town has neighborhoods like this. Marion has a lot of them.

The City of Marion consists of a traditionally-built core, recently rebranded as Uptown Marion, and extensive suburban-style development elsewhere. Uptown Marion is no longer an employment center, and while it contains the public library and City Hall, most governmental facilities are elsewhere. Marion's 2020 population of 41,535 is spread over nearly 18 square miles. Some of the farthest-flung residents are in mobile home developments beyond State Route 13. Squaw Creek Villages, for example, has a WalkScore of 17, and that assumes you're willing to dart across Route 13 to Wal-Mart. The design of Marion creates challenges of efficiency and equity to any transit system.

The Marion Circulator bus currently connects to Routes 5 and 30 near Collins Road Square

Until 2017 Marion was served by Routes 5N and 5S, which were extensions of the 1st Avenue bus originating in downtown Cedar Rapids. Each ran every 90 minutes, half an hour apart, and both served the city center. In 2017 Route 5 was terminated at Lindale Mall, where it connected to two new circulator routes, including Route 20 for all of Marion. 

2017 version of Route 20 is in green

Route 20 runs once an hour during the day, going more or less directly to Uptown and then swinging widely about the town. It achieves the goal of wide coverage, but it's too circuitous to be practical for anyone, unless they simply have no alternative. As Jarrett Walker (2022) says, "the sad mathematical fact is:  Ridership arises from how useful service is to many people, not how useful it is to absolutely everyone.  When we seek to serve absolutely everyone, we’re planning for coverage, not ridership [link in original]."

At the same time, sending buses around that lengthy circuit is not cheap. In a town like Marion, which has few streets and many stroads, it makes sense for the foreseeable future to have an ad hoc transit system. In chapter 9 of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer--reviewed here--Strong Towns' Charles Marohn argues that the only provable purpose for a bus system remains what it was before we started developing towns around the automobile: to be "a wealth accelerator for local communities" (p. 156):

Transit is a wealth accelerator when it is used in support of productive development patterns and is deployed to function either as a road or a street. Successful transit requires successful places, so if you desire transit, you must focus on building a productive place, somewhere where people want to be outside of an automobile.... Start with a place, then pick a transit option scaled to that place as a means to an end of making that place more financially productive. (2021: 157)

City Square, including Marion's long-defunct train station

As of now, Marion simply has no such place. Uptown Marion is delightful, and could be the place to start, as Marohn starts in his case study with downtown Springfield, Massachusetts. But Marion doesn't have a transportation center like Springfield's Union Station, and it's not clear that Marion even wants Uptown to serve in its historic role as a core downtown. So it's probably most cost-effective to have an on-demand ride-sharing service for the people who need it. It can target the (mostly poor) people who don't drive, and serve them more effectively by taking them directly to their destinations instead of all around the town.

Perhaps this is the only transit service a sprawled town will ever need, or will ever be able to afford. Marohn (2021: 160-161) advocates funding capital costs of transit by capturing through tax assessment the increased property value created by the service, and ongoing operations through fares, with little-to-no reliance on federal or state contributions. This way the transit system is responsive to price signals sent by the community, and grows with it. (As anyone familiar with Strong Towns knows, he advocates the same principle for streets and roads.) This may never be possible in a town like Marion, which seems to be, like "many places in this country that, for better or for worse, cannot be reasonably served by public transit" (p. 161).

It might be, though, that as the on-demand service operates over time, certain patterns of demand will emerge. Or that businesses in, say, Uptown Marion, find they lose something from not having a transit connection to Cedar Rapids. In such cases, a more regular service could be instituted, the next incremental step up. Even then, they'd probably want to retain the ride-sharing service. As Edward Humes (2016: 311), where bus systems are well-established,

There's still the last-mile problem, and this is where the new dynamic of ridesharing services can complete the solution.... Offer riders a package deal, a true door-to-door solution, at a rate that beats car ownership.... A rideshare-express bus combo will certainly cost a lot less than paying $12 billion for light rail with a 2.6 percent share of commuter ridership. If such a service could be fast, convenient, and affordable compared to owning a car and commuting alone at peak hours, it could change the door-to-door world in a big way...

Maybe that day will come to Marion some day, or at least the part of Marion that isn't hopelessly sprawled. In the meantime, scaling down transit service at this time will provide the City of Marion with flexibility to do that which the long and winding fixed-route does not.

1100 7th Avenue, pre-2017: I miss this bus stop

City of Marion site: https://www.cityofmarion.org/ 

Cedar Rapids Transit site: http://www.cedar-rapids.org/residents/city_buses/index.php

Edward Humes, Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (Harper Perennial, 2016)

Charles L. Marohn Jr., Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (Wiley, 2021)