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)