Week Without Driving diary

Cedar Rapids traffic is rarely congested, but there's a steady supply of it,
even during Week Without Driving

Week Without Driving is being observed for the first time this year in Cedar Rapids. Begun in 2021 in Vancouver, Washington, it has gotten bigger each year since. Founder Anna Zivarts of Disability Rights Washington has also published a book in 2024, When Driving Isn't an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (Island, 2024).

Week Without Driving is primarily about raising awareness of issues surrounding accessibility. The webpage starts with 

If you can drive or afford a car, you may not understand what it's like to rely on walking, rolling, transit and asking for rides. But for nearly a third of people living in the United States--people with disabilities, young people, seniors and people who can't afford cars or gas--this is our every day.

The four simple rules for the observance are a little farther down the same page.

So this is not about environmental conservation, or personal fitness, and not really about personal ethical choices either. People who choose to walk or bike to work are considered, along with motor vehicle drivers, as "those who have the option to drive."

I am an older, white male, as yet able-bodied, who lives about two miles from the center of our city. I am married, with two grown children; collectively we own four cars and a cargo van. I am retired, but I still have an office at the college, which is barely a mile from our house. This situation creates options for me that a lot of people don't have. Part of my week will be spent looking for those people, who are often invisible or at least indistinguishable from everyone else, and perceiving how others may not have the ability to navigate the week the same way I do.

Monday, September 30 (sunny, 82F)

Walked to: St. Paul's United Methodist Church

I had things to do and people to meet at church this morning. It's less than a mile away, so not a difficult walk. Another member of our group lives near me, and rode his bicycle. Everyone else came from farther away. In this case walkability is partly a matter of choice of where to live and where to attend church; my last church was four miles away with some tough street crossings, and I never once walked there.

3rd Avenue SE: I can walk around this tree... can you?

But what's "not a difficult walk" for me isn't easy for everybody, nor do I expect it's going to stay easy for me as the years roll on. As I walked, I noticed fast-moving traffic on the thoroughfares (19th Street and 3rd Avenue) I had to cross; walnuts in various states of repair on the sidewalk; a car parked across the handicapped-accessible curb cut; and trees encroaching on the sidewalk. None was a barrier to me, but I wasn't using a cane or a wheelchair, pushing a stroller, walking with a small child, or being a small child. It was an unseasonably lovely day, not raining or icy. Even having a destination within a mile's walk can be an unwelcome adventure depending on the circumstances.

NOTE: Today, Greater Greater Washington and the Washington Area Bicyclist Association are co-sponsoring a walk audit in DC. I wonder if Cedar Rapids would ever be willing to try that? I'm sure there are disability advocates around here who could be hired to lead it.

Tuesday, October 1 (sunny, 68F)

Walked to: Hoover Guitar Studio

Biked to: Uptown Coffee, Marion

Grant Wood Trail approaching Marion

The Cedar Rapids metro is a few suspenseful connections from having a highly serviceable trails network. There have been some delays, so we're still about at the point I described here a year ago. We have a very strong trails advocacy group, the Linn County Trails Association, which deserves a lot of credit for what's happened. 

LCTA now lists 2025 completion dates for both the Grant Wood Trail which will connect Marion to the main north-south trail, and the (closer to my house) Cemar Trail which would arguably be the fastest route between the two downtowns.

To connect to the trails, or to get anywhere by bicycle until the network is ready for serious commuting, you're best advised to go by side streets, but like most metro areas in America our grid system is patchy. Today I tried going right up C Street NE (25800 cars per day); I made it, but I wouldn't recommend it for a child or an inexperienced rider. 

Uptown Coffee is in the historic (1901) Memorial Hall building

Uptown Coffee is not only delightful, they give double punches for bike riders! 

My card runneth over, because I cycled here

I brought my laptop to Uptown so I could check in with the excellent 880 Cities webinar series, this week featuring Bridget Marquis of Reimagining the Civic Commons--pertinent to this Week Without Driving, because public space is meaningless without accessibility, and accessibility is meaningless without places to access. I saw quite a few people walking on the Grant Wood Trail as I approached Uptown, generally my age or older.

In other news, the City of Waterloo (50 miles north of Cedar Rapids) is going to paint their bike lanes green, emulating Cedar Rapids (Winterer 2024). And The War on Cars podcast featured Sarah Bronin, author of Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World (W.W. Norton, 2024), which includes cases of urban zoning reform that have improved accessibility, which Cedar Rapids should emulate. 

Wednesday, October 2 (sunny, windy 78F)

Bus to: Vault Co-Working Space/Helen G. Nassif YMCA/Dairy Queen [replaced car trip]

Walked to: St. Paul's United Methodist Church [replaced car trip]

The sign said "OPEN" but it wasn't

This was the first day that I would have driven, were it not Week Without Driving. For people who own them, cars are more than just means of rapidly getting around that live at your house, and whose costs are already sunk. They're places to lock your laptop while you work out, and to stow your wet swim clothes afterwards. The co-working space where I work has a picnic deck in front that no one was using today, so I hung them there until I began to worry they would blow off onto someone's windshield and get driven to Clinton or some place. They got pretty dry while they were out in the wind anyhow.

Drying in the breeze

I also prefer to use the car when I'm getting ice-cream-for-later. We don't have an ice cream shop in our neighborhood. We don't have any shops in our neighborhood. The closest Dairy Queen is a mile away, across 1st Avenue; there is no direct transit between us and them, and I didn't trust the soft-serve not to degrade if I walked or biked. There's another one in the opposite direction, 1.4 miles away, with the same problems but moreso. There's a third Dairy Queen on 1st Avenue, 1.8 miles away, propitiously located along a bus route that, quite uncharacteristically for Cedar Rapids, runs every 15 minutes. We are well served by this franchise, but with all those choices, I guessed wrong.

Dairy Queen, 3304 1st Avenue NE:
Oldest (I think) DQ in CR

I studied the bus schedule, and estimated I had 12 minutes from getting off the outbound bus to getting on the inbound bus with my frozen treats. It was actually 13 minutes this afternoon. However, after all that planning, I found the store empty. In a car, I might have driven to another DQ, but today I just caught the inbound bus and headed home.

The third trip on my day's agenda that I would usually take by car was church, where we have choir rehearsal from 7:30 til 9 p.m. It's not a long walk, and I don't even have to cross 1st Avenue, but in the dark it's not particularly pleasant. I walked after all, and it was fine. I'd only gotten a couple blocks when I realized I was wearing a dark gray t-shirt and black pants... not exactly hi-viz! I had just never thought about it. I guess one of the unexplored luxuries of driving is you don't have to think about things like what yoiu're wearing. Or where to stow your wet swimsuit.

All this over-thinking shows how accustomed I am to having a car at my disposal, even if I usually get around town other ways. Not having a car would shape my choices, and maybe I'd make different ones, like eating my ice cream at Dairy Queen rather than taking it home. Or maybe never doing anything in the evening. But we should also recognize that the design of our sprawled city, with daytime-only bus service and residence-only neighborhoods, also constrains our choices.

In other news today, the State of Iowa rejected the vast proportion of Cedar Rapids's traffic cameras (Sostaric 2024). I have mixed feelings about traffic cameras, but I think this is an indication of our stodgy state government's solicitude for drivers that devalues walkers, wheelers, and cyclists.

Tbursday, October 3 (sunny, 80F)

Bus to: Lightworks Cafe, Ground Transportation Center/Cedar Rapids Public Library/Cedar Rapids Museum of Art

Stephanie and Emily of Community Development celebrate Week Without Driving;
I scored a package of Almost Famous Popcorn and a chip clip

I've previously written about our city bus system. Thinking in terms of accessibility, Cedar Rapids Transit is a good example of Jarrett Walker's ridership/coverage tradeoff (see Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Improve Our Communities and Our Lives [Island, revised ed, 2024]). Cedar Rapids definitely has a coverage system, which means many people around the city who might need a bus will have one reasonably close by. The system offers free rides to seniors, the disabled, and students at Cedar Rapids public schools. During Week Without Driving, all rides are free!

Round, round, I get around

The disadvantages are 

• even a coverage system can't get to everyone in a town as sprawled as ours, so not everyone is near a route; 
• covering as much of the city as the system does means routes are quite circuitous; and 
• buses run only during the daytime. Except for the #5 bus, which runs along 1st Avenue East every 15 minutes, buses run twice an hour during school commute times, and only once an hour the rest of the day. The system has limited service on Saturdays, and none on Sundays or holidays. For anyone who doesn't need a bus, these are inevitable deal-breakers.

Getting to Lightworks in Oak Hill Jackson this morning for coffee with arts impresario F. John Herbert was easy; living within two miles of downtown means I don't have to deal with as much of the circuitousness as someone who lives or is travelling farther out. The #2 bus stops about a block from my house, and it's a fairly direct route to Lightworks, which is two blocks from the stop by the Post Office. Returning by the #2 is less practical, so I walked four blocks to the stop by Greene Square, took the #5 to 18th Street, and walked five more blocks home. 

Friday, October 4 (sunny, 74F)

Biked to: Coe College/Helen G. Nassif YMCA, Coe College [replaced car trip]

Bus to: The Map Room

 

Approaching Coe College, 2014

I spent most of today on campus at Coe College, my employer for 35 years and where I still have an office. My short commute from home can be done any number of ways (except bus, where I wind up walking half the distance anyway). Moreover, most of the commute can be done on side streets, so the only real trick is crossing 1st Avenue when I get to campus. On a bike, I prefer using crossing mid-block to avoid turning traffic. 

The lights at Coe Road and College Drive are timed such that there's always a long enough gap in the traffic. This is not true for pedestrians, however, even me with my relatively fast clip.

I went downtown to swim before lunch. There is some cycling infrastructure, but it's complicated by crossing 8th and 7th Streets, which are the entrance and exit to Interstate 380, which was foolishly plowed through the center of town back in the day. One chooses between:

• 2nd Avenue: NO, blocked by Physicians Clinic of Iowa
• 3rd Avenue: BEST INFRASTRUCTURE, but you can be overlooked in drivers' enthusiasm to get onto the highway
• 4th Avenue: LESS CROSS TRAFFIC, with four way stops at both 7th and 8th, but narrow and the light at 10th Street is very very long
• 5th Avenue: NO, same as 4th except 7th and 8th don't stop, pavement is really degraded

The infamous light, 4th Avenue and 10th Street

I opted for 4th Avenue, and ran the light when I heard a car coming up behind me.

No Week Without Driving for Slager: appliance delivery requires a truck

 Saturday, October 5 (sunny 89F [tied record high temp])

Biked to: Bruegger's Bagels

Car to: Holley's Shop for Men/Target, China Inn/Paramount Theatre

Cedar Rapids Symphony Orchestra, Paramount Theatre, 123 3rd Av SE

I knew from the start that eventually I would have to drive somewhere this week, because we had tickets to the Cedar Rapids Symphony Orchestra tonight. Conductor Timothy Hankewich's baton was scheduled to start waving at 7:30 p.m., long after the bus stops running. On my own I might have walked the two miles, but it's not a great walk. So we, and the other concertgoers, and those attending "Carrie" at Theater Cedar Rapids, and other downtown food and entertainment seekers all coated the streets with our cars. I would have loved to have had an option like a bus, but that is not to be. Nothing takes the romance out of a symphony concert like driving in traffic and searching for a parking space. (No, the answer is not more parking spaces. Parking is the enemy of everything for which a city exists.)

The alternative to driving to the symphony is not going. 

Holley's Shop for Men, Lindale Mall

So it was not a big deal this afternoon when we drove to Lindale Mall to get me a suit for our niece's wedding on the 18th. Bus service to the mall is pretty good, but then we ran an errand to Target afterwards, which would have required a more complicated plan. We left Holley's at 2:30. To get to Target, we would take the #30 bus that stops west of the mall by Jo Ann Fabrics, with the next one due at 3:20. This northeast circulator would get us to Target about 3:45, with the next one coming an hour later. We'd take this one to Wal-Mart, arriving at 4:55 (2.5 hours after we left the mall) where we could transfer to the #6 headed downtown, except it would have stopped running by this time. Meanwhile, the real life Nesmiths were about to start dressing for the symphony.

Sunday, October 6 (sunny 72F)

Walked to: St. Paul's United Methodist Church

Biked to: Lightworks Cafe

I didn't drive on this last day of Week Without Driving, only because my wife does the grocery shopping. Hy-Vee Food and Drug Store, the leading grocery chain in Cedar Rapids, has moved its operations to large lot stores at the edges of town. There are buses that serve those stores, and others serve Fareway and New Pioneer Co-op, but of course those don't run on Sundays.

⛽

Week Without Driving wants to focus on accessibility, not on the environment, fitness, community or personal choice. Okay. My experiences this week have identified a number of obstacles to access: condition of walkways, bus schedules, location of destinations, and street design. I didn't mention loose dogs, larger and heavier trucks, or aggressive fellow travelers, though those are frequently barriers as well. Prioritizing remedies will depend on whether the obstacle to access is a physical limitation, age (young or old), or poverty. But whatever we do, it will also facilitate anyone's lighter tread on the environment, personal fitness, city financial sustainability, and building stronger communities. And whatever we do will inevitably be limited by the extent to which we have sprawled and continue to sprawl.

Regardless, we should do something. I hope for some specific policy initiatives from the city in response to this week's experiences.

Appendix

SIERRA CLUB SURVEY Take our Week Without Driving Survey! (sierraclub.org)

1. Are you able to participate in the Week Without Driving challenge by swapping one or more car trips with walking, biking, or taking public transportation?
1. If yes or unsure, what type of transportation would you plan to take instead?
2. If you're unable to participate at all, or to the degree that you would like, what are the barriers in your community that make it more difficult to reduce driving or avoid it altogether?
2. What's the one or more thing in your community that would make it easier to get around without a car?
3. How are you involved with the Sierra Club?

OTHER LINKS

Dan Allison, "A Trip to Fair Oaks," Getting Around Sacramento, 2 October 2024

Courtney Cole, "Week Without Driving Has Arrived--Here's Why It Matters," Smart Growth America, 30 September 2024

Nicole Dieker, "Living in Cedar Rapids Without a Car," The Billfold, 22 February 2018

"Week Without Driving is Rocking," America Walks, 3 October 2024

Anna Zivarts, "No One Left Behind: Nondrivers Are Facing Crisis Too," Strong Towns, 16 August 2024

Anna Zivarts, "When Prioritizing All Modes is a Lie," Planetizen, 16 September 2024