Happy Trails 2024-25

 

The CeMar Trail is ready to be connected!

Linn County Trails' cheery Facebook post today serves a reminder of Cedar Rapids's ever-improving trails network. Many of these projects fix connections at a specific location, but by the end of next year there will be some dramatic changes apparent to even the most casual trail user (cf. Peffer 2024). 

Arguably the most dramatic will be the completion of the CEMAR Trail between Cedar Rapids and Marion, filling the gap between Mt. Cavalry Cemetery and Route 100. (See the map that accompanies LCTA President Tom Peffer's message this month.) I don't know if it will make it faster to go between the two central business districts by bicycle than by car, as someone suggested when this was still a gleam in our eyes, but it will be a game-changer--in a good way, I hasten to add, for anyone who knows how much I hate that term under normal circumstances.

Currently the Cedar Rapids portion ends at 3rd Avenue and 33rd Street Drive SE, by the Mt. Calvary Cemetery:

33rd Street Drive approaching 3rd Avenue SE

 

It's hard to see between the house and the cemetery, but there is a strip of public land there where the trail will continue. Looks like construction has begun across Indian Creek!

View of trail-in-process from the cemetery

Graves near the creek afford view of the trail

On the Marion side, the trail ends just north of Highway 100, in the shadow of Menard's:

There is a spur just there that connects to the west end of Grand Avenue:

The Bowling Street Trail is one of the oldest in Cedar Rapids, and it was showing its age back in 2015 when Brandon Whyte took the MPO Ride down there. It's now improved and longer, running from 20th to 33rd Avenues SW, thereby connecting Czech Village to points south, including the Wilson Avenue Hy-Vee Food and Drug Store. 

Bowling Street Trail pothole, 2015

2024: New year, new surface!

Several pedestrian crossing signals were added as well

The trail continues on the old macadam surface south to 50th Avenue, becoming an eight-foot sidewalk over U.S. 30 before it diminishes to six-feet approaching Kirkwood Community College.

Other trails updates for commuters:

• The Cherokee Trail will get another 1.7 miles longer, extending east as far as 13th Street NW, so getting people about a mile or so from downtown on what could become a key east-west artery.
• The Edgewood Trail will add 1.1 miles north from the Cedar River to Town Center Drive. It has the potential to be a key north-south artery, particularly once the new west side library opens. 
• The Cedar Valley Nature Trail will add a 1.7 mile loop from 7th Avenue SE (where the current trail goes onto the street) to the Lightline Bridge project south of Czech Village. 
• I don't see anything about connecting the Lindale Trail to the CVNT, though; is that still in the works? [LCTA responds: Hopefully construction will begin in 2025 but... the City is awaiting a response on a final appeal to the Railroad for [the preferred alignment along the railroad right of way between Center Point Road and Council Street]. Should the Railroad consent, the project can proceed. If not, the alternative alignment along Council Street and 51st Street... will need to be developed. As such, the timeline is currently indefinite.]
• The LCTA newsletter also includes plans for a capital campaign for future trails, including building the Interurban Trail to Mt. Vernon. 

Why This Matters

All this trail development is enough to make an urbanist giddy, so it's good for our mental balance that Pete Saunders's Substack today references a pandemic-era post by Alissa Walker, who found much of urbanism, even at the height of COVID, to be blithely indifferent to the social inequality that mars our cities (and our whole country, really):

If the coronavirus has made anything clear, it's that cities cannot be fixed if we do not insist on dismantling the racial, economic, and environmental inequities that have made the pandemic deadlier for low-income and nonwhite residents. Yet many prominent urbanists have simply tweaked the language from their January 2020 tweets and fed them back into the propaganda machine to crank out COVID-tagged content, perpetuating the delusion that all cities need are denser neighborhoods, more parks, and open streets to magically become "fairer." (Walker 2020, citing Wigglesworth 2020 for COVID data)

Maybe in 2020, we should replace Walker's reference to "pandemic" with "road deaths," "housing instability," "deaths of despair," or "trouble with the law," but the concern remains a valid one. An Urban Institute study found 52 percent of Americans living below the "true cost of economic security," with 12 percent living below 75 percent of that threshold (Acs, Dehry, Giannarelli, and Todd 2024). Will better bicycle infrastructure significantly assist with such widespread struggling? We simply don't know. A couple years someone around here--I can't remember if it was the City of Cedar Rapids or somebody else--surveyed trail users. It was a convenience sample, and it skewed heavily male and upper income. (It's difficult in Iowa to oversample whites, but it managed to do that, too.) So when it comes to making our cities more equitable, we are literally groping in the dark.

That having been said, and with the understanding that even the best trails aren't going to magically fix social injustice, I think a lot of this trail development will improve equity, simply because the trails are  becoming as functional as they are fun. We are gradually building a network that facilitates safe, inexpensive commuting to work, school and shopping all over town. And that's definitely worth celebrating!

Chicago's 606 trail serves bicycle commuters and school children,
as well as recreational walkers and joggers