10th anniversary post: Improve public transportation

 

Passengers boarding at Ground Transportation Center

Early in 2015, Cedar Rapids produced a master planning document, Envision CR, that included two ideas for public transit:

1. "Continue to evaluate transit ridership and serviceability to identify opportunities for improvement" (#37)
2. "Explore the possibility of creating a BRT-like crossroads that connects users from Lindale Mall to Westdale, and from Hiawatha to Kirkwood Community College" (#38)

"BRT," by the way, stands for Bus Rapid Transit.

These are part of a longer section on mobility, which aims for a multi-modal (i.e. not just cars) network that connects places, eliminates barriers, and is safe and pleasant to use.

Ten years later, nothing as radical as BRT has been implemented, but a number of positive changes have been made:

• The #5 bus, which runs along 1st Avenue from downtown to the boundary with Marion, runs every 15 minutes throughout the day
• Two suburban circulators, the #20 and the #30, serve Marion and the far northside/Hiawatha, respectively
• Service has been extended one hour later in the evening, with the last bus on each route departing at 7:15 and running its route until around 8:00
• While not strictly part of the Cedar Rapids bus system, the 380 Express bus, an inter-city service begun in 2018, departs for Coralville and Iowa City every 20 minutes throughout the day

Also, I'm not at all confident about this, but there seems to be more capacity for bicycles on buses, albeit only two per ride. I've never personally witnessed someone unable to load their bike because the rack on the bus was full.

Bike rack demonstration during Move More Week, Oct. 2022  

Riding the bus is easier than ever these days, because apps like Ride Systems, Transit, and any mapping app I've used take most of the guesswork out of when the bus will arrive. (I say "most of the guesswork" because every once in a while Ride Systems will show me a phantom bus.) I've been riding more because I get free rides with my senior pass, and while buses are typically not stuffed full, at least during peak times they are well-used. Consider that a bus with five passengers is serving more people than 99 percent of private motor vehicles.

There are definitely some pinch points, however, that limit how connected and pleasant riding the bus can be. One issue is Cedar Rapids' sprawled design--our 137,000 residents are spread over 71 square miles, or less than 2000 per--which scatters people and destinations. That puts quite the strain on the system, given that we seem committed to a coverage model, and so most people who ride the bus have no other choice.

What's the next step? 

Sean Duffy, U.S. Secretary of Transportation
(Source: transportation.gov)

In the public chaos that is America in 2025, the answer to that question on any subject at all is anyone's guess. That is certainly true for public transportation, towards which the Trump administration has characteristic hostility. (See Weiner and Duncan 2025, Parshley 2025.) The Chicago Transit Authority has already announced substantial imminent service cuts (Farver 2025), while the State of Colorado is scrambling to replace federal funding for Bus Rapid Transit projects (Minor 2025). Suffice to say funding levels in Cedar Rapids are unlikely to go up in the next four years, and may be drastically reduced.

With that said, I've noticed a few pinch points in our local transit system that we could address with incremental measures. Even small steps have tradeoffs, though, and I don't have any data on which to assess those, so I'll just throw these out there and walk away.

1. Improve traffic flow. Any place where the bus has to stop for cross traffic should not be on the route. A couple examples are the inbound #2 bus on 5th Avenue which has to wait for all traffic to clear on 8th Street (and currently 7th Street, too, due to a construction detour) before turning left, and the inbound #6 bus on 2nd Avenue which has to cross both 8th and 7th. Shifting the route one block over means they're on streets (well, avenues) with all-way stops at 8th and 7th. This will improve both travel times and drivers' nerves.
2. Express or crosstown buses. As of now, anyone traveling from one side of the city to the other has to change buses at the Ground Transportation Center, which entails a wait of up to 15 minutes. We can't eliminate everyone's transfer issues, given the scattered nature of Cedar Rapids destinations, but there could be one or two buses that go north-south, and one or two that go east-west without stopping at the GTC.
3. Swing shift routes. Anyone who works past 7 p.m. can't take the bus home. Could we exchange some day service for a small number of routes that run late into the evening? That could be useful for a substantial number of workers.
4. Shuttle buses for evening events in the core. Once Downtown recovered from the 2008 flood, it saw an increase in events and restaurants, which led to many complaints about the scarcity of parking. The answer is not more parking lots, which are the implacable enemy of city activity, but more ways to get there.

Buses poised to depart the GTC

A workable bus system is an important part of any city's transportation network, for reasons of equity, traffic congestion, environmental impact, and financial resilience. The potential of the bus system to achieve those goals is constrained by the layout of the city. But even a city as sprawled and scattered as Cedar Rapids can do things to improve that functionality.