The bottom line is private cars don't scale

Czech Village parking lot, November 2020

My latest brush with fame came last weekend, when the Cedar Rapids Gazette published a long article by reporter Steve Gravelle on the Czech Village-New Bohemia district, suggesting that development in the area has reached a sort of inflection point: 

A wave of new residential and mixed-use building construction over the past decade nearly tripled property values in the neighborhood, from $12.9 million in 2015 to $37 million last year, according to Jennifer Vavra Borcherding, director of The District: Czech Village and New Bohemia.... The recent projects were built on property the city acquired through post-flood buyouts, replacing dozens of single-family homes that were swept away. The shift to high-density apartments and town houses has altered NewBo's historic aesthetic.

The article included a number of quotes from "Bruce Nesmith, who studies urban design and is a founder of the Corridor Urbanists group," including:

Ten years ago, when I started hanging out down here, I hoped it would evolve in the direction of urban village--places for people to work, places for people to shop, places for people to live. It's probably not done that. The direction now is economic development as a tourist destination, which is OK.

I'll own those statements, though I hope my original comments followed "OK" with "but..." or "if...." In any case, despite much new residential construction, commercial development has been specialized rather than fulfilling "normal daily needs;" and that prospects for hotel construction seem optimistic given the city has been unable to find a private buyer for the big downtown hotel it pushed in 2013. I wrote more about all that last fall.

My participation in the article got a fair amount of attention. Several people expressed to me concern about proposed additional development discussed in the article. They told me about the difficulty of parking for events in the district, and worries that additional residential and commercial development would bring more people competing for fewer parking spaces. Not everyone can walk to every place, I was told, which while true, can get psychically translated into "Not anyone should be expected to walk to any place." 

Given the amount of space this blog has given to tracking the vast waste of space that parking lots represent--even on Black Friday--I was resistant to their concerns. Everyone should understand, if they don't already, that car storage takes up enormous amounts of land at low taxable value, increasing the distance between destinations, squashing vibe, and making any other way of getting around inconvenient if not outright impossible. (See Grabar 2023.)

And yet! I'm not here to preach about personal choices, to residents or shoppers. This blog is first and foremost about public policy, which should make personal choices possible. But Cedar Rapids has developed in a way that Czech Village and New Bohemia are heavily dependent on recreational consumers coming from elsewhere, and the vast proportion of those consumers are simply not in a position to get there except by private motor vehicle. That's not the fault of individuals, it's the fault of the community.

The Czech Village-New Bohemia district is basically Edgewood Road, except for being a whole lot cuter. Maybe this all was inevitable, and the urban village was always going to be a pipedream. Or a sales pitch.

Drive-to urbanism is a thing, but without the valuable attributes of real urbanism. (For an egregious nearby example, see Kaplan 2016.) You can't drive your way to real urbanism. Driving requires parking; you've seen the aerial photos of a 75,000-seat sports stadium surrounded by untold acres of parking. Or how many bicycles fit into a single car-parking space. People don't take up much room, but their cars do.

Parking lot, Tropicana Field, St. Petersburg FL

If getting someplace, whether it's New Bohemia or Lindale Mall, requires driving, it's going to require parking. Parking requires way more space per person than practically any other use of urban land. Way more space requires way more city infrastructure without the revenue to pay for it (Mieleszko 2025). Land used for parking can't be used for housing or shops or parks or schools or anything else that contributes to quality of life. Without the ability of people to walk or bike or take public transit to places, locations become placeless. Roads then need to become wider in an (ultimately fruitless) effort to keep up with the demand to drive. This too is a financial loser for the city.

The bottom line is private cars don't scale. I don't know how New Bohemia ultimately solves that problem, but you can't parking lot your way to long-term prosperity.

ORIGINAL SOURCE: Steve Gravelle, "New Bo Comes of Age," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 3 August 2025, 1A, 4-5A