10th anniversary post: Collins Road

 

Lindale Mall is dangerous to access for pedestrians or cyclists

What is our collective responsibility to people who have made rational (in their minds) decisions based on previous bad policies? How much money should be spent mitigating the badness, as opposed to putting money into areas with better infrastructure?

Ten years ago, I was bothered, to say the least, by news (Smith, cited below) that the city was planning a major project widening Collins Road by Lindale Mall. The proposal included raising Collins in order to extend Lindale Drive underneath it and into the mall parking lot. The total cost was projected to be $15.4 million, of which the City of Cedar Rapids was providing 20 percent, with the rest funded by state and federal grants. According to a comment by the Corridor MPO's redoubtable transportation planner, Brandon Whyte, about 10 percent of the total project cost would go to making Lindale Drive a "complete street" with eight-foot sidewalks on both sides.

Lindale Drive at frontage road, 2012
(Google Maps screenshot)

Lindale Drive dead end, 2024
(Google Maps screenshot)

My strong objections to the "complete streets" aspect of the project were informed by Jeff Speck in Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012). In Step 10, entitled "Pick Your Winners," Speck argues:

Most mayors, city managers, and municipal planners feel a responsibility to their entire city. As a result, they tend to sprinkle the walkability fairy dust indiscriminately. They are also optimists--they wouldn't be in government otherwise--so they want to believe that they can someday attain a city that is universally excellent. This is lovely, but it is counterproductive. By trying to be universally excellent, most cities end up universally mediocre. Walkability is likely only in those places where all the best of what a city has to offer is focused in one area. Concentration, not dispersion, is the elixir of urbanity. (2012: 259, emphasis mine)

(See also Doyon 2015.)

Still, the city officials quoted in the Gazette article made valid points. When Gary Peterson of the city's Public Works Department said the project would provide "pedestrians and bicyclists an inviting option in one of the city's principal commercial centers where few options now are in place for them," he was not wrong. The only non-car option at present is the #5 city bus, which stops on 1st Avenue in front of the mall on its inbound trip, though I've frequently seen people get off a few minutes earlier on the outbound trip and then sprint across 1st Avenue (average daily traffic count 18,700) to the mall or McDonald's. I do not recommend this.

The Grant Wood Trail passes about three-quarters of a mile north of Collins Road. Riding south on Lindale Drive towards the mall is not bad, but getting across Collins to the mall would be is an ordeal. People also live around here; besides trail riders, there are a number of relatively inexpensive apartments and town homes north of Collins, along Lindale Drive, Park Place, and Northland Drive. 

Lindale Manor mobile home court, 400 Lindale Drive, Marion
(Google Maps screenshot)

Could the residents' lives be made less car-dependent? Yes. Should that be a priority for city spending? I still wonder.

In 2018-19, Collins Road was widened as planned, eliminating the frontage road, and sidewalks were extended along Lindale Drive and Collins Road itself. But Collins Road was not raised, and Lindale Drive was not extended underneath.

Collins Road at Lindale Mall entrance, 2012
(Google Maps screenshot)

Collins Road at Lindale Mall entrance. 2024 (Google Maps screenshot):
The road is wider, the sidewalk is new. 
Note the sun is in the faces of westbound drivers

(It is possibly relevant here that a Hy-Vee supermarket on the south side of Collins, just west of the mall, has closed since I wrote that piece in 2015.) Your best option to access the mall on foot, bicycle, or wheelchair is a surface crossing with a traffic light about a quarter-mile to the west. Actually, I would say your best option is not to access the mall at all, but such snarkiness is not helpful in city planning.

Over the years, traffic on this stretch Collins Road has declined from about 27,500 (2013) to 25,000 (2017) to 24,000 (2021). On the service drive with the traffic light I referenced, it's declined from 5950 (2013) to 5300 (2017) to 4800 (2021). 

Looking across Collins Road at Lindale Mall entrance
(Google Maps screenshot)

Given there's going to be a lot of turning going on as well, safe crossing at this intersection is far from given, even when the drivers on Collins don't have the sun in their eyes.

Now that the (very expensive) widening of Collins Road has happened, the chance to piggy-back some active mobility access to the mall has probably passed. I still think that complete streets money for Lindale Drive was better spent elsewhere, making good walkable places great instead of making awful (even moreso after Collins was widened) walkable places less awful. But I'm less confident in that opinion than I was ten years ago.

ORIGINAL POST: "Collins Road: Oy Veh," 26 October 2015

GAZETTE ARTICLE: Rick Smith, "Major Work for Prime Destinations," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 15 October 2015, 1A, 9A