Weather versus urbanism

 

Record one-day snowfall hits Providence
(Swiped from WPRI 12 website)

As the Northeastern U.S. staggers under record-breaking snowfall (above, CNU33 host city Providence), I come, laptop in hand, to report on my weekend. This is not the post I was going to write. 

Jane and I traveled to Dubuque and Galena to celebrate her birthday. These are two river towns northeast of Cedar Rapids that long ago were economic hubs; then, when the economy shifted underneath them, they lacked the money to update their built environment. Eventually, their historic walkability attracted tourism, and their fortunes were made.

We had snow the night before we left, though nothing unmanageable. In its aftermath came several days of cold, windy weather. As the temperature dropped through the day on Friday, wind speeds averaged 20+ mph, with regular gusts over 30 mph. It happened pretty much exactly as forecast.

I was aware of the weather forecast, and that we were there to celebrate Jane's birthday, but I am Never Not Blogging, and I thought I would write about how urbanist design makes foul weather bearable, because in a truly walkable neighborhood destinations are close enough that you're never out in the foul weather very long. By the time you realize you're uncomfortable, you've gotten wherever you were headed. That's essential to urbanists' antipathy to skywalks:

While sidewalk substitutes may sometimes be justified by fast-moving traffic, the more economical solution is to design and signalize streets for lower speeds. Poor climate alone is rarely justification for sidewalk substitutes, as some of the world's best walking cities, such as New Orleans and Quebec City, still attract pedestrians during many months of truly miserable weather. (Duany, Speck and Lydon 2010: 7.5)

Charlotte's Coffeehouse
(This is a Google Maps screenshot. It was too cold to
take my hands out of my gloves so I could take any pictures!)

We started our day in Dubuque with lunch at Charlotte's Coffeehouse, which calls itself "Dubuque's Third Place," with considerable justification, given the number of people eating together. And they're open til 5:00 p.m. seven days a week! (There were also quite a few people eating alone. Is that still third placey?) Their 11th and White location is northeast of Downtown, and not terribly far from Loras College.

Limerick Candles and Vintage Reads, 1108 Iowa Street
(Google Maps screenshot)

Limerick Candles and Vintage Reads, used bookstore, two blocks away:

River Lights Bookstore, 1098 Main Street
(Google Maps screenshot)

River Lights Bookstore, retail bookstore, one block away, where I purchased Shade by Sam Bloch, which I will report on soon:

Voices Dupaco Building, 1000 Jackson Street
(Swiped from dbqart.org)

Dubuque Museum of Art, four blocks away in the Voices Dupaco Building. They say they're open 10-4 Friday but the door was locked a little after 2.

Our walk thus totaled seven blocks, all within the Millwork Historic District, not counting wrong turns, which happen sometimes in an unfamiliar place. Sometimes those wrong turns can lead to unexpected delights, but on Friday, let me tell you, in the face of that wind, every step was purchased dearly. There didn't seem to be a lot of potential stops between the destinations, and there were zero people on the street besides us. So maybe this isn't the perfect urbanist neighborhood, though it did have enough destinations to keep us going. Anyway, today, the score was Weather 1, Urbanism 0.

SEE ALSO: Bill West, "The View from My Doorstep," WestWords, 24 February 2026

PRINT SOURCE: Andres Duany and Jeff Speck with Mike Lydon, The Smart Growth Manual (McGraw Hill, 2010) 

First Avenue Corridor Redevelopment Plan

Micro-area map

(2/12/2026) Can a historic neighborhood business district near downtown be reincarnated in the 21st century?

The City of Cedar Rapids is preparing a Corridor Redevelopment Plan for First Avenue East between 12th and 16th Streets, roughly the same area as covered in the First Avenue East Micro-Area Action Plan adopted in 2025 (Nieland 2025). That plan, while not bold, took notice of the problems that have accumulated over the years in this area:

• It is historically a neighborhood business district in an area where housing stock and population have been declining for decades
• So, businesses have neither the surrounding population to support a neighborhood business nor parking capacity for chain retail
• It is the main commercial street for the Mound View and Wellington Heights neighborhoods, but with 20,000 cars a day along five lanes it mainly serves as a highway between Interstate 380 and points farther out
• So, walking across or along 1st Avenue is highly unpleasant and dangerous

Modest development across 1st Avenue from Coe College

Ideas to mitigate these problems in the 2025 plan included more crosswalks, street trees, and business recruitment. The Corridor Redevelopment Plan is a sort of adjunct to the Micro-Area Action Plan, focused on design elements. Its stated goal is providing "a coordinated vision for new buildings, public spaces, and street improvements to support reinvestment."

Former Hy-Vee Grocery remains vacant nearly two years after closing
(picture taken from A Avenue facing 1st Avenue)

The city held an open house this week at Coe's Alumni House, at which they invited public comment on the Corridor Redevelopment Plan. Display boards located around the room looked very specific, but in fact they were imaginative concepts showing what a little nudge from the city might produce. What the city is committing to, if that's not too strong a phrase, is planting street trees and working with the State of Iowa to slow traffic, narrowing lanes and possibly inserting a tree lined median. (1st Avenue is also State Route 922 and Business U.S. 151.) 

Hypothetical locations of new development
(The mixed-use building with interior parking is at the former Hy-Vee site)

Also: Emily Stochl, who co-owns the Cafe Allez that has been fixing to move into the old Brewed Awakenings space at 1271 1st for quite awhile, told me 13th Street SE will become two-way, which would make access to that block from 1st much easier. Betsy Bostian from the city planning department told the Wellington Heights Neighborhood Association Tuesday night that the city was also going to try to rectify the crossing at 16th Street. Coe College is also willing to make some of their unused space east of campus temporarily available.

Some of Coe College's vacant land in the Mound View neighborhood

From these improvements might come more business investment and maybe some housing as well--and if they don't, we'll still have improved safety and dignity for pedestrians, at relatively low cost. A plaza was shown at 14th Street and 2nd Avenue, across from the Commonwealth Apartments, though its provenance was unclear. 

There were a lot of critical comments posted at the Coe open house, mainly complaining about slowing traffic on 1st, as well as missing some amenities like a grocery store and pharmacy. I'm all for having those amenities, too, but the current business models for groceries and pharmacies seem to require large buildings and large parking lots, neither of which is available in this historically neighborhood retail area.

The Wellington Heights neighbors exposed a flaw in the rosy scenario portrayed on the display boards. Efforts to develop the target area could easily fall afoul of the zoning process. The neighbors seemed primarily concerned with unwelcome uses, like smoke and vape shops and parking garages. The city people encouraged them to use the zoning process to voice specific concerns, but zoning is famous for derailing even good development by escalating time and costs (cf. Gray 2022). I feel the city should adopt a form-based code for this area to forestall this.

I think if the loudest voices prevail, 1st Avenue is doomed to be an underperforming stroad for the rest of time. I think, however, that the city is facing some other imperatives. With the state cutting property taxes on an annual basis, and city population not growing, Cedar Rapids just cannot let some of the most valuable property in the city rot. They simply have to do something to restart it, and if they can do it without kickstarting an ambitious housing program (my preference), so much the better. I hope the City Council sees it that way!

City of Cedar Rapids 1st Avenue East Corridor Redevelopment Plan and Micro-Area Action Plan page

EARLIER POSTS:

"Could 1st Avenue East Be a Grand Boulevard?" 1 July 2024

"Crossing Cedar Rapids' Busiest Intersections: 1st Avenue," 8 August 2023

10th anniversary post: Mass Transit

 

boarding the #7 to the southwest side, September 2025

(2/6/2026) My friend Randy turns 65 today, which makes him eligible for a senior pass entitling him to a lifetime of free rides on Cedar Rapids transit. He is an experienced bus rider, but not so much in his only-recently-adopted home of Cedar Rapids, so I wish him well on the adventures ahead of him.

Sample transit pass. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Ten years ago this month, Cedar Rapids transit was going through an intensive self-examination. The Corridor Metropolitan Planning Organization (Corridor MPO) hosted the first of two public open houses at the Ground Transportation Center. We saw pictures of bus shelters, and a demonstration of the new RideCRT app. We saw route maps that showed four of the twelve routes had averaged more than 2500 riders per week over the previous five years; three more averaged 1500-2500 riders per week, with the remaining five coming in under 1500. (The #2 line averaged less than 1000 riders per week.)

My comments back then envisioned a dramatically different system, aimed at increasing ridership within what I imagined was an emerging urban core: shrinking the coverage area to the innermost 25 percent of the city, making routes direct along major thoroughfares, and trying out express routes from downtown to important locations on the periphery. I still think this would be a very good system, but it would be getting far ahead of where the city and its people are right now.

Transit open house, February 2016

These days, the transit operation is not dramatically different, but continues to try new ways of making optimal use of limited resources. In the last ten years, low-ridership routes 4 and 9 have been eliminated; routes 20 and 30 have been instituted as circulator routes for the adjacent towns of Marion and Hiawatha, respectively; and a truncated route 5 now runs every 15 minutes up and down 1st Avenue East. Some bus stops have been removed in order to speed travel (cf. Vejendla 2026). Weekday service now extends into the evenings, with the last stops made about 8:00 p.m. And the RideCRT app has been replaced by TransLoc, which I confess I'm still getting used to.

[Thanks to data supplied by the Corridor MPO, we can see that ridership in fiscal year 2024 had returned to the 4000+ per day typical of the 2010s. Route #5 leads all with more than 5300 riders per week--good call!--followed by west side Route #8 the only other route topping 2500. Six routes average 1500-2000 per week, two routes and the Marion circulator come in between 1000 and 1500, and the Northeast/Hiawatha circulator has less than 1000.]

So, for Randy, and anyone else of a certain age who's thinking of taking advantage of our city's bus system, here are some pointers from an experienced user:

• The transit system works best the closer you are to the center of town, specifically the Ground Transportation Center (400 1st Street SE). My house is 1.9 miles away, Randy's is under a mile. It also helps to be close to 1st Avenue East, which sees buses running each way every 15 minutes. Being close by makes connections easier, and missing the bus less costly. Relying on the bus on the periphery is more difficult; the routes (except for #5) are circuitous, routes that far out are widely separated, and missing the bus is catastrophic when it only comes once an hour.
• The transit system works best when your destination is along the same route on which you start. The attractions of New Bohemia, a little over two miles from my house, are easy to get to on the #2 line. The Oakland Road Hy-Vee is about the same distance in the opposite direction, but would be a long slog on multiple routes. If you're planning to go to multiple places in different parts of town, getting to those places by bus is going to be a time-consuming, logistical challenge.
• There are some covered bus stops, but not many. The one on C Street in Czech Village has an uncovered bench. The one nearest to my house is just a sign. I hope the adjacent homeowner isn't worried about a weirdo blogger lurking on their sidewalk, and appreciates my efforts to stay off their lawn by the sign until the bus arrives.
• Bus arrivals are pretty reliable, given they must contend with all the car traffic and stop for trains. I'm getting used to TransLoc, which shows bus locations and estimates when they'll arrive at a given stop. For example, as I write I see the #2 bus which runs by my house has just turned onto Mount Vernon Road at 19th Street. 

It will be at the stop nearest my house in about 14 minutes.

Transit is an app which will allow you to plan your trips, but I find any maps app, like Apple Maps on my iPhone, works just as well.

• All bus routes leave the GTC at 15 minutes past each hour, and they all return at about the top of the next hour, so depending on where you are on the route, you can make a decent ballpark estimate of when the bus will arrive near you. Some routes run more frequently, particularly during peak hours during the school year, but nothing makes me feel like a newb more than anticipating a bus that wasn't going to come.
• Boarding is pretty uncomplicated, especially if you possess a pass. If you don't, individual rides are $1 (cash only with no change given), and all-day passes $2, so if you're going to ride more than once in a day just ask the driver for a pass. Crowded buses are rare, but they happen, particularly if someone has a wheelchair (takes three seats near the front), a stroller, or a dog. Iowans live in a sparsely populated state--the same population as the City of Chicago, in an area the size of the entire State of Illinois--so are neither used nor inclined to share seats. Even so, riding the bus is way more sociable than solo driving (Ramirez 2026).
• Buses can accommodate up to two bicycles, which can be handy. I have seen people pop bikes on and off the bus, and have practiced it myself, but have a powerful mental block against doing it in real time.
• Once you arrive at your destination, thank your driver, and debark. That's it. No searching or paying for a parking space. You've arrived. (Just keep an eye on the time so you don't miss your return trip.)

This is an urbanist blog, and your humble blogger cherishes urbanist dreams of viable, reliable public transit, even in small cities like mine. We could have it, says one study, for less than half of what we spend annually on highways (Brey 2026). Such a "moonshot" may not be the most fiscally sustainable approach (cf. Marohn 2025), but it would surely be an improvement over our current moonshot against immigration (Ray and Sanchez 2026).

ORIGINAL POST: "Mass Transit, Here and There," 17 February 2016

CEDAR RAPIDS CITY BUSES WEBSITE: Bus Routes