10th anniversary post: Cedar Rapids' protected bike lanes experiment

 

Protected bike lane demonstration project,
3rd Avenue SE, 2 August 2015

A protected bike lane is one that is separated from moving car traffic by some barrier, such as parked cars, bollards, or curbing. This provides more physical protection for riders than a single stripe of paint or a painted zone (buffered lane). (See discussion with illustrations in the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, prepared by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO).)

I've been thinking that, when it comes to protected bike lanes, nothing serves as proof-of-concept quite as well as all the riders you see riding on sidewalks instead of streets. But proof of which concept? Sidewalks, despite the occasional presence of pedestrians as well as numerous driveways, are physically separated from the motor vehicle traffic, just like a protected lane; but, unlike a bike lane and more like a trail, they are located off the street.

He wants protection! 300 block of 10th St SE, 2021
(Google Earth screenshot)

Cedar Rapids built its first protected bicycle lane on 3rd Avenue SE less than ten years ago, thanks to advocacy and funding by the Corridor Metropolitan Planning Organization and its crack transportation planner, Brandon K. Whyte. Whyte led a "pop up" demonstration in August 2015, in which parking was moved off the curb to provide protection for the cycle lane. 

Beginning of the protected lane at 8th St SE

By 2019 Cedar Rapids had built protected lanes along 3rd Avenue from 8th Street SE to 6th Street SW. They remain, to my knowledge, the only such lanes in the city. Most bike lanes in the city are unseparated, while construction of cycling infrastructure has focused on trails and shared-use paths.

Shared-use path on K Avenue NE accommodates both
bikes and pedestrians

NACTO considers protected lanes to be an essential part of an "all ages and abilities" (AA&A) cycle network: Protected bike lanes are the only tool for All Ages & Abilities biking on streets with high curbside demand, speeds of more than 25 mph (40 km/h), multiple adjacent travel lanes, or motor vehicle volumes over 6,000 vehicles per day. They do what trails can't; while off-street trails like the CeMar Trail provide cyclists with superior protection over a sustained distance, they don't provide access to destinations (homes, schools, shops, offices) which are inevitably located on streets. Attempting a comprehensive trails network entirely apart from existing streets network could easily become "prohibitively expensive" [David Sucher, City Comforts (Seattle: City Comforts Inc, 2nd ed, 2016), 90].

Riding downtown on 3rd Avenue SW

Protected bike lanes are credited with improving traffic safety as well as encouraging cycling among the interested-but-reluctant. Within a year of introducing bike lanes, New York City found sharp decreases in injuries to all travelers, particularly (and perhaps counter-intuitively) pedestrians [Jeff Speck, Walkable City (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012), 190]. Nationally, analysis of data at both the block and network levels published in Nature found protected lanes had 1.8 times more riders than blocks with standard bike lanes, and even more when compared to shared streets (Ferenchak and Marshall 2025). 

Janette Sadik-Khan, who as transportation commissioner of New York City built miles of protected bike lanes among other pedestrian-friendly infrastructure, told Gilbert Penalosa at a Cities for Everyone webinar this summer:

When we put down protected bike lanes like... on 8th Avenue, which was the first one in the United States, we heard lots of people say that they were scared that people wouldn't be able to reach shops, that it was going to be bad for business... but sales data showed that where we put down protected bike lanes, injuries were cut in half, for all people, and shops showed a nearly 50 percent increase in retail sales. [The accompanying slide showed "-58% injuries, -67% pedestrian crashes, -29% speeding, +49% retail sales." She showed additional data from Toronto ("+100% cyclists") and London.] So whether it's making a street safer, better for business, or making it easier to get around, mile for mile, meter for meter, euro for euro, nothing beats a bike lane. [Quotation starts at 24:30 of the video]

Despite all these high-powered arguments, there is opposition. Some of it is the inevitable opposition of self-centered motor vehicle operators who wish everyone would just get out of their personal way, and perceive--correctly--that they are expected to slow down and share road space. Some especially confident cyclists object to what they see as relegation, when as vehicles their bicycles are fully entitled to space on the streets. 

But even ordinary cyclists have concerns about protected lanes. The main concern seems to be intersections, when cyclists are forced into traffic, particularly turning traffic than may not have seen their fellow road user. In particular, parked cars, which often form part of the protective barrier, can obstruct the motorists' view of the protected cyclists. I have myself, because the protected lane forces you into a more-or-less straight path, experienced unavoidable interactions with people standing in the lane, riders coming the wrong way at me, and one e-cyclist urging me out of their way.

100 block of 3rd Avenue SW:
Without a protective barrier, parked cars can and do
encroach on the bicycle lanes (Google Earth screenshot)

These problems appear to be in large part fixable. A cement curb between the cars pictured above and the bike lane they're sharing would provide a lot more "protection" for cyclists.

Given the value of bike lanes in encouraging ridership and improving street safety, we certainly shouldn't fall back onto the status quo. We should respond to problems as they arise, as Memphis has done with bike lanes on Broad Street. After residents experienced frequent issues at the intersection of Broad and Collins Streets, a transportation consultant involved with the original installation "suggested that the city could create a truck apron at the corner using speed bumps. This would tighten the turn radius for cars, forcing them to slow down, while still allowing larger trucks to make the turn. It’s also a quick and easy change to make" (Strong Towns 2025).

NACTO has a number of recommendations for intersections, based on four principles: 

1. change underlying assumptions about how intersections must operate
2. give people biking and walking clear priority over turning vehicles
3. reduce the approach speed and turn speed of motor vehicles
4. make people walking, biking and driving mutually visible

The specific remedy will depend on the intersection, of course, but a bike setback like this...

Source: NACTO

...gives both cyclist and driver more time to see each other. (Note the distance between the crosswalk and where the cars turn.) 

• "Right turn on red" could be barred where there are frequent conflicts between cars and bicycles (and pedestrians). A leading green only works when cars aren't expecting to roll regardless of the color of the light.
• Clearly-marked and maintained crosswalks and "cross-bikes" provide paths across the intersection that are visible to drivers. 
• Removing one parking space from each intersection will provide more visibility, not just of bicycles but also of motorized cross-traffic. 
• Finally, more and more visible traffic enforcement would discourage rogue behavior by everyone--as long as it's focused on genuine dangers (cars blowing stop signs, wrong-way bike riding, aggressive or erratic movement by anybody) and not on easy prey like pedestrians crossing empty streets.

That all said, I think there's room to expand the presence of protected bike lanes. Jeff Speck prefers--at least he did when the first edition of Walkable City was published--shared streets for downtown areas, to allow everyone access to shops, assuming "an environment of such slow driving that bikes and cars can mix comfortably at biking speeds" [2012: 203-204]--which is not always the case in Downtown Cedar Rapids. Speck wants to look at streets "where car speeds get into the thirties." I'd start with those of our stroads that don't have quieter streets that parallel them: 16th Avenue SW, Center Point Road NE, and Mount Vernon Road SE, to name a few.

So, bottom line: protected bike lanes are a boon--not a cure-all, and not appropriate everywhere, but done right they are a boon nonetheless.

ORIGINAL POST: "Cedar Rapids' Protected Bike Lanes Experiment," 3 August 2015

10th anniversary post: CR churches

 

Apartments across from Greene Square,
part of a surge of building in the core of Cedar Rapids

Ten years ago this month, I hosted two events featuring Charles Marohn, founder and CEO of Strong Towns: an evening public event at the Iowa City Public Library, and a meeting of the Corridor Metropolitan Planning Organization the next morning in Ely. Remarkably, I wrote nothing about those events and took no pictures; all I did was post a link to the video on Iowa City's website, which link has, alas, now expired. (A subsequent Iowa City appearance by Chuck, in 2019, can be found here:)

I did take pictures in July 2015, lots of them, of churches in the Oak Hill Jackson neighborhood. The idea was that there were a number of houses of worship remaining from the era when the core of Cedar Rapids was bustling and dense, and that when--as I anticipated--urbanism returned bustle and density to the city center, these religious institutions would be ready to support the new arrivals and be the basis for renewed community.

Since that post, three more churches have been started in Oak Hill Jackson, and I have acquired editions of Polk's Directory for 1953 and 1998 that show changes in the property uses as well as in the surrounding areas.

New Churches

Veritas is a non-denominational church that
hosts a coffeehouse on weekdays

Veritas Church, 509 3rd St SE

In 1953 this building was Nash Finch wholesale grocers (the folks who operated the Econo Foods and Sun Mart chains). There was a Sinclair station on the other side of 3rd. In 1998 there was no listing for the church's current address, while Cedar Valley Habitat for Humanity occupied the building across the street that is now their ReStore. The oldest Google Earth photo, from 2012, shows the Intermec company occupying this building.

Trinity Presbyterian Church, 1103 3rd St SE

This congregation was started in 2020, and is affiliated with the conservative Presbyterian Church of America. They hold services in the theater at CSPS Hall, a historic Czech and Slovak community center dating from the 1890s. In 1953, this block of 3rd Street had, besides CSPS, six single-family households, one duplex, and 11 businesses, as well as the Salvation Army at 1119-1123 (now Parlor City). In 1998, there were two households and five businesses sharing the block with CSPS.

Revolution Community Church, 1202 10th St SE

This congregation, along with the ROC (Recovering Our City) Center, is using the building that ten years ago was occupied by Oak Hill Jackson Community Church. The sign above the door actually says "Refuge City Church," which testifies to the versatility of the abbreviation "RCC." In 1953 this was St. George Syrian Orthodox Church, which built the church in 1914; they moved to Cottage Grove Avenue SE in 1992. In the 1998 Polk's Directory there was no listing on 10th Street SE between 12th and 15th Avenues.

Older White Denominations

First Presbyterian Church, 310 5th St SE

This venerable church was built in 1869, and occupies the same block as the also-historic YWCA, opposite Greene Square Park. "First Pres" is the first of the oldline Third Avenue Churches; now, with the departure of First Christian Church and People's Church (Unitarian Universalist) in the 2010s, it is also the only mainline church on the southeast side below 10th Street.

St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church, 1224 5th St SE

Built in 1904, this church long served the working class neighborhood around the Sinclair meatpacking plant. In 1953 just that block of 5th Street had 14 households containing 47 residents, as well as two vacant houses and the Sisters of Mercy at 1230 5th. In 1998, the block still had seven occupied residences, but all the older houses in the area were bought up and leveled after the 2008 flood. 

Historically Black Congregations

Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 512 6th St SE 

Built in 1931, Bethel AME Church has, like St. Wenceslaus, has continued its ministry after losing many of its closest neighbors. In 1953, the 500 block of 6th Street had seven single-family homes and two duplexes with a total population of 45. By 1998 it was down to two single-family homes, two vacant apartments at 514 6th, and four residences "not verified." Today there is just a vacant lot between Bethel and 5th Avenue.

New Jerusalem Church of God in Christ, 631 9th Av SE 

This church was built by Hus Presbyterian Church in 1915; Hus moved to Schaeffer Drive SW in 1973, and then closed in 2021. The 9th Avenue block had seven single-family homes and four duplexes in 1953, with a total of 68 residents. By 1998, the New Jerusalem congregation was established in the building, and the block listed five single-family homes and two duplexes.

Historically Black Congregations (possibly shut)

Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, 1030 7th St SE 

This church was built in 1965, but it's not clear that it's still in operation. Their Facebook page last updated 2022, and they're no longer listed on American Baptist Churches website. The banner still appears on the building, and the lawn is cut, but a sign on the door says "Mask required to enter," which surely is a vestige of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020-21.

In 1953, this address was the home of John D. Malbrue, a factory worker for Collins Radio, and his family of five. The block had 13 homes for 45 people, as well as a grocery store at 1000 7th. In 1998, the block had three homes, the church, and a social service organization called Options; 1000 7th was vacant. (Today 1000 7th is the site of the charming Sacred Cow tavern.)

Southeast Church of Christ, 930 9th St SE 

A handsome "Church of Christ" sign has been added to the exterior since 2015, but the charming garden I noticed is gone. Its web and Facebook links are to churches in Texas. In 1953, the building contained the grocery store of William W. Krejci; the block had 10 single-family homes and five duplexes, with a total population of 68. The 1998 Polk's Directory lists the Church of Christ, nine homes, and two "not verified." It's still a well-settled block.

Here in 1998, but no longer

Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, 824 8th St SE

Mt. Zion moved to the edge of town after the 2008 flood, after nearly a century in the neighborhood. Its location is now part of a parking lot for the MedQuarter. Before the move, that block of 8th Street, which once was home to 56 people besides the church and a funeral home, was down to the church and one vacant property. 

Church of Jesus Christ of the Apostolic, 916 10th St SE

In 1953 this address was the house owned by Mrs. Francis Leksa. It is now part of an apartment complex constructed post-flood.

Plenty of churches remain nearby: Harris Oak Hill Apartments

Holy Ghost Missionary Baptist Church, 1003 6th St SE

There is no listing for this address in the 1953 Polk's Directory, but 1001 6th was the home and store of grocer Milo Grubhoffer. What was probably the church building was for some time post-flood used for storage by the nonprofit Feed Iowa First. Something new is being constructed in its place even as we speak.

Construction at former Holy Ghost site

Ten years on, the church scene in Oak Hill Jackson is different, but similar. In the meantime, there's been a lot of building.

New Bo Lofts addition, across from St. Wenceslaus

Loftus Lofts, in the heart of New Bohemia

Will all this new construction be populated? Will the new residents find, or even look for, community in their neighborhood churches? Do the churches even want to play the role of community rebuilder, or are they focused on their present membership? To answer these questions, we would need data, which I famously don't have.

ORIGINAL POST (with more pictures): "CR Churches," 20 July 2015

10th anniversary post: Laudato si'

Pope Francis, who died earlier this year

One of them, an expert in the law, asked [Jesus] a question to test him: "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" Jesus said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself." On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22: 35-40)

Way back in 2005, when Benedict XVI became Pope after the death of John Paul II, I expressed ambivalence to a friend about the new Pope's reputation for orthodoxy. The friend responded something to the effect that the Roman Catholic Church has its own imperatives, and since I'm not Catholic (true), it's really not my business.

I don't remember much from Benedict's eight-year papacy, but the emergence of his successor as a world leader of the first rank showed something I at least was not seeing in Benedict. Ten summers ago I eagerly devoured Laudato si' (Praise Be to You), Francis's second and best known encyclical, and later would read The Name of God is Mercy (Random House, 2016), which accompanied his declaration of 2016 as an International Jubilee of Mercy.

The revolutionary nature of Francis's papacy can certainly be overstated, as indeed can Benedict's orthodoxy. What made Francis such a consequential figure for Catholics and non-Catholics alike was not a shift in doctrine but a shift in emphasis, away from rules and towards caring. He spent many of the early sections leading up to a declaration that God has a "loving plan in which every creature has its own value and significance" (para 76). Each human has a duty of care to every other human and to the natural world. None of his recent predecessors, whom he cites along the way, would have disagreed with that proposition, but by centering it in his ministry Pope Francis became such a consequential figure.

Pope Francis also centered the quality of mercy in his ministry; in calling for a Jubilee of Mercy, Francis argued that mercy is the paramount value of the Christian faith, and the major way in which God's followers manifest God in the world. 

(In my home state of Iowa this week, we're seeing quite a different approach from Republican U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, who invoked her "Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" while advocating massive cuts in Medicaid, the federal health care program for poor people (Henderson 2025, Alfaro 2025).)

Becoming Pope brings the opportunity to speak globally as the leader of a substantial body of Christians. No other Christian has a similar position; the fragmented and fractious Protestants have a collective action problem, as for that matter do Muslims. Unfortunately, for many years the loudest Protestant (and Muslim) voices have been angry and prejudiced and clannish, hardly a good witness for a merciful God. (Hence we have Senator Ernst, as mentioned above, or Vice President J.D. Vance claiming that St. Augustine advocated caring less about people not in your immediate family.) 

What Francis was able to do as Pope was to be that good witness for Christianity, often loudly. This is not to be naive about the institutional failings of the Catholic Church, with which Pope Francis struggled, not always successfully. But the overarching message of his papacy was a constant challenge to treat each other well, not overlooking how we design our places. Indeed, among his statements in Laudato si' was this urbanist nugget:

Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape. (para 153)

Subtract Francis's voice from the last 12 years, and who is filling that role, so prominently and consistently and persistently?

So, from this non-Catholic, thank you to Pope Francis for twelve years of world leadership, and much joy in whatever the afterlife brings.

Pope Leo XIV (Wikimedia commons)

To the new Pope, Leo XIV, you have big shoes to fill, as I don't need to tell you. May your ministry, in spite of all administrative demands, continue to center love and mercy in your message to the world! And may your hometown White Sox return to winning ways soon.

SEE ALSO: Willemien Otten, "A New Pope, A New Dawn," Sightings, 29 May 2025

10th Anniversary Post: Neighborhood stores

 

Founded April 2022:
Cultivate Hope Corner Store, 604 Ellis Boulevard NW

One of my hopes ten years ago for urbanist development in Cedar Rapids was the emergence of neighborhood grocery stores. I'd been reading urbanist luminaries like Andres Duany and co-authors, as well as Jane Jacobs and Stacy Mitchell, who commended having daily essentials like groceries within walking distance. Though corner stores flourished a couple of generations ago--the 1953 Polk's Directory for Cedar Rapids lists well over 100--today the grocery landscape is dominated by big box suburban supermarkets and gas station-convenience stores. In 2015, the then-new master planning document Envision CR did not mention corner stores, although it allowed that newer developments on the edge of town could see "neighborhood retail or mixed use" near residences.

Closed June 2024:
Former Hy-Vee, 1556 1st Avenue NE

The ensuing decade has brought some though not very much movement in this direction. The versatile social service nonprofit Matthew 25 opened a corner grocery store on the northwest side three years ago. Meanwhile, however, the Mound View and Wellington Heights neighborhoods lost their grocery store when Hy-Vee closed last spring. There are a couple of "international" groceries in preparation, but they haven't opened yet. 

Opening TBD: Hornbill Asian Market,
 1445 1st Avenue SE (photo 12/31/2024)

And burgeoning apartment construction in the core neighborhoods have surprisingly (to me, at least) not resulted in local stores to serve their new occupants. 

The Neighborhood Corner Store is operated by Matthew 25 as a non-profit, and they seek donations of cash and produce. It has the potential to do a lot of good in what it calls a "former food desert," but may not be a model for widespread adoption of corner stores. When I talk to sympathetic people about the Neighborhood Corner Store, they immediately mention the shortage of parking. Of course, if you're coming from across town, that's going to matter, but that's not what corner stores are for. It makes me wonder if Cedar Rapids even "gets" the concept of corner stores, much less is waiting for them to supplant the large-lot suburban supermarkets?

Small groceries were everywhere in my early life; growing up, we did most of our grocery shopping at the Sunnyside Supermarket, three blocks from our house, albeit required crossing a fearsome state highway.

Former Sunnyside Supermarket site:
611 West Roosevelt Road, Wheaton, IL today

My only recent experience with corner stores came in Washington, D.C., where I spent a semester in 2018. There were three corner stores near our apartment, no doubt due to the neighborhood's unusual combination of wealth and population density. One of them, the Congress Market on East Capitol Drive, has since gone out of business. 

Congress Market, formerly at 4th St and East Capitol Drive SE

So has an Amazon Fresh store in Crystal City that had only opened in 2022, as well as two small-format Target stores (Del Maestro 2025).

So, I don't know. The argument for corner stores is compelling: As walkable destinations, they provide everyday opportunities for exercise, energy conservation, and community building. But are there viable business plans, and strong enough public preferences to choose corner stores over megamarkets? 

Dave Olverson's recent piece for City Builder blames zoning restrictions for the lack of corner stores, and so, in a talk for Cities for Everyone that focused on housing, does Missing Middle Housing author Dan Parolek. Addison Del Maestro, however, notes the difficulty of slotting neighborhood stores into metropolitan form that is decidedly suburban:

"Urbanism," after all, isn't just land use. It's all the other elements of a place scaled to urban land use. [Emphasis his.] That includes passenger and utility vehicles--urban firetrucks, the small cars that Europe calls "city cars"--for example. It also includes smaller-scale retail. But because the status quo everyday store has shifted from a small Main Street store to a big-box, car-oriented suburban one, localities and developers do not have a bundle of "off the shelf" retail concepts to fill out Main Streets, urban neighborhoods, and mixed-use developments. Residents want their own grocery store nearby or underneath the apartments, but most national and general merchandise chains do not really operate that retail concept at scale. (Del Maestro 2025)

Cedar Rapids found this out when city officials, actively but in vain, tried to recruit grocery chains into the former Hy-Vee space on 1st Avenue NE. I just don't think that zoning reform will be enough in our town, as long as grocers choose away from small stores, and residents are for the most part comfortable driving to supermarkets, as well as being anxious about the supply of parking being impacted by stores near their homes. 

Neighborhood supermarket? Folks in this subdivision
can walk to Hy-Vee

ORIGINAL POST: "Envision CR IV: Neighborhood corner stores," 28 May 2015

EXCITING UPDATES!!

"NewBo City Market Expansion to Field Neighborhood Grocery by Field to Family," Iowa's News Now, 8 May 2025

Rebekah Vaughan, "Developer Hopes to Bring Grocery Store to Wellington Heights, Neighbors React," KCRG.com, 6 May 2025

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.

10th anniversary post: Jeff Speck in Cedar Rapids

 

Jeff Speck talking about "The Safe Walk," 2015

Ten years ago this month, when urbanism was still relatively "new," our local Corridor Urbanism group was all of two months old, your humble blogger was still young and idealistic, and Jeb Bush and Scott Walker were the frontrunners for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, the prophet Jeff Speck appeared in Cedar Rapids. The Boston-based architect, city planner, and author of Walkable City [Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011] was in town to promote some of the redesign recommendations he had made while consulting with the city. Our one-way-to-two-way street conversions, separated bike lanes, and four-way-stops where there used to be traffic lights all came out of his time in our city.

My report on Speck's presentation at the City Services Center is here. Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan scored an interview with Speck, which can be found here. Speck's presentation that night is still on YouTube:

(1:15:08)

2015 was an optimistic time in a lot of ways. Across America residents and businesses were returning to city centers, violent crime had been falling for 25 years, the economy had largely recovered from the 2007-09 recession, and our city was rebuilding after the 2008 flood. Urbanism's insights promised knowledge that would help us sustain all that in ways that were also environmentally and financially resilient.

I still believe in cities, and believe that urbanism has important things to say which can help us understand our present problems, or which we can ignore at our peril. The optimism of those days has been difficult to sustain, however. National politics is getting uglier by the week, thanks to President Trump and Elon Musk and their reign of hate and lies and casual destruction. In Cedar Rapids, the most visible policies were once those street designs and reconstruction in the core, promising many safe walks to come. Now the most visible policies in Cedar Rapids have changed the subject from safe walking to carefree parking, as we put suburban development (the MedQuarter, the casino, school consolidation) where it shouldn't be. We seem to be moving towards more car-dependence, not less, which I think we will come to regret.

More importantly, urbanism across America has entered a new phase of life. Not only are the easy lifts behind us, but new challenges have arisen.

Loftus Lofts construction, New Bohemia, September 2024

Redevelopment has not been as inclusive as it should have been. Pete Saunders recently re-posted a 2018 reflection in which he quoted Richard Florida on the new wave of problems. Florida, whose The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic, 2002) and Who's Your City? (Basic, 2008) promoted the ideas of cities building off clustering of knowledge workers, more recently published The New Urban Crisis (Basic, 2017, also discussed here) in which he laments not foreseeing the problems that would result from an insurge of higher incomes.

Just when it seemed that our cities were really turning a corner, when people and jobs were moving back to them, a host of new urban challenges--from rising inequality to increasingly unaffordable housing and more--started to come to the fore. Seemingly overnight, the much-hoped-for urban revival has turned into a new kind of urban crisis.... Gentrification and inequality are the direct outgrowths of the re-colonization of the city by the affluent and the advantaged.

The city boundaries were re-integrated, but people were not, so the new prosperity ran up against the limits of the middle class bubble. Some places gentrified and older residents got displaced; a lot more places remained isolated and "devalued" (Saunders 2025).

Arco Building, 2022, features recently remodeled offices

The pandemic rearranged decades-old commercial patterns. The daylong succession of human activities (residential, work, recreational, residential) imagined six decades ago by Jane Jacobs and decimated by Euclidean zoning might have been easy to rebuild in our city centers, if only work had held still. The COVID pandemic shifted a good deal of work to remote, and the succeeding years have seen only partial recovery. Kaid Benefield wrote in Place Makers of a recent trip to Union Square in San Francisco where he found Nordstrom's closed, with Walgreen's and Bloomingdale's weeks away from the same fate. And it's not just remote work.

I think a number of trends are contributing to declining urban retail, none bigger than a consumer shift to the convenience of online shopping and delivery. A second major factor is the rise of remote work practices and consequent decline in daily office workers who have traditionally supported businesses near their places of employment. A third factor is rising crime rates in some urban neighborhoods.

With regard to crime, urban areas are having a variety of experiences, but the miracle of 1990-2015 seems to be over (citing Farrell 2024).

Low income housing, SW side

Housing. Need I say more? Not too long ago, Pete Saunders noted that urbanism seems to have turned into all housing all the time. As demand for housing increasingly outstrips supply, costs in high-demand areas are making one of the basic necessities of life harder for people to obtain. (See this interactive graphic, complete with time slider.) I don't know where this is going--another crash, maybe?--but in the meantime we're dealing with big time market failure. 

At the bottom end, an ever-larger group of people have been forced into unstable housing arrangements or out onto the street. This is a nationwide problem that hits people locally. New data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development find the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness has increased 57 percent since the low point in--you guessed it--2015. (See the analysis at Torres 2025). The explosion of homelessness has made some urban areas highly unpleasant. They are our brothers and sisters, and they need a place to sleep and process waste just the rest of us do, but their increasing presence is making urban areas harder for the rest of us to use. 

Maybe if we can find ways to make office-to-residential conversion work on a large scale (Anderson 2023), we can stabilize the housing market, rejuvenate urban retail at least for necessaries, and thereby put enough eyes on the streets that they will look less ramshackle and feel less dangerous. There certainly a lot of people continuing to do the hard work of building great places, as the The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast and the Cities for Everyone webinar series seem never to run out of people to feature (although the international scope of Cities for Everyone often makes me wish I lived in France or Spain). The black urbanist movement described by Pete Saunders (2018 [2025]) continues to "focus on immediate concerns and push for pragmatic solutions."

Mostly, I still believe in walkable, compact development as the best for human quality of life as well as the most sustainable. Speck's four elements of walkability--safe, comfortable, interesting, and useful--will remain forever relevant.

10th anniversary post: Blizzards get you thinking

 

That was a blizzard (2015)

Ten years ago the weather was different than it is this week. A big pile of snow--11 inches, says my post--got dumped on Iowa as January 2015 turned into February. This year, we're in a stretch of unseasonably warm weather including a couple record high temperatures and a couple more near-records. 2024-25 been a warm dry winter, which could be random luck, but we should know better than that by now.

I produced my own blizzard, of questions, ten years ago. This anniversary post seemed a good time to revisit them.

1. Why are we still building sprawl?
2. Can downtown develop/be developed by a resilient transportation system?
3. How should I be rooting on the federal transportation bill?
4. How should we consider climate change in planning?
5. Why is the clearing of public sidewalks the responsibility of the homeowner, even though the clearing of public streets is undertaken by the government?

These questions are pretty central to how we design our cities, allowing that #5 was dropped on me by a work colleague while I was working on that post, so it got looped in. City design may strike a person more urgently during a blizzard than it does when the big-box store is a simple 20-minute drive away. My 2015 frustration at the pace of positive change, too, probably reflected fatigue from the hard work of snow removal. 

Never not contemplating urbanism

Surely people were going to grasp that local government finances are driven by the demands we place on it, not by waste, fraud and abuse? That cities won't be able forever to rely on federal and state money to make up whatever funding gaps result? That public transit unlike private vehicles is scalable in a way that supports intensive economic development? That climate change makes new demands on our capacity to be resilient?

However, "There's drudgery in social change, and glory for the few," sang Billy Bragg. Today the urgency of approaching urban design differently is, if possible, less apparent at all levels of government. I've gone from being mildly frustrated to totally appalled. Urbanist design comes recommended for all sorts of reasons related to our common life: environmental sustainability in the face of climate change, place attachment, exercise, inclusion, community-building, and financial resilience. 

Strong Towns has been saying for years that local governments rely too heavily on federal and state financial assistance, which makes big development projects and sprawl seem cost-free. (See Charles L. Marohn, Jr., Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity [Wiley, 2020] for the complete argument.) Twelve erratic years of federal government shutdowns and near-shutdowns haven't apparently changed the towns' short-term thinking. Maybe a freeze on federal grants--one was declared January 27, temporarily blocked by a judge the following day, and then rescinded (see Parker 2025)--would jolt localities into more productive approaches to development?

Ten years ago, Washington infighting was imperiling appropriations for the Department of Transportation, which funds state and local transportation projects. Eventually the bill got passed, but to what end? Though the Joe Biden administration nudged these projects in the direction of transit, transportation funding goes predominantly for roadway construction and expansion, which reinforces our already car-centric development. That's what prompted question #3 on my list. I followed up: If the federal government is the founder of this ridiculous feast, maybe if they cut off the allowance states and localities will be forced to be rational?... It would be at least interesting, because at least local choices would be clearer. 

Nor has an increasing pile of climate disasters catalyzed urbanism. Climate science is a key element of the "woke bullshit" President Trump feels he has a mandate to quash (For the risks inherent in Trump's aggressive climate change denial, see Flavelle 2025). Within 24 hours of Trump's inauguration, acting Environmental Protection Administration head James Payne fired all members of the Science Advisory Board and the Clean Air Advisory Board, and the U.S. withdrew from the international climate talks known as the Paris Accord. Trump is attempting to pause federal grants for clean-energy projects, slash or purge the federal workforce, and has appointed a pro-extraction, climate change-denying permanent EPA administrator who has little environmental experience (Davenport 2025). It's not clear that professional environmental staff will be gagged as health staff have been, but it seems likely they will be strongly discouraged from speaking openly about anything important.

In Iowa, we're not going to talk about the climate, either. Land in Iowa is plentiful and cheap, and we apparently trust the oil lobby to make sure we still have access to gasoline for our (ever larger) vehicles. So new K-12 science standards excise the term "climate change" (in favor of "climate trends"), along with the word "evolution." Reference to human impacts on the climate will also be removed from education (Luu 2025). If we don't talk about it, maybe it will all go away?

Maybe the answers will come, not by restoring urbanism, but some wholly new design concept. Geographer Stephanie Wakefield raises that possibility in a piece for Next City that promotes her forthcoming book about the future of Miami:

Rather than an endless expanse of cities and urbanization processes with seemingly no terminus — the latter destined to be but fodder for ever greater resilience of the former — might the Anthropocene’s human and nonhuman dislocations produce other spaces, processes and imaginaries entirely? (quoted at Ionescu 2025)

I'm definitely curious about what these spaces and imaginaries might be, although I don't know how well I'll do with an entire book written in the manner of the sentence quoted above. Wakefield suggests localities will have additional design/form considerations beyond the urban-or-suburban dichotomy I'm used to. 

As it happens, later this month I'll be in St. Petersburg on the opposite side of the State of Florida. I'm looking forward to seeing what people are calling the large body of water between Florida and Texas, but also how they are dealing with likely climate threats. Here is a map of future sea level contingencies from Advantage Pinellas, the long-range transportation plan produced by Forward Pinellas, which is the St. Petersburg-area Metropolitan Planning Organization.

from Advantage Pinellas (2024, p. 41)

The first thing to notice is that's a fair chunk of land that's theoretically going to be under water. The second thing to notice is Metropolitan Planning Organizations, like Forward Pinellas and our own Corridor MPO, are funded by the U.S. government. That means our tax dollars are paying for this "woke bullshit!" How much longer will Advantage Pinellas remain online? I've downloaded it, just in case. For now, it's encouraging that people--at least those who staff MPOs--are thinking about resilient, inclusive, livable, prosperous futures. Bless them for it. Whether they will be allowed to keep doing so is at this point unanswerable. 

Strong Towns has always maintained a local focus, treating national politics as not-my-circus-not-my-monkeys. I'm not sure how valid this is anymore. At the state and national levels, powerful industry interests and Project 2025 ideologues are making the rules now, and if there's information that threatens them, they'll do their best to suppress it. Localities could try to figure things out on their own, but constitutionally they're limited by state action, and anyhow it's just easier to keep doing what we've been doing.

So, my answers to the questions I posed ten years ago: 

1. Why are we still building sprawl? Because it's the policy path of least resistance, residential and commercial developments can be large enough to be highly profitable, and localities get the property taxes without immediate needs for service.
2. Can downtown develop/be developed by a resilient transportation system? Probably not, because most cities don't have the political or financial independence for this to happen.
   
3. How should I be rooting on the federal transportation bill? Doesn't matter. Streets and highways will always get taken care of, however imperfectly they are maintained once their built.
4. How should we consider climate change in planning? Consider a range of possible outcomes for which we need to be prepared, and support rather than suppressing research.
5. Why is the clearing of public sidewalks the responsibility of the homeowner, even though the clearing of public streets is undertaken by the government? Street maintenance sucks up a lot of resources, so we get mandates on property owners instead.

I hope I'm still around in 2035 to admit how wrong I was back in 2025!

ORIGINAL POST: "Blizzards Get You Thinking," 1 February 2015

SEE ALSO: C40 Global Cities website: international intracity climate action networ. Hearing Helene Chartier from this organization speak on the Cities for Everyone webinar the morning after my post made me feel somewhat more hopeful.