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

Downtown dreams and reality

 

Downtown Cedar Rapids parking map

The City of Cedar Rapids is surveying residents on the subject of parking in Downtown and surrounding areas (Czech Village, Kingston, New Bohemia). (If you're in CR, and seeing this before Wednesday 6/11, contact me and I'll send you the link.) The survey mostly asks for data about destinations, times, and difficulty parking. 

According to my sources, the city is looking at removing meters from downtown, or else adding meters to other areas in the core. If we do remove meters from downtown, however, that will cut the flow of cash to ParkCR, the company to which we foolishly sold the parking concession in 2014, and which is already receiving less income than we had contractually promised. We would have to pay them off somehow.

Parking instructions from ParkCR, Third Avenue Bridge,
Downtown Cedar Rapids

I'm torn about the parking survey, regardless of how we work things out with ParkCR, because removing meters seems the best thing in the short run for downtown businesses, the city, but more free parking is not in the long-term general interest. We have learned from reading Donald Shoup (he's tough) and Henry Grabar (a much easier go) that free public parking in a high-demand area s a policy mistake, because setting the price at zero makes demand for any product artificially high. Too much demand for parking results in traffic congestion and noise and an unpleasant environment for anyone else in the area. Eventually, it results in pressure on the city to supply more, either through more public lots or parking mandates on developers, which wastes space. High-value land is yielding no revenue, and the empty space it creates between revenue-producing destinations makes the area less walkable and less interesting. Free parking is the enemy of vibe.

[If you're attending an Orchestra Iowa concert on a Saturday night at the historic Paramount Theater, profiled in this 1.75 minute video from Iowa Public Broadcasting, driving is your only alternative. Finding a parking space can be a challenge.]

Ideally, any city's core would be best advised to develop around non-drivers who are able to walk, bike, wheel, or bus to multiple revenue-producing destinations. I'm fixated on grocery stores and other suppliers of necessities, but Bill Fulton (2025) has observed that:

people who lived near downtowns and liked to walk places tended to drive to the grocery store or the mall, in large part because they want to have a vehicle to haul the stuff home. Since Covid, of course, many of these folks choose to order all kinds of goods online.

Maybe I should stop dreaming about groceries and hardware in the core? Even so, says Fulton, 

People who lived [near the downtowns he studied] tended to walk more when they had some place they wanted to walk to. And what they wanted to walk to most often was parks, libraries, cafes, and restaurants.

Our city's core is attractive, but what surrounds it is without form and void. 

Between 5th and 12th Streets, much of the space is
dedicated to parking

Hence, with respect to the very few who ride across the void on our incipient trails system, or utilize our limited public transportation, the only connection to the world outside the void is by private car. 

Whether we're talking grocery stores or "parks, libraries, cafes, and restaurants," patrons either come from close by or from far away. If they come from far away. Here's the paradox: The more parking our city provides, the less room there is for the places people want to go. Yet sincerely trying to build a walkable core by putting a price on parking is a risky game, maybe as likely to take businesses off the streets as to put people onto the streets and into destinations. "We don't want parking meters in NewBo," says City Council member Ann Poe.

Block-long free parking in Czech Village
does fill up on weekends

If you're reading this critically, you'll notice my argument is missing data. I've got none. What I'm also missing is a sense of what the city's vision is. A decade ago, Cedar Rapids seemed motivated to become an active town, bringing in the Blue Zones folks and building separated bike lanes. I really couldn't say what the city's vision is now, other than some vague notion of "success" based in attracting shoppers.

So, what's an urbanist supposed to write in the comments section of the survey? The market price for parking in the core area outside of downtown is probably zero, because there's so much of it. Maybe the best approach is to attend to the needs of core constituents now, even if that means (sob!) more subsidies for car parking and (double sob!) paying off ParkCR with money that would have been better spent elsewhere. Shoup argues for charging market prices for parking, with money devoted to improving the district where it's spent. That alone keeps the path open to a more vibey, financially resilient, walkable future.

If we've learned anything positive from the DOGE derecho,
it's that the national government is no longer a reliable funder
of expensive stuff

P.S. I wonder how many people who resent food assistance or affirmative action as "government handouts" not only allow an exception for parking, but expect that parking should be free?

SEE ALSO: "I Wish This Parking Was...," 27 November 2020

Black Friday Parking 2024: BR 151

They were there for the deals at the Marion Wal-Mart

Even frigid temperatures could not deter this devotee of #BlackFridayParking, Strong Towns' annual photographic survey of excess parking. Cultural devotion to ensuring drivers have an easy (and free or cheap) time storing the cars wherever they go has created a profligate use of land. Case in point: I went to a bar with some coworkers the day before Thanksgiving. It's a small building, 1800 square feet. Do you know how many parking spaces would fit in that building? Ten. That's all. So you can just imagine how many alternative uses we're foregoing with just one single megaparking lot.

Northwest section of the lot, 9 a.m.

This year's observance of #blackfridayparking took me to the Wal-Mart at the edge of Marion, or what used to be the edge of Marion, at the intersection of US151 and SR13. Built in 2005, it is the most newest of our metro's three Super Centers. There were a lot of people shopping there, and a lot of cars parked, and yet, as busy as it was, huge swaths of the lot went unoccupied. I'd guesstimate it might have been 55 percent full.

View from McDonald's

Northeast edge

Marion has grown quickly, more than doubling its population since 1990. More recently they have reconfigured traffic to enhance their Uptown area, and are engaged in writing a comprehensive plan for the next 25 years. For thirty years, though, their growth was an explosion of suburban development, much of it along Business Route 151, which runs from this intersection through the center of town into Cedar Rapids, where it becomes 1st Avenue East. So for about two miles, it seems like the edge of town, because the edge has moved ever-outward as the town has grown.

Hy-Vee Grocery Store, 3600 10th Avenue.
Maybe 75 percent full at 9:30 a.m.

Average daily traffic counts along this stretch are 16700 across 151/13, 13000 above 50th St, 11700 between 50th and 44th, and 14400 between 44th and 35th; after a roundabout routes traffic onto 6th Avenue, 7th Avenue still carries 5600 approaching 26th Street.

Auto-Zone, 1055 Linden Drive.
Last picture I took before my camera rebelled.

I walked along BR 151 to a coffee appointment in Uptown. It really gives you a sense of how human scale is lost in auto-centric development, in that I could walk five minutes and feel as though I was getting nowhere. It's difficult to convey in photographs, particularly since my phone rebelled against the cold at this point--it was about 15 degrees, and windy--and refused to come out of its shell until we were safely inside the coffee shop. 

Best I could do: Google Earth screenshot
looking east from 31st Street

As Marion undertakes its new comprehensive plan, they may or may not try to diversify this route. There certainly is a lot of parking along the way...

Screenshot from Marion 2045 page,
showing 26th to 44th Streets

Screenshot from Marion 2045 page,
showing area around Wal-Mart and 151/13 intersection

...which arguably is a bigger issue than whatever's going on at Wal-Mart.

Spending land that could be productive and interesting on parking lots seems irrational to me. But so does waiting ten cars deep at a drive through, and I saw that at both Starbucks and Dunkin today. So do all the people huddled under blankets in the long line outside Da Bin consignment store. There is clearly much I don't understand, which keeps your humble blogger extra-humble.

SEE ALSO

"Marion 2045," Marion comprehensive plan page

"Uptown Marion Parking Study" (May 2024)

"Black Friday Parking 2024: Mount Vernon Road," 24 November 2024 [last year's observance]

"Black Friday Parking 2019," 29 November 2019 [last time I surveyed Marion]

Black Friday Parking 2023: Mount Vernon Road

2317: One of many smokeshops on the road, used to be a bookstore

I've gone a bit off-script for this year's celebration of #BlackFridayParking. Strong Towns has promoted this event since the mid-10s as a way of highlighting the high costs to cities of zoning regulations that mandate large commercial parking lots (Abramson 2023). Past Black Fridays have taken me to the parking lots of big-box stores on our city's outer edge, and to the vast parking lots all too close to our city center.

Amidst all the giddiness and photography, I've come to the conclusion that, in Cedar Rapids anyway, the problem is not the zoning code. Our giant Wal-Marts and Targets have parking lots even bigger than the code requires, because land is cheap here, customers expect it, and the city is designed in such a way that 90+ of people are going to drive to shop anyway. 

In 2017 I walked 16th Avenue SW, a mid-century commercial corridor that is now a model for discarded sprawl. 

Still empty in '23: former K-Mart parking lot, 16th Av SW, November 2017

The problem on 16th is not that even large Black Friday crowds couldn't fill the gigantic parking lots, but that there are no crowds at all. (That year I was accompanied by "the other Dr. Nesmith." I don't know whether the excitement was too much for her, but she hasn't been tempted by #BlackFridayParking since.)

This year I followed a similar impulse to Mt. Vernon Road SE. This historic corridor is getting some love from the city in the form on an action plan. Alas, its internal contradictions mean some of its goals are going to have to give way, probably to faster vehicle traffic.

The Mount Vernon Road action plan covers 10th to 44th Streets.

4035: At the east end of the plan area, acres of parking at the Mt. Vernon Road Hy-Vee

 The executive summary describes the challenge on page 19:

The Mt. Vernon Road corridor includes a wide variety of land uses including a neighborhood hardware store, a large grocery store, several gas/convenience stores, banks and credit unions, professional offices, restaurants, bars, and various specialty, variety, drug, auto parts, auto repair, and discount goods stores. The corridor also includes schools, churches, a residential care center, a fire station, and a cemetery.

2405: Used to be a pharmacy

However, the dominate [sic] land use is single family residential with just a few multi-family residential properties sprinkled throughout the corridor. There are several quick-serve and fast food restaurants but few sit-down style restaurants. There are vacant properties along the corridor and some occupied commercial sites that are dated and/or in need of renovation and maintenance. There are also several retail uses that are typically not considered neighborhood friendly including tobacco shops and liquor stores.

Because that's the kind of commerce wide fast streets get!

2663: Used to be a Greek restaurant

2700: Used to be an Italian restaurant

Unsurprisingly, public input sessions on the action plan revealed desires for small retail shops, redeveloping vacant lots, fewer "less neighborhood friendly uses," more separation between residential and commercial areas, turn lanes, and slower truck traffic. Bike lanes were nixed, as bicycling on this road is unsafe and slows car traffic (p. 19).

Word clouds generated by Mt. Vernon Road corridor public meetings

902 28th St: Cute shop for a walkable area

3605: Another vacant property, whose potential changes on a walkable street

The public's desires are reflected in the plan's goals (p 9): (1) promote new retail development and redevelopment along the corridor; (2) encourage neighborhood scale and neighborhood friendly uses; (3) improve traffic circulation and safety; (4) increase walkability and safety for pedestrians and cyclists. I expect the immediate pressure to improve traffic circulation to render the rest of this admirable list unfeasible. I hope I can explain why.

1841: Neighborhood retail lost to road widening

1901: Neighborhood retail lost to road widening

Neighborhood retail (goals 1 and 2) relies on walkability (goal #4), but that would require Mt. Vernon Road to become smaller and slower (goal #3b but not #3a). The stickler, as the plan's authors admit (p. 11), is that Mount Vernon Road has been developed into an arterial, the collector road for the entire southeast side. The authors claim it has too much traffic already--23000 according to the plan text, 18000 according to the state's average daily traffic counts--for its four lanes, and there are too many driveways for comfort as well. 

3303: Even small parking lots are between the (franchise) shops and the sidewalk

Since it is pretty much the only through street in that part of town, there's no reasonable alternative for truck traffic. 

3025: More franchises by parking lots

So the road will be reconfigured to restrict left turns across traffic at 15th and 19th Streets; it will end in a roundabout at 10th Street; parking lot access will where possible be redirected to side streets; and cyclists will be directed to alternative routes on parallel streets. 

Approaching downtown, new left-turn lane onto 15th Street,
creating more distance between core neighborhoods on either side

Cars and trucks will move more swiftly, past locations that could have supported neighborhood friendly uses. (See Herriges 2019 on how arterials work, and don't work.)

1420: Gargantuan c-store, nominally in Wellington Heights

This is the point where I should be telling you what the city should be doing to fix this. I confess I'm at a loss. What are we trying to build here? It's not a downtown, where we go for density, mix the uses, slow the cars, and ignore the parking-obsessed. It's not the suburbs, either, nor is it quite a highway. It's become an awkward mix of all three, so that anything you do to fix an immediate issue with Mt. Vernon Road--narrow it, widen it, add pedestrian infrastructure--is going to make something else worse. 

3401: Vernon Village used to have a small grocery and a French restaurant,
which then became a bakery/cafe. Now it might be a ghost kitchen?

(I would like to see bus service along the entirety of Mt. Vernon Road, just shooting straight from downtown to maybe Bertram Road and back. Currently, the circuitous Route 2 travels Mt. Vernon Road eastbound from 19th to 42nd, but not westbound. I don't know that it will fix anything detailed above, help the emergence of cute shops, cut down on vehicle speeds, or make walking safer, but it's curious that this has never been done.)

2714: Another auto parts store, next to another vacant building 

So, this year my #BlackFridayParking thoughts have wandered far from the subject of parking. But as we see here, excess parking is more than some unproductive government regulation. It is a product of the problematic way we build towns, and how we get around, just as it makes those problems worse. The result is stroads like this one. The parking lots are just the most obvious symptom, or maybe #2 behind the uninspiring commerce.

2000: Used to be an arts center, before that an elementary school

The public comments that informed the Mt. Vernon Road Action plan are not wrong, just naive. It's natural for us to want more of the things we enjoy, with fewer consequences. Why can't we have smoother traffic flow and plenteous parking, at cute shops, all at a neighborhood scale? Because, beloved readers, in this vale of tears, cars compete with everything else for space, and the easier we make it for cars to move the less likely they are to stop, to shop or for any other reason. 

2711: Big pharmacy with bigger parking lot

Same building, different side

The more room we make for cars in the form of parking lots, the less room there is for anything at a human/neighborhood scale. Anyone who's paid attention as Mt. Vernon Road has gotten wider and faster knows this. That's not politics, it's physics.

26th St: One of several cute dead-end streets off Mt. Vernon Road
Access becomes more difficult as the road gets faster

18th St: From here to downtown, access is limited by a barrier

Strong Towns video, "Are Parking Lots Ruining Your City" (15:40):

SEE ALSO: "Black Friday Parking 2022," 25 November 2022 

Mark Stoffer Hunter, "History Happenings: Changes Coming to Mount Vernon Road and 19th Street SE," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 24 November 2018

Ben Kaplan, "Mount Vernon Road is Dangerous by Design," Corridor Urbanism, 11 June 2021

Rahul Rejeev, "Children, Left Behind by Suburbia, Need Better Community Design," Public Square: A CNU Journal, 13 November 2023

Historical Aerials

3404: One of many vacant stores on Mt. Vernon Road

Book review: Paved Paradise

 Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World [Penguin Press, 2023], xix + 345 pp.

[University of Texas students] bristled at the university's $600 annual parking fee. Less parking, to them, meant a more gated campus, an extra fee on top of tuition. They couldn't afford to live in West Campus, the bustling student neighborhood abutting the state capitol building. The question Greg [Anderson] wanted them to ask was not "Why is it so hard to park?" but "Why is it so hard not to drive, to live in a place where you could choose not to care about the cost or availability of parking?" (Grabar 2023: 283)

At an event last night, a woman told people from Matthew 25 how much she liked their recently-established Cultivate Hope Corner Store in Cedar Rapids's near northwest side neighborhood. Her only concern, she said, was they don't provide enough parking for the store to be successful. The comment was well-meant, and well-taken, and reflects that in our town that the vast majority of people will use a car (or, more likely, an SUV or pickup truck) on all trips. Customer parking needs to be plenteous, convenient, and free if any business is going to survive.

It was as though she were tasting a dish--it happened to be a cooking class we were attending--and judging it needed some basil, or maybe just a dash of salt, to liven it up. She's far from alone in Cedar Rapids, and probably in your town as well. But it's time we stopped taking parking for granted, and/or expecting it to be waiting for us whenever we drop by, and started having more informed conversations about what it does to our places. Eighteen years ago, UCLA economist Donald Shoup published his landmark The High Cost of Free Parking, which helped to change the dialogue among city planners, but clearly something more is needed.

Fast-growing Charlotte has parking craters in the city center

Into this breach steps Henry Grabar, a reporter for Slate, who has written an accessible, lively and persuasive book on the very subject--how we came to this pass, and what is preventing us from making necessary corrections. Paved Paradise has gotten a lot of well-justified attention, and I anticipate it will raise awareness that parking is not without significant costs. If a few more people in each town stop taking parking for granted, and start noticing its effects, he will have succeeded and probably should be knighted.

To mollify neighbors, residents of this Charlotte apartment
building will be required not to park anywhere nearby

In part one, Grabar surveys the impact of using land for parking vehicles: higher housing costs and the difficulty of building more, heated sometimes violent conflict when spaces to park are scarce, hollowing out of city centers, loss of historic buildings, more driving and increased traffic volumes, difficult regulation and near-impossible enforcement. He quotes Jane Jacobs towards the end of chapter 4: "The more downtown is broken up and interspersed with parking lots and garages, the duller and deader it becomes in appearance." Later he compares two historical strata in the city of Chicago:

Chicago BP [Before Parking] is the metropolis of the imagination: Art Deco skyscrapers, elevated trains, corner bars nestled inside neighborhoods of three-flats and Victorians, low-slung corridors of uninterrupted commercial storefronts stretching halfway to the state line. Chicago AP [After Parking] looks like run-of-the-mill suburban sprawl: chain stores lurking behind salt-crusted parking lots. (2023: 127)

Part two discusses the administration of parking, both by private enterprises and local governments. Either way, opportunism is rife. Citizens believe parking should be free by right; for parking companies it's an easy way to make money, whether or not there are actual customers; and cities use it both as a source of revenue and an opportunity to grant favors. In chapter 7, he describes in detail the debacle when the City of Chicago sold 75 years of parking rights way too cheaply to a private consortium headed by Morgan Stanley. One good outcome, though: when the consortium (CPM) jacked up parking rates, it increased the supply of available parking as well as encouraging people to try alternative means of getting places like public transit and bikeshare. On the other hand, the city not only has already burned through its windfall, but it is severely constrained in modifying street design for other uses than parking.

Interior, Arco building, 2022:
How will more downtown residents change parking
in Cedar Rapids?

It is in part three where the rubber meets the asphalt. Chapter 8 is a tribute to Shoup, to whom Grabar and all of us are indebted. Then we see the policy changes that Shoup's followers achieved in cities across America: parking meter rates reflecting the demand for parking by time and location, zoning policy changes ending mandated parking minima for new development, no parking requirements near transit, easing parking requirements for accessory dwelling units, among others. 

Change is slow to come, though, in part because this is incremental change on top of a parking-rich built environment, and in part because obstacles remain even after the repeal of bad public policies: (1) builders kept building as they always had, (2) downtowns that lacked any alternative to driving, and (3) resistance to reduced parking from (a) current residents, (b) lenders, (c) federal regulations, and (d) tenants themselves (Grabar 2023:213-224). To get along with your development, it's better to go along with the people who can make your life miserable, so putting in excess parking becomes just one of the costs of doing business. Keith Billick found that out the hard way when neighborhood opposition doomed his proposed Lincoln Highway Lofts in 2017 (Kaplan 2017).

Too close to downtown: Cedar Rapids's blocks-long
MedQuarter can be traversed by parking lot--I've done it!

If I have one complaint about Paved Paradise, it is that Grabar spends most of the book in crowded big city centers. The America that is not New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, but which needs an infusion of good urbanism, gets a nod here but not much else. Parking is a particular challenge in big cities, but it's some kind of a challenge everywhere, just a different challenge. Grabar noted in an interview with the Congress for the New Urbanism today that most American land wasted on parking is in fact in suburbs, which also collectively have the greatest capacity to absorb new residents (assuming we aren't going to pave all the forests and soybean fields). The "valley of high parking requirements" depicted on page 179 probably best describes Cedar Rapids and a lot of similar American communities: land values are not high enough to build a lot of parking garages, but the town can't or doesn't want to build sprawl. (Actually, we can, and do, but shouldn't.) Many of us aren't averse to "more affordable housing, more new businesses, more historic reuse, more walkable neighborhoods," but don't feel like we have to make choices or alter our lifestyles to get them; certainly in the City of Five Seasons, we're not worried about "less time behind the wheel" (2023: 197). Yet, as Grabar notes, even here "Parking-light neighborhoods [are] the hottest neighborhoods in town" (2023: 282). The new condos going up like dandelions in Cedar Rapids' core cost more than my house, reflecting some measure of buyer demand.

The main takeaway from Paved Paradise is that much of local policy towards parking in America has sought to meet citizens' expectations that it be convenient, available, and free or cheap for all, but at best only two of those goals can be achieved. (Grabar, following Shoup, told CNU he'd pick convenient and available, and forego free.) The Cultivate Hope Corner store doesn't need a big parking lot so people from across town can shop there; we need to have more neighborhood corner stores across town. Convincing Americans we can't have it all, and in a supersized pickup to boot, is no easy feat, but this book gets us closer.

INTERVIEW with Henry Grabar on CNU's On the Park Bench series: https://cnu.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0b7f77508e8ddda6a07f50307&id=1ad4652659&e=28c4871ae8

SEE ALSO: 

"The Choices Parking Forces," 18 July 2019

"I Wish This Parking Was...," 27 November 2020

Marin Cogan, "The Hidden Force That Shapes Everything Around Us," Vox, 9 May 2023 [interview with Henry Grabar]

Neil Heller and Cary Westerbeck, "Parking Minimums Give Me a Haircut," Strong Towns, 14 July 2020

Black Friday Parking 2022

Strip mall, Edgewood Rd SW, 9:45 a.m.

On the southwest side of Cedar Rapids, there is a triangle formed by three stroads: Edgewood Road, Wiley Boulevard, and Williams Boulevard. Average daily traffic counts are roughly 19000 for Edgewood, 9000 for Williams, and (from 2017) 14000 for Wiley. Until about ten years ago, they surrounded Westdale Mall; since that was demolished, they serve a large Wal-Mart, a large Target, and numerous shopping plazas and stand-alone stores.

The area made for an irresistible subject for my 2022 #BlackFridayParking survey, part of the annual Strong Towns event. The area is clearly meant to be driven to; it is served by three bus routes (8,10,12) but the system runs only during the day, and today was running a reduced version of that due to the holiday weekend. Walking between stores is extremely difficult, I can attest. There's a lot of traffic, moving quickly, from various directions. I relied on my remaining agility and the kindness of strangers to get places and return safely to you.

It was a lovely day, sunny and unseasonably warm. I got to Target about 10:00 a.m., too late for the doorbuster sales, but still in time to see a sizeable crowd of cars and shoppers.

Even so, much of the parking lot was unused.

Target, 3400 Edgewood Rd SW, lot 2/3 full at 9:45 a.m.

Down the street at Wal-Mart, the situation was even more pronounced: Many, many shoppers and cars...

View from the front door

...but much unused parking.

Wal-Mart Supercenter, 3601 29th Av SW, lot 1/2 full at 10:00 a.m.

Away from the two retail giants, crowds were thinner and parking lots were emptier.

Strip mall across from Wal-Mart

Kohl's had some traffic near the entrance to their lot...

...but away from the entrance ir was empty.

Kohl's, 3030 Wiley Blvd SW, lot 1/3 full at 10:00 a.m.

The parking lots on the grounds of the former Westdale Mall were glaringly empty.

On the other hand, from a distance it looked like the parking lot of Menards (home improvement store) at Wiley and Williams was very full.

As I forded these lots, I also forded a number of access roads--some, as I said, busy with fast-moving traffic, and some seeing no cars at all. This leads from the Kohl's to Wiley Boulevard, but can only be accessed by southbound traffic.

It made me think that, as much of this event is designed to complain about parking craters, big-box stores and strip malls also generate an excess of infrastructure. Maybe next year we could do Black Friday Access Roads?

Meanwhile, the Westdale area is beginning to see a little of the development promised when the city sunk a fortune into its redevelopment. There is a mixed-use development with apartments.

Parkway West, 3998 Westdale Parkway

These apartments are within walking distance of a lot of shops. I wonder if anyone ever does walk? And what might be the attraction of living here, as opposed to a more human-scaled locale? Price? Highway access? 

The apartments are flanked by a hotel (Tru, a Hilton brand) and a construction project that will become a hotel.

Will these projects generate any foot traffic at all? And given the inherent risks of crossing acres of auto infrastructure, would it be a good idea if they did?

And then there's this guy, across from the Westdale bus stop.

Car wash? Oil change? Tire store? It's auto-oriented, in any case, consistent with its surroundings.

The main purpose of Strong Towns' annual #BlackFridayParking event is to highlight to #EndParkingMinimums, provisions of zoning codes that require large stores to have even larger parking lots. Cedar Rapids' zoning code has those provisions, but the parking lots I surveyed seem to be substantially larger than required, albeit I haven't counted spaces.

Even if zoning requirements do not fully account for this appalling design, public policy has a hand in it. Property tax policy allows property owners to pay low rates on large swaths of unproductive land. City officials everywhere have a preference for big "wins," including attracting and accommodating a large franchise operation, over the economic gardening that nurtures local businesses. (See Alter 2022 on the many benefits of small locally-owned businesses over the big-box franchises.)

The result is a car-chocked landscape, full of expensive infrastructure that the widely dispersed businesses ultimately can't support, stressing drivers and practically prohibiting pedestrians. For financial, environmental, and community reasons, we need to do better. We have what we have in unholy triangles like the one I haunted today, but we need to start thinking differently and designing our cities better. As they say at Strong Towns, "Having 'enough' parking is always going to be less important than creating a place people want to be."

SEE ALSO

"Black Friday 2021," 26 November 2021 [Blairs Ferry Road NE from Fleet Farm to Wal-Mart]

"Black Friday 2016," 25 November 2016 [same area that I visited today]

Lauren Fisher, "14 Photos That Prove We Have Too Much Parking--Even on Black Friday," Strong Towns, 25 November 2022

Daniel Herriges, "The #BlackFridayParking Exception That Proves the Rule," Strong Towns, 25 November 2022

Addison del Maestro, "Unplanned Vacancies," Deleted Scenes, 12 May 2022 [paywall] [which I haven't crossed so it might not be any good] [but he's brilliant so it probably is]

Jaclyn Peiser, "Black Friday Isn't What It Used to Be. Here's Why," Washington Post, 25 November 2022 [another annual tradition is declaring Black Friday "over"] [and indeed it may have run its course, or nearly so] [in the meantime we have all this parking]