Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

July 23, 2009: Welcome sign for Marathon at the south end of former IA 390.

The Marathon to Marathon has become the latest casualty of an aging and depopulating rural Iowa. The last race was last weekend.

While it may sound dramatic to describe the end of a 22-year event that way, it is none the less true. Its demise is summed up in this quote in the Sioux City Journal* article:

“When we all started, we were all in our 40s and low 50s, and now we are in our mid-60s, 70s and I had a committee of 15 to 16 people and now we are down to 6 to 8. We had young families with kids so it wasn’t any problem getting help, but families moved away … It’s a small town to start with, we just have run out of volunteers to be real honest with you.”

“We have run out of volunteers.” That is the scariest sentence one can say or read when it comes to community cohesiveness and social infrastructure. (Why yes, I am finally getting around to reading Bowling Alone, but I was waving a flag on this more than a decade ago.)

As much as they hate to admit it, the Baby Boomers are getting old. The 40-somethings of the mid-1990s are now the 60-somethings of the late 2010s, and a sufficient replacement cohort isn’t there. And I do mean literally not there; Laurens-Marathon High School just graduated its last class because of declining enrollment.

There’s any number of events/groups/what-have-you across Iowa — across rural America — that simply stopped for lack of new blood. (I think of the Amity Ice Cream Social, although it’s come back in a slightly different form.) Now, the Marathon to Marathon is one of them.

*I needed to blog about this ASAP, because the SCJ and all the Lee papers are getting a redesign “to emphasize mobile platforms” Wednesday and the only question is how horrible it will be.

Des Moines is out to remake its nearly 65-year-old system of downtown streets, the Register reports. It’s a combination of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, and doing the wrong thing for stupid reasons.

One-way streets are the second-worst thing a driver can encounter, behind only roundabouts, which are tools of the devil. (Unfortunately, the devil is very active in Cedar Falls and Cedar Rapids as of late.) Getting rid of one-ways on streets wide enough for two-way traffic is a positive thing.

The hard part with doing this in Des Moines is that the one-way system dates back to 1953 (see Jason Hancock’s “Highways of Des Moines”) and is baked into the grid. Cedar Rapids, which is also converting one-ways to two-ways, largely doesn’t have this problem. The I-235 downtown exits are based on one-ways. The map doesn’t make clear how the 2nd/3rd and 8th/9th splits south of downtown would be un-unified, or how DART routes would change from the shiny new station at 6th and Cherry. (And then, of course, nothing happens to East 14th/15th without the Iowa DOT’s say-so.) Every major intersection involved will need new stoplights. That may be why the expected completion date is 2030.

But — and there’s always a but — the plan also involves subtracting lanes of traffic, including not just the most active downtown arterials but a big chunk of University Avenue.

To take MLK Parkway — a “southern bypass” of downtown that, compared with the DECADES it was on the city’s wish list, opened the day before yesterday — and yank out one-third of its capacity is nuts. Sacrificing vehicle space for dedicated bike lanes, especially somewhere without the vertical concentration of really big cities, denies the existence of concepts like “winter”, “humidity”, and “traffic demand.”

Findings were presented Thursday after a yearlong case study by Speck and a team of planners from San Francisco.

Well, that explains that.

The money quote comes at the end of the story.

” … If you’re driving and driving is the thing you care about, this would be the down side of the equation of making these extensive and ambitious network changes.”

Because a street system designed for people who have automobiles and commute from houses with yards is so … unsophisticated.