In Which My Attempts at a Rant Can’t Make It

Sign May 24 in downtown Cedar Rapids. Sarte plays must be a thing this summer.

Downtown Cedar Rapids, at the moment, sucks. The railroad passing through town and the city are redoing all the crossings, and the route through downtown in spring 2018 is fraught with gravel, badly marked and planned detours and an odd disconnect between the signs posted and reality—such as a section of trail being clearly open if you approach it from the west, but marked as closed if you approach it from the east.

And there is a farmers market Saturday, which I might try to bicycle to (downtown farmers markets are more accessible by bicycle than by car, in my opinion). But I’m not sure about getting there with all the awkward torn up reality of the Cedar River Trail through downtown.

You can cross the gravel walks riding a bicycle, but do so with care.

So, following Thursday’s 35-mile ride (link to gallery from that ride), which took me that way twice, I might be primed for a biker rant.

But, I just can’t. I can’t summon sufficient outrage or umbrage. The state of downtown is an annoyance, but it’s an annoyance in a background of a positively transforming bicycle landscape in Cedar Rapids.

As a recent story in The Gazette pointed out, in recent years, Iowa’s second city has become way more bicycle friendly.

And it’s not just all the bike trial projects. There’s nothing scientific about this, and I do have to watch for frequent rude and dangerous drivers, but the increasing network of bike lanes and trail projects seems to roughly correspond with more bike riders—and more bike riders correspond with a general background level of slightly less hostile drivers.

There’s a rule of thumb, I think. Drivers in the UK rarely hassle bikers because bicycles are “normal” transport and simply something one expects to encounter. A few rare bikers will enrage the minority of hot-headed drivers. But the more bikers you add, the more bicycle riders simply fade into the normal background. I don’t think we’re “there” yet in Cedar Rapids, I just seem maybe a few hopeful signs that we’re evolving in that direction.

I have not been honked or yelled at much this year, and I’m frequent riding on busier streets—taking the new bicycle lane on C Avenue Northeast as part of daily commute, for example.

As for the physical sad state of our main trail through downtown—I guess my attitude is, if it results in better trail-rail crossings in the long run, I’m not above putting up with some short-term inconvenience. I do wish that detours for bike trails were a bit more intentional and marked well (as I have noted before, I have long not been happy with the American style of being very attentive to auto detours whenever there is a street project, but at the same time leaving pedestrians and bikers on their own, in sharp contrast to my experiences in the U.K. where a detour sidewalk is part of the plan for every street project), but I’ll live with the project and let the city get on with it.

The real hazard in Cedar Rapids is not the irritating street work. It’s the geese. Beware of aquatic avian dinosaur parents!

Near Cedar Lake May 24--young geese with watchful parent. I stopped for a break during a long bike ride (below) and must wait for some dinosaur traffic before I get back to my bicycle.