On May 31, 2019, I left the original Herbert Hoover Elementary School for the last time. However, I wasn’t graduating. Since before I started going to Hoover, it had been announced that “Old Hoover” would be closed, replaced by a “New Hoover” on the outskirts of the city. Many members of my community fought to keep Old Hoover open, and it even reached the Iowa Supreme Court, but the elementary school still closed. I hoped the site would become another facility that serves the community, perhaps a park, but no. It is now truly a shrine to American car dependency.
I should preface this by saying that I am an avid car enthusiast. Driving brings an incredible sense of independence and freedom. While driving can be a lot of fun, and is a good form of intercity travel, Americans drive way too much. In the USA, nearly every trip requires a motor vehicle. According to a 2022 study conducted by the American Automobile Association (AAA), 255 million drivers (almost 70% of the US population) made a total of roughly 227 billion separate car trips, spent 93 billion hours behind the wheel, and drove a total of 2.8 trillion miles. The average American driver makes 2.44 car trips per day, driving for roughly an hour every day, and going a total of 30.1 miles every day.
Drivers themselves, however, are not wholly to blame for the dismal level of driving in our nation. Pedestrian infrastructure is unsafe at its best, and nonexistent at its worst. Cracked sidewalks barely wide enough for one person are right next to the road, where a distracted driver can easily cause serious injury or death. Bicycle infrastructure is all but nonexistent outside of population centers, and even within our own city, the best bike infrastructure is some painted lines on a road covered in bumps and potholes that could easily cause catastrophic damage to a bike. Public transportation is also simply buses with irregular scheduling and has extremely spotty network coverage outside of all but the largest cities. So Americans have no viable choices except driving.
Driving should be a choice, however. Iowa City does an above-average job of being hospitable to pedestrians, cyclists, and others outside of cars. Fares on both the Iowa City Transit and Cambus networks are free, which is a boon for everyone. The city council also supports the continuation of the fare-free program for the foreseeable future according to The Daily Iowan. Downtown is very pedestrian friendly, with the Ped Mall being built in 1979 as part of the city’s urban renewal project.
However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Just because our public transit is free doesn’t mean that it doesn’t find America’s public transit pitfalls. Coverage is spotty at best, with only one or two stops serving entire neighborhoods. And good luck if you’re trying to get anywhere that isn’t downtown. A 45 minute walk to the grocery store is still faster than taking the bus when you have to take the bus to the Downtown Interchange just to wait 30 minutes for when your next bus is scheduled. But those buses seemingly only arrive whenever the driver feels like it. Granted, the scheduling issues are due to traffic, but there would be less traffic if the city invested in a transit system with higher frequency and broader coverage.
I’m not even going to get into the hellscape that is US-6, Iowa 1 West, and Riverside Drive, because I need to find a way to tie this back to Old Hoover.
2200 E Court could had the potential to continue to serve the community, but, sadly, this isn’t the case anymore. While the tennis courts in the former schoolyard do serve a purpose and aren’t an eyesore, it’s what lies at the former site of the building. I understand that there is a phenomenon called weather, but when the district cancels school, that’s because the conditions are unsafe to walk to school in. I know I live very close to school, but every day last year, except for when I had doctor’s appointments, I either walked or biked to school. I understand that, if the weather’s bad, you should be able to drive. If we invest in a good public transit system, however, one can get to school or work with ease in about the same time as driving.
The neighborhood simply isn’t built to handle the sheer amount of automobiles that come through once school lets out, however. Students need to at least try other transportation options before resorting to driving, unless other options are nonexistent. Something needs to be done soon, because the level of traffic isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s flat-out unsafe.
I understand that there are students and teachers who live in faraway areas that aren’t served by school buses or that have activities that mean they can’t take the school bus. The parking areas should only be used by students and staff who don’t have any alternative transportation.
However, the problem isn’t just students deciding that sitting in traffic is a much better option than walking. There is a lot that the local government can and should be doing to make the streets safer around not just our school, but all schools.
According to the state government, Iowa City spent a total of $5.31 million on “Roads, Bridges, and Sidewalks” in the 2024 fiscal year. One walk down Court Street just outside City High will tell you that not a lot of those funds went to sidewalks. I think we can use some of those funds to drastically improve the safety of our school’s neighborhood. The sidewalks are only three feet wide compared to 10 feet wide for a good multimodal path. In its current state, one can’t safely bike down Court St. If you bike on the road, you’re impeding traffic and are risking your own life. It is, however, completely legal to bike on the road in Iowa as long as you are as close to the right curb as possible. It’s also completely legal in Iowa City to bike on the sidewalk outside of downtown as long as you give the right of way to pedestrians. However, to give a pedestrian the right of way, you need to either take an adventure in to traffic or someone’s front yard.
Currently, the only traffic control device at the Court/7th intersection is a four-way stop sign. This system doesn’t work even outside peak hours for pedestrians, who have to cross the street on nothing but hope and luck. We can’t do much to change the actual structure of Court Street, such as adding a roundabout, as it is already in a neighborhood and is an arterial street. We should, however, spend the $200k-500k to install an actual traffic signal at the intersection. Another easy, inexpensive way we can “calm” traffic is by planting trees on the public median (the space between the sidewalk and the road). These not only look nice but also prevent speeding as drivers can perceive the danger of speeding right next to them.
Many other intersections in Morningside-Glendale work perfectly fine outside of peak hours. However, when four p.m. comes around, everything goes wrong. I get a great sense of superiority when I’m walking home down Morningside Drive towards 7th and I’m walking faster than the cars backlogged behind the feeble red piece of aluminum and steel telling the moms in their minivans to stop and wait for the traffic on 7th Ave. Now, as much as I love this feeling, the design of this intersection causes delays and is unsafe for pedestrians who have to cross 7th.
If a traffic light were installed, drivers might be stuck at a red light even when no other vehicles are present. So I propose an invention that probably already exists in the Netherlands because they do all of this stuff right. An AI-powered traffic signal that takes the number of cars and how long they’ve been waiting at the intersection into account when deciding when it changes color.
We can do other small things to improve the safety of students outside of cars drastically. We can and should add some kind of bike infrastructure on 1st Ave and Court St. 7th Ave would be a challenge to add bike infrastructure as it’s a much tighter street, but we could find a way. Recent roadwork on Rochester Ave implemented a ‘lane diet,’ reducing the number of lanes from three to two, and added a bike lane in each direction. However, those bike lanes serve practically no one as they only go from 7th Ave to 1st Ave. Those need to be extended as far as possible.
Some even smaller things are simply adding concrete paths. When I walk home, I take one of two paths: the path near the baseball barn thing or the exit road near the band door that goes to Morningside Drive. The concrete path from City to Glendale Road was an incredible investment that made the environment much safer for pedestrians and cyclists. The exact same formula needs to be applied to the band exit road. Whenever a car comes behind me on that route I need to go to the grass. Most of the time that’s fine, but when it’s snowy or muddy, it’s not very high on my list of pleasant experiences.
That’s pretty much all that can be done. I trust that City High and the ICCSD would make the on-campus improvements if they had the necessary funding from the state, and I trust that our city government would be avid supporters of these proposals. However, again, the state refuses to fund projects that aren’t a massive freeway interchange or a massive parking lot.
