THERE'S A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING

摘要

Cedar Falls, Iowa is home to the University of Northern Iowa, whose motto is simply "Lux," or "light." This nearly 150-year-old bastion of learning is both Cedar Falls' largest employer and the primary source of its population growth over the past several decades. One resulting effect of this growth was the unfortunate circumstance of the University Avenue corridor, which was originally designed and constructed in the 1960s to meet the then-meetable needs of the community, no longer serving as a viable or equitable means of mobility. As Cedar Falls is what you would commonly call a college town, mobility throughout the city is not primarily vehicular, but is a more diverse salad of standard traffic mixed with pedestrians, public transit services, bicyclists, mopeds, scooters, and so forth. The location of University Avenue-an urban arterial that was at one point the sole connection between the city and the neighboring (and thrice larger) city of Waterloo-makes it a crucial throughway, even in the face of alternative routes which have cropped up in the intervening years. In the middle of the last decade, it became abundantly clear that it was time for this roadway to be given a new breath of life, to be seen in new light-and that process began, as many such processes often do, with the local community.