Can the ‘common-man’s university’ be too close to a bus depot?

Is there anything wrong with this picture?

The snapshot is of two of the city's  largest public investments in the last generation - the Ground Transportation Center bus depot, side by side, with the Cedar Rapids Public Library.

Both today sit empty, victims of the city's June 2008 flood. And the city and federal government have made plans - though new Mayor Ron Corbett has talked of late about moving back into the bus depot, at least temporarily - to build a new library and a new bus depot at new locations.

However, this turn of events has prompted the city's new library director, Bob Pasicznyuk, to declare that a bus depot can be too close to a library.

“I don't mind it being in the vicinity, I just want some distance,” Pasicznyuk says. “It (the bus depot) was almost linked at the hip before. … What I don't want to do is just be right next door and be the waiting area for it.”

This kind of sentiment is puzzling to say the least to some regulars who depend on the city's bus system and love to go to the library.

“I don't see anything wrong with that,” says 15-year-old Matt McMurrin of bus patrons who want to spend some time at the library rather than wait in the depot for their city bus to arrive.

McMurrin, 15, of 440 West Post Rd. NW, says he has friends who ride the bus just to go to the library.

Cara Dietrich, 25, of 212 Wesley Dr. NW, says the city bus is one “community resource” to take people to a second community resource, the library.

“The bus actually brings more people to the library. And I don't think that's a bad thing,” Dietrich says.

All this matters because the proximity of a new bus depot and a new library has factored in the debate of where to put the $45-million library.

City Council member Tom Podzimek often has talked about one advantage of building public projects near one another is that they can share parking lots, which might make smaller lots instead of two large mall-like lots.

This, in fact, might be a plus for one of the three proposed library sites, the TrueNorth site across Fourth Avenue SE from Greene Square Park, which is adjacent to the current proposed site for the new Intermodal Transit Facility bus depot.

The TrueNorth site, though, didn't figure in the library board's top two picks for a library location, though the board pointed to the TrueNorth site's relative risk of flooding as a primary reason it didn't like the site.

(The TrueNorth site, though, has been and will be outside the 500-year flood plain in the city's new flood maps, and the True North building took on no water at street level in the June 2008 flood, Sandi Fowler, assistant to the city manager, reported to the City Council last week.)

The library's Pasicznyuk isn't alone in wanting to make sure a new library and a new bus depot aren't next to each other. Council member Chuck Wieneke feels the same way.

Both Wieneke and Pasicznyuk see it as a “safety” issue, though both, when asked to elaborate, talk about out-of-towners coming through the city on intercity buses (four stop in Cedar Rapids a day), with Pasicznyuk throwing in “transients and the homeless” as those of concern.

Pasicznyuk talks about his own travels years ago on a bus and a stop at the St. Louis bus depot where he was approached by drug dealers and a prostitute.

“I'm not saying we have that issue here,” he says. “But that (depot) waiting-room environment has a little different feel to it than people just using the transportation system to get to the library, which I think is wonderful.”

Pasicznyuk says some have suggested that the library is there for “the poor,” but he says he wants the library to be there for everybody. Downtown libraries perceived as catering mostly to the homeless can come to be seen as unsafe, he says.

“I want the net to be big, but I don't want it not to include somebody who doesn't have means,” he says.

Pasicznyuk points to the library-building movement of steel magnate  Andrew  Carnegie a century ago and to Carnegie's view that a library is the university for the common man.

“We should never walk away from that,” he says. “As long as we don't turn into – my mom's a social worker – and that's not (what we are).”

Bus-rider and library-user Jason Hayes, 34, says concerns about bus patrons as library users can leave the impression that people who ride the bus “aren't as high class” as those who drive a car.

Hayes says he goes to the library to read magazines and to use the computer, which he says has become essential for looking for jobs and filing job applications online.

“Because I don't have a car or a house doesn't mean I don't read,' Hayes says. “The library is for the smallest kids to the oldest people, and how they get there shouldn't matter.”