It’s a dead end for long street names in Cedar Rapids

CEDAR RAPIDS — What do Kurt Warner Way, Center Point Road and Wright Brothers Boulevard have in common? None would be allowed as a new street name under a proposed update to Cedar Rapids’ road naming standards.

The city is working to update its rules and regulations around how streets are named to address ongoing maintenance concerns, increase driver comprehension and help streamline emergency response.

Cedar Rapids City Council members already gave preliminary approval for the updated ordinance, although it will require two additional approvals to take effect.

Under the proposal, street names would be limited to 14 characters including spaces. Road type classes such as St, Rd or Ave would count toward that limit, although quadrant identifiers such as SW or NE would not.

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City traffic engineer Cari Pauli said the limit is meant to reduce the frequency of sign repairs or replacements after high winds or other weather events that batter and bend street signs across the city.

“The longer the street name, the longer the street sign,” she said, noting that longer signs are more easily bent. Longer signs also “might need to have multiple supports instead of just one, so it’s kind of a maintenance issue.”

Traffic engineering technician Mary Oehler said the ordinance would be cited most frequently in the case of new development where streets are created to service a new subdivision, commercial complex or other development.

The rules would apply only to streets that are named or renamed after the ordinance is enacted, she noted, so the 14-character limit and other guidelines would not apply retroactively to existing streets unless there was a request for renaming.

The ordinance would further prohibit street names from including abbreviations, acronyms, initials and/or special characters such as hyphens, slashes or hashtags.

Also disallowed would be the repetition of street names with different road types — such as a hypothetical Prairie Drive SW and Prairie Lane SW — or of street names with different quadrants such as Prairie Drive NE and Prairie Drive SW.

Pauli said those specifications should minimize confusion for commuters, as well as help emergency services such as police and fire more easily respond to calls. Further, street names must be relatively easy to pronounce and avoid words that could easily be mixed up with those of a similar sound.

“We want emergency services to be able to find you” regardless of where in the city, Pauli said. “It’s another change so when you’re saying ‘Oh, I’m on such-and-such street,’ there’s no ‘Wait, where?’ or ‘How do you spell that?’”

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The ordinance also would update the regulations around how and when a street could be named after a person.

Under current code, streets can be named after people who have been dead at least 10 years and who are of local, national or international stature. The updated ordinance would reduce that to at least three years after the death, and of someone who was a resident who “contributed positively to the city’s image” or anyone with a positive impact to the region, nation or world.

Pauli said the three-year time frame is more consistent with regulations for comparable cities staff reviewed while researching the proposed ordinance. She noted that there are some exceptions to the postmortem requirement — such as Kurt Warner Way — but that those were backed by the City Council as allowable outliers.

The council first discussed the ordinance in early May. The next reading will occur Tuesday at the City Council’s regular meeting with a possible third and final reading scheduled for June 10.

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