High art on city streets

CEDAR RAPIDS - Roadkill is only one challenge for this group of artists.

Even so, earlier this summer John Freeman couldn't help painting over a dead squirrel in the middle of the street near Johnson Avenue NW and Wiley Boulevard NW.

'It's a hell of a place to take a nap,” Judd Toll chimed in.

Freeman, a crew chief on Cedar Rapids' street-paint striping operation, is the main guy behind the wheel of the city's $150,000-plus paint striping apparatus as it works each year to paint almost all 1.4 million linear feet of yellow centerlines, white-edge lines and white-skip lines that separate traffic lanes going in the same direction.

Toll, who like Freeman has been on the city street paint crew for more than 25 years, spends most of his time these days painting the city's 1,700 arrow markings, 1,000 stop lines at intersections, more than 200 crosswalks and 80 rail crossings.

Paint on Cedar Rapids city streets are reciving more attention these days as the city's 'complete streets” policy creates more bicycle lanes and as the city pushes to convert one-way streets to two-way streets.

The street striping is becoming particularly creative in some downtown spots. Just wait, for example, as new stripes go down on the Second Avenue and Third Avenue bridges. By October, the two, one-way, multilane streets will change for several blocks to one lane of traffic each way, with bike lanes between the traffic lanes and the parking at the curb.

Matt Myers, the city's traffic engineer, said Freeman, Toll and others on the paint-striping crew juggle assorted variables, from unexpected rain to cool days when the paint dries more slowly to bumpy streets, clogged paint lines and motorists driving through fresh paint.

'Stripers really have to be aware of all these things that are happening,” Myers said. 'If anything is off, it can affect the performance out there.”

Freeman, who doesn't paint watercolors or sculpt after he goes home at night, nonetheless sounds every bit the artist with some 5,000 gallons of yellow and white paint to put down each year on the city's streets.

‘meticulous' painter

'Everybody sees your paint out on the street,” Freeman said. 'And people who know me know this is my job for the city. They might see a squiggly line out there and say, ‘What happened over there?' ”

Toll sings the praises of Freeman's work.

'This guy is meticulous,” Toll said. 'He should have been a drill sergeant. He holds everybody to a higher standard. …

We want to make it look nice, and John's the reason why.”

Freeman said the most 'stressful” part of the job is to paint new lines where none have been before. One such case is the new bicycle lanes on Boyson Road NE, he said.

Walking miles on job

New lines require the crews to walk the entire length of the project, dotting the street where the new paint stripes will go. Freeman said he's had days where he has walked 10 miles to mark streets on foot.

The city's giant stripe-painting truck is a two-person operation, with Freeman behind the wheel and a second crew member in the back helping to keep the new paint on the old lines. A street where new lines don't cover old, faded ones is a failed paint job, Freeman said.

The speed of the $200,000 truck's transaxle dictates the amount of paint that falls and the amount of reflective glass beads that fall into the paint as it hits the road surface.

The paint is loaded onto the truck in 250-gallon totes, which is enough for most days of work.

The glass beads are what reflect the light from headlights at night so motorists can see the stripes on the street.

John Witt, the city's assistant traffic engineering manager, said Freeman is part accountant, too. Freeman carries a black binder with him on the job to track every linear foot of stripe painted and how many gallons of paint used.

Freeman also still has the aged clipping of a newspaper story from earlier in his career when he painted over a dead raccoon or squirrel in the middle of Mount Vernon Road SE. The story made the TV news, too. The dead animal with the stripe of paint was named 'Vernon.”

'Activists looked at Vernon and just went crazy,” Freeman said. 'I think they even scooped it up and buried it somewhere.”