RAGBRAI 2012: Shrinking towns, swelling ride

Tue, Jul 24, 2012 | by Michael Morain

Webster City – With 8,000 residents, this Hamilton County town feels like a booming metropolis compared to last night in Lake View, where the population barely cleared 1,000 in the most recent census. The place was busting at the seams. (Many of the 10,000-plus RAGBRAI riders spent the night up the road in Sac City, population 2,200.)

Check out the close quarters at Lake View’s Black Hawk State Park:

And consider this: As RAGBRAI has grown since its inaugural trek 40 years ago, most of Iowa’s small towns have gotten smaller. Those opposite trends are fine for the pass-through towns but can add up to serious problems for the overnight hosts.

Small towns can absorb only so many people overnight, although one rider told me of a ride many years ago, where an overnight town of 2,500 managed just fine, with a whopping 85 percent of the locals opening their homes for the riders overnight.

But what about the future? Will the RAGBRAI route options – especially in the more sparsely populated west – be limited even further as Iowans migrate toward bigger cities like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids?

These are the things one wonders about on an 80-mile day. Care to weigh in?

2012 ragbrai, RAGBRAI, RAGBRAI 2012, RAGBRAI XL, ride across iowa

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