AMES, Iowa -- RAGBRAI cyclists will be enjoying a more beautiful Iowa on the annual July ride, thanks to the Iowa’s Living Roadways Community Visioning Program. This year’s RAGBRAI route passes through 15 communities that are making Iowa’s roads and towns more visually appealing and environmentally diverse by participating in this unique program.

Since 1996, the Visioning Program has provided 149 small Iowa communities access to professional landscape planning and design assistance. Through a series of planning meetings, a volunteer committee works with a Trees Forever facilitator, a professional landscape architect and a design team from Iowa State University to identify potential landscaping projects and to create images showing how finished projects might look.

“The communities along the RAGBRAI route are a mixture of current communities that are still developing concept plans, recent communities and communities that were some of the first to go through the process,” said Sandra Oberbroeckling, ISU Extension’s coordinator for the program. “Jefferson, for instance, was one of three communities that went through community visioning when the program was a pilot program through ISU Extension Landscape Architecture.”

The visioning communities and their Visioning Program years along the route from west to east are: Missouri Valley (2000), Shelby (2004), Harlan (2008), Kimballton (2001), Exira (2001), Jefferson (pilot), Grand Junction (2008), State Center (2005), Le Grand (2002), Toledo (1998–99), Belle Plaine (2008), North Liberty (2001), Solon (2005), Lisbon (1997–98) and Tipton (2007). Two of these communities, Exira and Kimballton, participated in a corridor enhancement pilot program that applied the visioning program participatory design process to the U.S. Highway 71 corridor in Audubon County.

The types of completed projects that cyclists may observe along the route include new entryway signage in Missouri Valley and Solon, roadside plantings in Exira, Jefferson, and Toledo, trail development in State Center, and downtown streetscaping in Lisbon, Oberbroeckling said.

The Visioning Program is sponsored by the Iowa Department of Transportation in partnership with Iowa State University Extension Community and Economic Development and Trees Forever.

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