Streetsblog New York City

Monday night was a big moment for sustainable transportation in Cleveland.

With a small group of helmet-toting onlookers in the wings, the City Council finally gave their nod to a complete streets ordinance — the culmination of more than five years’ struggle.

Finally, there was a sense that change was coming, that the value of traveling by foot, bike and bus was valued and understood.

Flash back to 2005, when the first seeds of this victory were being sown. It was then that an environmental advocacy group called EcoCity Cleveland, now Green City Blue Lake, first lobbied Cleveland City Councilman Matt Zone to put forward a complete streets ordinance.

But Cleveland wasn’t ready yet. It would take contributions by local philanthropic organizations, mass strategy meetings and even a spirited (but ultimately unsuccessful) fight with the Ohio Department of Transportation before this law would pass.

About a year prior to the introduction of that first, doomed ordinance, EcoCity Cleveland joined forces with two bedrocks of the local philanthropic community, the Cleveland and Gund foundations, to help the city develop a sustainability agenda. The two philanthropies — which still retain their economic might from Cleveland’s heady industrial days — combined to fund the creation of a “Director of Sustainability” position for the city of Cleveland. The position was designed so that after three years, it would pay for itself through energy and waste savings.

They chose a man named Andrew Watterson to head the new division. Two years ago, he planned and hosted a multi-day “Sustainability Summit” — a significant event at which the entire community was invited to share their vision for Cleveland.

Read more…

Last month the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy released its report, “Recapturing Global Leadership in Bus Rapid Transit” [PDF], which proposed a LEED-like rating system for bus rapid transit projects and laid out a strategy for American cities to build systems as good as the world’s best BRT. While more than 20 American bus projects have claimed the BRT mantle at various times, the ITDP report named just five American cities with bus corridors that made the grade and earned the title “True BRT.” Streetsblog is pleased to publish a series of case studies from ITDP examining these innovative transit projects. We started with Pittsburgh and today, we focus on Cleveland.

Cleveland doesn’t often get recognition for being a leader in innovative transportation – but maybe it should. A recent report from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) awarded Cleveland the highest rating of any American BRT system.

Cleveland’s first BRT line opened in 2008. The HealthLine stretches 6.8 miles along Euclid Avenue, connecting the city’s main employment centers, including downtown Cleveland, the Cleveland Clinic, and University Hospital, coming within a half mile of more than 200,000 employees and 58,000 households. In just three years, ridership has increased more than 60 percent over the bus routes that formerly ran along the corridor. This promotional video shows how the HealthLine mimics light rail for a better passenger experience.

Read more…

Much has been made of the food desert phenomenon afflicting the industrial Midwest. GOOD Magazine, Dateline, NBC and countless others have weighed in on the apparent market failure that causes grocery stores to shun cities like Detroit and Cleveland like a bad case of head lice.

This whole storyline reached a fever pitch earlier this year when it was widely circulated that the city of Detroit — all 140 miles of it — lacked a single grocery store. This was, of course, patently false. A quick Google search shows that there are dozens, even hundreds, of foodsellers populating Detroit’s neighborhoods.

What type of grocer does business in down-and-dirty Detroit? One example is the Honey Bee Market, a family-owned business that has been operating in the city for five decades. It carries a wide selection of Central American ingredients, in addition to plenty of fruits and vegetables. The store was voted “most fun” by Detroit’s Metro Times.

So how did the Wall Street Journal, Dateline and NBC get it so wrong about Detroit? I argue that it is all about semantics, along with a large dose of cultural relativism.

The argument about food deserts seems to be premised on the assumption that supermarkets — suburban-style, big-box, corporate chain stores with plenty o’ parking — are inherently superior to walkable, family owned food markets that serve low-income populations. The media portrays these corner markets as liquor stores or “discount” stores carrying little fresh produce and lots of Hostess cupcakes.

While there is certainly a class of convenience store that lacks healthy food options, many analyses have completely ignored the presence of small, family-owned food markets and their important role in feeding urban populations.

Read more…

Dear Governor-Elect Kasich,

Congrats on your victory in the Ohio governor’s race this week. You’ve got a tough job on your hands and I don’t envy you, taking the reins in a state with an $8 billion budget deficit and a 10 percent unemployment rate. I didn’t vote for you, but I considered it. Even so, I think I join the vast majority of Ohio residents when I wish you tremendous success.

Even though you only won election a few days ago, I hope you don’t mind, I have a little bone to pick with you. I was more than a little dismayed to hear that in your post-election victory speech, you said Ohio’s plan to connect Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati via passenger rail was “dead,” and that “passenger rail is not in Ohio’s future.”

Forgive my confusion, but I fail to see how returning $400 million in federal money is the right decision for a state with our record on unemployment. According to the Ohio Department of Transportation, that infusion of cash would have immediately created 255 jobs. The U.S. Department of Commerce suggested it would result in a total of 8,000 spin-off jobs.

But, of course, the 3C Corridor wasn’t just about creating jobs; it was mainly about moving people. Now, I understand some people have complained that the plan was for conventional-speed, as opposed to high-speed, rail. Some skeptics have wondered whether Ohioans would be willing to sacrifice the convenience of their private automobiles for a mode that was likely to take longer and force them to operate on a fixed schedule.

I feel compelled to point out, however, that this statement makes a number of assumptions that do not necessarily represent the perspective of the state as a whole. For example, are you aware that at the time of the latest census, 374,000 Ohio households did not have a private vehicle available to them? This represents more than eight percent of the state’s households.

It frustrates me when I hear people make unqualified statements such as “no one will ride it” because I, for one, would ride it. See, I own a car but prefer other modes of transportation. I like to bike and take public transit. It saves me money and it makes me feel like I’m doing my part to preserve the environment.

Read more…

If you want to get a sense of how devastating sprawl has been to the urban areas of northeast Ohio, head over to Woodlawn Avenue in East Cleveland. Between the rows of boarded up buildings, a house collapses onto itself. Graffiti pays homage to dead loved ones — “R.I.P. Fife.” Nearby, stuffed animals have been stapled to a telephone pole in a memorial, presumably, to a dead child.

Travel thirty miles west to Lorain County, and they’re laying sewer pipe for a new housing development. The housing market is strong in exurban Avon, where a new highway interchange has spurred a rush in commercial real estate development on what was once forests. Here residents can commute an easy 35 minutes by highway to downtown Cleveland, while avoiding the higher taxes that come with closer-set communities, burdened by old infrastructure and the cost of providing social services to less affluent residents.

It’s a pattern that can’t be reversed without the type of comprehensive planning that the Obama administration has encouraged through its Sustainable Communities Initiative, which would receive a substantial boost with the passage of the Livable Communities Act.

For decades, residents of greater Cleveland have been moving up and moving out. In fact, long ago, East Cleveland itself was founded by industrialists, including Nelson Rockefeller, who were seeking shelter from what they thought were exorbitant city tax rates.

But that’s not what makes this region a special example of the destructive impacts of laissez-faire development. Housing works this way in many, if not most, mid-sized American cities, with less disastrous results. The difference in metro Cleveland is that, roughly since the 1970s, the regional population has been stagnant. That means, in essence, for every house built in Avon, a house in East Cleveland — or the city of Cleveland, or, increasingly, one of the inner-ring suburbs — is abandoned.

The result has been devastating for the central city and the smaller residential communities that encircle it.

Read more…

Cleveland's first venture into Bus Rapid Transit -- a 10-mile route called the Health Line -- was turning heads before it fully launched, attracting planners from other cities looking to boost transit ridership. Now that the ribbons have been cut, the Plain Dealer's Steven Litt hails the finished product:

The core section of the line, from Public Square to University Circle, has center median stations on raised platforms designed to enable riders to step directly onto buses, as if they were rail cars. An innovative precision docking system makes it easy to align the buses with precise spots on the platforms, so riders know where to queue.

The 34 stations along the line are smartly tailored gems. They have a light, transparent feel that makes them look both elegant and safe. They complement the architecture of nearby buildings, rather than obscure views.

Less noticeable are the ingenious ways in which landscape architects from Sasaki Associates in Watertown, Mass., redesigned the avenue from building face to building face to include 5-foot-wide bicycle paths and tapering islands with flower beds at the bus stations.

Intended to spur economic development along the city's historic but struggling main drag, Euclid Avenue, the Health Line figures to get even more attention from other cities if the Obama administration commits to increased federal investment in transit:

Read more...